Research by Geekcartel
(29 - 31 March) â ETH Dubai Devcon (Developer conference) was held as scheduled. Geekcartel joined experts around the world including Web3 startups, developers, funds and the wider crypto community over the conferenceâs 3 days to explore the latest in web3 trends, development tech and news about blockchain.
With a total of 72 projects we interacted with at the conference, there were 2 Layer1 projects, 3 Layer2 projects, 11 NFT projects, 5 DAO projects, 2 Metaverse projects, 1 IOT project and 48 DeFi projects. We were engaged in the conference and had gone through deep communication with over 40+ startup teams. We did some filtering among these 72 projects based on their understanding level to Web3.0. After this, we selected some significant projects and early stage investment opportunities and referred them to our partnered VC, industry experts, angel investors, etc.
Layer1
Partisea Blockchain is a zero- knowledge proof blockchain.
Partisia means âDistributed Trustâ, their mission is to establish a WEB 3.0 infrastructure with no single point of trust for generic coordination of public and private information to be used by all applications across all platforms.
Partisia Blockchain is built for trust, transparency, privacy, and speed of light finalization by combining secure multiparty computation (MPC) and blockchain technology.
Partisia Blockchain target audience are enterprise, NGO and government.
Partisia Blockchain have a complete system which include service of wallet, block browser, validation node, test net, bridge and etc around basic infrastructure of blockchain
Partisia Blockchain Participation of Partisia ecosystem is still at the beginning stage, for third party only algorithm stable coins - Frax, Launchpad â PartiPad, NFT marketplace THENIFTY.
Panther Protocol is an end-to-end solution that restores privacy in Web3 and DeFi while providing financial institutions with a clear path to compliantly participate in decentralized finance.
Multi-asset smart contract protocol. Leveraging zkSNARK cryptography, and state of the art multi asset mixing, network participants can deposit digital assets from any blockchain into Panther vaults and mint zero knowledge zAssets: fully collateralized, private counterparts that are poised to become an ever expanding asset class. Stablecoins, utility tokens and NFTs can finally become infused with privacy.
Interchain Layer1 Private Dex, Panther executes low latency, low fees, private swaps between digital assets across different blockchains, while providing private orderbooks, a better bonding model for increased capital efficiency and private on and off ramps.
Novel selective disclosure schemes. Panther enables full privacy by default, while also providing retail and institutional users with custom selective disclosure modes. Directly, or via Trust providers, users can selectively disclose data to trusted counterparties. Panther also offers zero knowledge disclosures, proving compliance without actually disclosing any underlying data. This could revolutionize compliance and minimize the effect of data breaches forever.
Sub-nets for access controlled liquidity pools. Subnets enable the creation of permissioned pools. One practical application for this is that it allows institutions to create a subnet for its users to privately and compliantly trade between themselves, using DeFi infrastructure, but without interaction with the other users in the system outside of the subnet.
This speeds up the institutional adoption of DeFi, onboarding millions of users of financial services.
Layer2
Cartesi is a side chain decentralized computing platform. The advantage is it allows decentralized applications to launch on Linux OS without being limited by the calculation limit, and the (high) gas fee of the main chain. Complicated processes can be run off the chain and free from scalability limits and fees.
Cartesi held a live coding tutorial in Dubai DevCon, developers can use Cartesi develop tools Blockchain OS to develop their DAPP in Python. Cartesi does support languages like JS, TS, RUST etc. Unlike other L2 solutions which are only limited to Solidity, developers could easily use their original technology stack to develop.
Fuel Network is a L2 scalability solution which is built on Optimistic Rollup L2 technology + UTXO. Mohammad Fawaz from Sway presented a showcase to the audience about how to apply Fuel Network tools on Fuel web design, construct, deploy and use of DAPP, he also presented the difference between Sway language from Fuel virtual machine âFuelVMâ and Solidity.
Hermez is a layer 2 scalability solution which was acquired by Polygon. Continued by the publishing of Proof of Donation by Hermez 1.0, the team had announced a new mechanism Proof of Efficiency on Dubai Devcon to support the under development zkEVM scalability solution which is permissionless and audit-less.
Choise is a MetaFi (CeFi/DeFi) ecosystem based on Crypterium CeFi solutions and Charism DeFi protocol, that reinvents how protocols operate with CeFi, reduces commisions up to 50 times and unlocks crosschain high yield to 100 million CeFi users.
Crypterium is a mobile crypto wallet, has a strong user base in Europe, which is more than 400,000 registered users. Users can use Crypterium to trade crypto currency, reload for your mobile, register a savings account and its global crypto card.
TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare is one of its advisors. The project was also rewarded as one of the leading "Emerging 50" in the "Fintech 100" report jointly published by KPMG and H2Ventures. Crypterium token was listed on Crunchbase and other main exchanges.
Choise is the aggregates layer of CeFi and DeFi, this simplifies the Crypterium Cefi user to exposure to the DeFi products, and earn high profit in a safe security. The product direction of Choise (Cefi+Defi) is able to attract users with different kinds of risk preferences, improve the overall retention and connective of the ecosystem, and strengthen their market position in the European market.
Atomex is a HD wallet based on atomic swap technology. Atomex merges the advantages of centralized and decentralized, it allows users to complete cross chain atomic swap of the crypto asset with full control of private key, and only have to pay a miner fee. Atomex liquidity is guaranteed by professional market makers.
Atomic swap is the technology which allows digital assets to be traded anonymous and without third party trust. It uses Hashed timelock smart contracts. The minimum can be a few minutes while the maximum time is six hours for an atomic swap. It completely depends on the chosen pairs.
Atomex keeps decentralization, safe privacy, and users do not need to register or go through KYC to access the wallet. But Atomex will check whether the address contains any abuse and suspicious assets.
Currently Atomex supports a total of 7 tokens which are BTC, ETH, XTZ, LTC, USDT, tzBTC, tBTC, wBTC. Atomex also supported staking for XTZ.
Unreal FInance is a decentralized protocol that allows users to tokenize the yield generated by popular lending protocols such as Compound, Aave, Unilend etc. By tokenizing their yield users can lock-in their interest rate thus getting a fixed interest rate. Another high demand use case is yield speculation.
By using Unreal Finance, a user can instantly sell their unrealized yield effectively locking their interest rate at a fixed price. Moreover, traders can now speculate on the unrealised yield.
Unreal Finance is still at white paper stage, there is still no official product launched.
The Paycer team is developing a bridge protocol that aggregates DeFi and crypto services cross-chain and combines them with TradFi to create new user-friendly financial products and services available on an easy to use platform.
The Paycer Protocol will provide cross chain operability and aggregate certain DeFi products from different blockchains. The Paycer Platform will combine the Paycer Protocol with traditional financial services like a bank account and a debit card. Users only need to make a fiat money deposit on the Paycer platform to get started, no interaction with cryptocurrencies or DeFi is required. Paycer will then automatically place the deposit in selected DeFi products, providing a high and constant interest rate as a passive income.
The Paycer Protocol will combine multiple DeFi products with different interest rates cross-chain. This will generate a stable interest rate up to 20% for clientâs savings. Higher rates will be possible through Paycer token staking.
The Paycer Protocol will integrate DeFi services from Polygon, Ethereum, Polkadot, Harmony, Avalanche, Cosmos and Binance Smart Chain.
The Paycer platform will follow laws and regulations and will operate from a headquarter in Hamburg, Germany within the European Union. Paycer will have a partnership with a financial entity for an official banking license.
Shutter Network is an open-source project that aims to prevent front running on Ethereum and malicious MEV by using a threshold cryptography-based distributed key generation (DKG) protocol.
The mechanism used by Shutter can be implemented into various layers. The first instantiation we built is a simple drop-in solution for smart contracts at the application level, which is gas efficient and doesnât require L1/L2 protocol changes.
Shutter is designed to be such a solution â decentralized, efficient, and practical. Projects can adapt their existing smart contracts with little effort and without waiting for an Ethereum protocol update.
Shutter allows users to send encrypted transactions in a way that protects them from front runners on their path through the dark forest (the metaphorical hunting ground of front runners that each transaction must cross). For example, a trader could use Shutter to make their order opaque to front runners, which means attackers can neither determine if it is a buy or a sell order, nor which tokens are being exchanged, or at which price. The system will only decrypt and execute a transaction after it has left the dark forest and is included in a block.
UniFarm is an innovative farming solution where a bunch of projects comes together to create a reward pool. Users can stake any one token and get multiple tokens as rewards.For example, if there's a UniFarm pool of $ORO, $MATIC, $REEF, $CNTR, and $FRONT, users could stake any of these tokens and start earning all the tokens as rewards.â UniFarm is a win-win solution for all the parties involvedâprojects and investors alike.â The investors get to enjoy a good APY and get a bunch of reputed project tokens as rewards without any market exposure risks.â Projects get exposure to a new set of investors and get their tokens staked, giving them more room to build and grow.
Unifarm current TVL is 100m+ďźtotal users 10K+ďźtotal partner 100+
Renfter is a smarter, better and more secure way of renting NFTs. It does not need the NFT renter to give up its ownership to rent the NFT. Renfter accomplishes the NFT renter through non-collateral based smart contract but not by collateral.
Renfter Protocol solves problems for people who want to rent their NFTs, people who would like to rent NFTs from others and third parties (games, apps, and other people) who would like to verify who has the current rights of using rented NFT, without being the actual owner at the moment.
Artifest wants to take NFTs to the next level by introducing the only platform which aims to get real world valuable artifacts on blockchain like Diamond jewelry, Antiques, Sculptures, Paintings, collectibles across all segments. This will help all the rare and unique assets to get access to a mass audience. To establish trust in buyer and seller Artifest will facilitate an escrow account for the ease of transfer of the article and its value. This escrow account will be monitored by governance token holders. Along with the NFTs minted by Artifest, the platform will ensure physical transfer of NFTs minted by its users through escrow service.
Artifest will open their platform for permission less listing of rare physical items. Experts will be on board across the globe to ensure the authenticity of the antiques and other articles placed on the platform. This platform is one of its kind and truly will unlock the power of real-world possessions to deliver their due position in the blockchain world.
Artifest will release its token AFT . Interested people will have to buy the NFTs listed through AFT tokens. Artifest takes the responsibility of safe logistics. In case the owner wants to resale the NFT transaction will happen through escrow account and the logistics will be taken care of by Artifest.
MetaMetaverse is a Build & Play to Earn metaverses, users can explore and build the metaverse and earn the in-game currency. While the other metaverse is selling the land NFT, Metametaverse is selling the metaverse NFT.
When a user owns their own metaverse, they can create multiple sub-metaverse and resell them , showing off their NFT, upload their own 3D environment created, set environment settings such as rain, fog etc. They can also build their own game on it.
Huddle01 aims to be the harbinger of bringing web3 into real-time communications. Mission is to make online presence secure by protecting digital identity. Huddle01 believes that everyone should own a digital space where they express themselves freely, letting their true speech take its ideal form.
Huddle01 can simply be understood as zoom in web3. Currently supporting NFT Avatar, Eth address login, video saving in IPFS decentralized network.
Investor partner of Huddle01 kind of luxury, it include Protocol Labs, Fenbushi capital, Hashkey etc. Founder of Protocol Juan Benet and ex-partner of A16z Preethi Kasireddy are one of the angel investors.
DAOSYS harnesses the power of DAOs through our Bitcoin-level security and a self-sovereign treasury. Unlike other decentralized organizations, DAOSYS is free of treasury governance issues.
Driven from a layer 1 blockchain (syscoin). Layer 1 blockchain is the new root of all value creation in tomorrow's world of financial applications. DAOSYS formalizes a financing vehicle as a layer 1 decentralized ecosystem. With perpetual risk-free growth driven by stakeholders with no central governance.
Time-based funding through quests. Quests are created through Roundtable discussions between stakeholders and builders. Compartmentalizing risk and governance of Quests eliminates traditional contagion risks. With the revolutionary Autonomous Service Engine technology from DAOSYS, capital risk is converted to opportunity costs. Builders have little to no costs of obtaining capital due to market driven coverage of funding. This effectively creates global financial inclusion and reduces barriers of entry.
Group Collaboration with Roundtable. Roundtables provide a compartmentalized governance solution for coordinating ventures. Stakeholders and Builders are free to manage their venture and finances independent of other DAO members. Allowing for best-of-breed solutions to fit any venture.
No Systemic Risks with DAO Participation. Self-sovereign treasury management and market index derivatives differentiates DAOSYS from existing DAOs. Members not only face no risk from the actions of other members, instead profiting from the increased volume. As a result, general volume is harnessed to create a feedback loop of funding for perpetual development.
Foundership is an India startup who focus on incubator and accelerator, they have the largest community of web3 developers.
Foundership supports startups to accelerate growth through coaching, raising capital and the founders' network.
Based on ETH2.0âs recent update, the networkâs upgrade to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) would not be that effective to increase the speed of block times and might be even slower than the current Proof of Work (PoW) due to the speed of aggregating the validator. Vitalik Buterin had posted an article on Reddit âWhy wouldn't Proof of Stake drastically reduce block times vs. Proof of Work?â. Undoubtedly, this will disappoint users that had high expectations on faster block times.
Therefore, while waiting for ETH2.0 to highly increase its efficiency, scaling solutions and a multi-chain future remain our main goals of investment and research. As both expected profit and user profit in DeFi markets continue to trend down and/or plateau, more rational and traditional users are entering the mining sector.
Undoubtedly, the main focus for the post-DeFi era would be seeking certainty in chaos. We look forward to the proliferation of more structural financial products and financial derivatives in the market as these will provide more options for those inert users to assess the risk.
Besides, we noticed that there are plenty of projects focusing on Web3.0 integration applications in the conference, such as decentralized real time communication softwares or the linkage from Web2.0 to Web3.0.
The future for all new infrastructure products is undoubtedly enormous, but at the same time they will face increasingly direct competition from traditional tech giants. In addition, we noticed some of the European countries are ready to issue financial certifications or licenses for DeFi platforms. This could eventually mean that projects would be forced to crucially decide to either become fully decentralized or become a regional certified project .
Geekcartel will continue to keep our focus on the exploration of multi-chain governance in the next stage. Using a token to vote will not only be constrained by signature and the risks of multi-chain, but also impact the enthusiasm of users who hold little to no tokens. Evaluating the address by snapshot of history action and speeches that record on the chain are among the future solutions for multi-chain governance.
With ETH Amsterdam around the corner, GeekCartel will continue to present more valuable projects and assessments of early-stage investment opportunities.
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