With bitcoin still hovering around the $20,000 price level, action in the cryptocurrency markets hasn’t been all that interesting lately. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t exciting developments on the fundamental side. Let’s take a look at 3 cryptocurrency and blockchain projects worth watching this week.
3. Sushi (Sushi)
Sushi is a community project that has created a series of decentralized financial services. The project originally started in 2020 and launched a Uniswap fork called SushiSwap. The project’s innovation was to reward liquidity providers on its decentralized exchange with SUSHI governance tokens. This brought a liquidity boost to SushiSwap at the expense of Uniswap, essentially forcing the Uniswap team to launch the UNI token shortly thereafter.
Even though SushiSwap seemed to be a real threat to Uniswap for a while, it now has much lower trading volume and liquidity. However, Sushi remains a notable decentralized finance project and offers a range of DeFi services including token swaps, lending, borrowing and yield farming.
Users can stake their SUSHI tokens to earn a portion of swap fees paid to SushiSwap. Thanks to the xSUSHI token issued to Staker, users can still participate in the governance process even after staking.
Why SushiSwap? Project has elected a new chef, GoldenTree reveals SUSHI token holdings
While sushi isn’t among the most hyped DeFi projects right now, there have been some interesting developments worth keeping an eye on lately. Asset management firm GoldenTree, which has approximately $47 billion in assets under management, has announced that it holds more than 3.9 million SUSHI tokens, equivalent to approximately $5.2 million. In a post on the Sushi discussion forums, a GoldenTree employee has disclosed an Ethereum wallet where the company stores its SUSHI tokens. The collaborator says that GoldenTree can support the Sushi project on tokenomics and protocol design issues.
The Sushi Project also recently elected former Bitfineon CEO Jared Gray as its new “Head Chef”. Gray received 84% of votes conducted through SUSHI tokens. The new chef says he plans to improve the efficiency of the sushi project, which would allow him to launch new products to capture a bigger market share. The successful election of a new leader could bring more stability to the sushi project, which struggled with internal unrest earlier this year.
2. NEAR protocol (NEAR)
NEAR Protocol is a blockchain smart contract platform that emphasizes scalability and developer-friendliness. The NEAR protocol is proof-of-stake based and launched its Nightshade sharding solution in November 2021.
Instead of having to learn a new programming language, developers can write smart contracts for the NEAR protocol in languages like Rust and AssemblyScript. The NEAR blockchain’s smart contract capabilities support popular use cases such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NEAR also offers Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility via the Aurora platform.
Why NEAR? The NEAR Foundation partners with Google Cloud
The NEAR Foundation has partnered with Google Cloud to provide technical support for web3 projects built on top of the NEAR protocol. Google Cloud’s infrastructure is used by Pagoda, a platform that provides essential services for startups on NEAR.
The Pagoda platform provides tools to help NEAR developers test their decentralized applications and securely deploy them to the NEAR mainnet. After launching the DApp, developers can use the Pagoda platform to monitor real-time usage analytics. Pagoda also has a JavaScript SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows developers to build their DApps using the popular programming language.
Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, commented on the partnership:
“This partnership marks a new chapter for us as we continue to provide the best possible support for the next generation of visionaries who choose to build on the NEAR protocol.”
1. Read DAO token (LDO)
LDO is the governance token of Lido DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that oversees Lido’s liquid staking protocols. Through the DAO, LDO holders can decide on important protocol parameters, including fees and the assignment of node operators and oracles. Lido allows users to retain liquidity even as they wager their coins.
The protocol issues tokens to represent staked coins, for example stETH for staked ETH. Tokens like stETH can be traded or staked in DeFi protocols to generate income. Lido offers liquid staking services for various blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Kusama and Polygon.
Why LDO? Lido now supports stETH on Arbitrum and Optimism
Lido has made a move into Ethereum-based Layer 2s, allowing the stETH token to be wrapped and bridged to Arbitrum One and Optimism. Additionally, the project has announced 150,000 LDO in liquidity mining incentives to boost liquidity for packaged stETH. Protocols offering the incentives include Beethoven X, Balancer, Curve, Kyber, and Velodrome.
Lido is now on L2?️
Connect your staked ETH to Layer 2 protocols with the push of a button to benefit from lower gas fees and exciting DeFi opportunities.
— Lido (@LidoFinance) October 6, 2022
Arbitrum One and Optimism are Layer 2 platforms that work on the Ethereum blockchain and enable significantly faster and cheaper transactions. Both are based on a technique called optimistic rollups, where large numbers of Layer 2 transactions are bundled and submitted to the Ethereum blockchain.
Lido continues to dominate Ethereum staking. According to Nansen, the Lido protocol accounts for 4.25 million ETH staked out of a total of 14.2 million ETH staked.
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