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Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
, Author: Ade, published with authorization.
Polkadot (Poca), regarded as a cross-chain leader, is one of the few market focuses that can still take away some attention from Ethereum after the DeFi fire. In the second half of 2020, another DeFi development in Ethereum is in full swing. In the corner, the ecological construction of Polkadot DeFi is also in full swing.
According to PolkaProject statistics, the current number of Polkadot ecological applications has reached 310, covering fields including underlying technology, wallets, oracles, NFT, DAO, smart contracts, bridges, DeFi, Internet of Things, and games. 97 projects, accounting for 31.29%. How many DeFi projects are there? How is the current development? What category do they belong to? What changes have been made to Polkadot's ecology? This article will take readers through the current status of the Polkadot DeFi ecosystem.
The modularity and flexibility of Substrate are highly compatible with the demands of DeFi infrastructure
Substrate is a blockchain building framework that makes it easy to create custom blockchains optimized for unique scenarios. Substrate is fully modular and flexible: mix and match off-the-shelf components and build the core business logic, while leaving the rest to the framework. Plug-and-play modules like consensus networks and finality free developers to focus on specific areas of expertise, saving a lot of time and effort in the development process. Stay lean by implementing only necessary functionality on your custom blockchain.With Substrate's forkless upgrades and transparent governance tools, new features can be added over time without worrying about network forks and enjoy easier, risk-free upgrades. In addition, Substrate also provides native support for direct connection to Polkadot, and the Substrate tool Cumulus will also unlock inter-chain communication, collaboration, and shared security.At present, Substrate has been updated to version 2.0. The blockchain framework now includes Off-Chain Workers and more than 70 composable modules, and is optimized for building Polkadot-compatible blocks that can be put into production. The chain lays a solid foundation.
Benefiting from the development of the Polkadot network, the number of its developers will increase sharply in 2020. Encrypted venture capital firm Electric Capital recently released "
Blockchain Developer Report
" shows that compared to the 189 developers in the third quarter of 2019, as of the third quarter of 2020, the number of Polkadot developers has reached 384, a year-on-year increase of 103%.
Among them, the number of developers of Polkadot’s decentralized financial center and stablecoin platform Acala has increased by 200%. At present, Acala has launched a series of DeFi financial products: such as the stable currency system of decentralized over-collateralized lending, Staking derivatives, decentralized exchanges and other Layer 1 core modules.
Polkadot has established a set of "cross-chain underlying architecture", allowing all different types of blockchains connected to this architecture to work together. This means that only when enough ecological projects can interact well in this decentralized system can the true potential of the system be realized.
Analysis of Polkadot's DeFi Ecological Status in Five Dimensions
According to the classification and summary of Polkadot's current DeFi projects, Lianwen divides them into five categories: cross-chain (transfer bridge), oracle machine, application, DEX and wallet, and analyzes its ecology.
Cross-chain / transfer bridge
Polkadot uses cross-chain message passing (XCMP) for asynchronous communication between parachains. With the help of XCMP, it is possible to send messages that do not require a response (but can guarantee that the receiving chain will act on it), and to communicate that requires some specific information to be returned (such as the return value of a function called on the receiving chain).
To put it simply, XCMP plays the role of a "bridge" in the Polkadot system, similar to the TCP/IP protocol commonly used on the Internet, which allows messages to be transmitted between the various parachains of Polkadot, and supports components on these parachains to interact.
The transfer bridge provides the possibility for blockchains outside the Polkadot system to interact with the Polkadot ecological cross-chain. Most of the projects in the Polkadot ecosystem are based on the Substrate framework, which has greater flexibility in the customization of blockchain network components. Through the native support for cross-chains, Polkadot’s DeFi ecosystem can smoothly build various applications, even compared to Ethereum. Greater flexibility.
In this category, the main representative projects are PolkaBTC, the first Polkadot ecological bitcoin anchor coin, asset cross-chain projects represented by ChainX, Darwinia, a bridge project located in Polkadot, etc.
PolkaBTC is the first trustless Bitcoin-anchored currency launched by the DeFi interoperability platform Interlay, allowing users to mint Bitcoin-backed assets PolkaBTC to the Polkadot blockchain 1:1, and is widely used in Polkadot's DeFi.
The PolkaBTC Alpha testnet was launched on December 9th, allowing users to mint and redeem the first PolkaBTC and connect to the BTC Parachain (“Bitcoin Parallel Chain”) testnet. According to the roadmap previously released by Interlay, the BTC Parachain is expected to be launched in February or March 2021.
Currently ChainX has successfully updated the mainnet to Substrate 2.0. This version will adopt Polkadot's new hybrid consensus mechanism and enable on-chain governance functions at the same time. The ChainX 2.0 independent chain will evolve from three directions: Kusama parachain, Polkadot parachain, and Polkadot secondary Relay chain.
Oracle
Darwinia is a cross-chain bridging network developed based on Substrate, focusing on building a future asset interconnection network, including non-standard asset auction markets, stable currency cross-chain, asset exchange and other fields. Darwinia uses a sub-linear super light client to realize the perception of the state of the external chain to replace the current more centralized or semi-decentralized cross-chain solutions.
At present, the one-way cross-chain bridge of Darwin Ethereum is officially opened, and the Darwin mainnet is also gradually launched. According to the official introduction, Darwinia will open the "Ethereum-Darwin two-way cross-chain bridge/transfer" in the third phase, and "multi-directional cross-chain" in the fourth phase.
Oracle
DeFi relies on the blockchain system for cryptocurrency transactions and loans, and the oracle machine, as an important mechanism for obtaining data from the outside, is an essential part of maintaining the normal operation of DeFi. In the field of oracles,
The current oracle projects in the Polkadot ecosystem include Zeitgeist, ZK Oracle, PolkaOracle, Kylin Network, Clovyr, and Noise Explorer.
Among them, the privacy oracle machine ZK Oracle will be designed and developed based on the SERO chain in the early stage, and will support Turing's complete smart contract platform on SERO.
DEX
Before the official launch of various functions of the Polkadot mainnet, ZK Oracle will maintain the original anonymous solution, and then ZK Oracle will migrate to the Substrate cross-chain underlying architecture to continuously improve various functions of ZK Oracle.
It is worth noting that Polkadot has officially announced that it will integrate the Chainlink oracle machine as the price feed source for all blockchains in the Polkadot ecosystem. The introduction of Substrate and the Polkadot ecosystem is an important milestone, and Chainlink has officially become an "interface across various blockchain platforms."
In addition, Acala, Laminar and the decentralized oracle machine Band Protocol have jointly released the "Open Oracle Gateway" (Open Oracle Gateway). The quality of service (QoS-Quality of Service) service and fee are free, which means that in addition to Acala operating its own oracle and providing price feeding services, the oracle gateway solution allows multiple participants to join.
In addition, the DEX PolkaSwap of the Polkadot ecological uncustodial AMM mechanism will be launched in the near future. PolkaSwap is based on Hyperledger Iroha v2, bridged to the Kusama and Polkadot networks, allowing users to trade digital assets based on Substrate.
wallet
Another DEX Polkastarter will be officially launched on December 15th, and the first batch of projects to conduct token sales are already in preparation. Polkastarter is specially established for cross-chain token pools and auctions, allowing decentralized projects to raise and trade funds in a low-cost and fast manner, and provides cross-chain, priced bulk transactions and dynamic price auctions, etc., and supports commonly used ERC- 20 digital assets.
application
wallet
application
borrow money
The underlying products of DeFi are the part of the content that users have the most contact with and the closest contact with, and it is also a part of the content that builds the core of a complete DeFi ecosystem. From here, the financial Lego game of DeFi officially begins.
In Ethereum DeFi, the underlying products include mortgage lending, trading, insurance, wealth management, derivatives and other niche applications. Polkadot DeFi is currently not as extensive as Ethereum DeFi, but it also has a series of basic underlying products. Lianwen summarizes it as follows:
borrow money
Lending is the cornerstone of the DeFi financial system and the earliest mature business model in Ethereum DeFi. At present, there are not many projects focusing on lending in the Polkadot ecosystem, and more projects have lending functions. This category includes: Konomi, a DeFi aggregation application platform, Acala’s Honzon protocol that supports cross-chain multi-asset mortgages, the original EOS-based DeFi project Equilibrium, and the lending protocol Akropolis, etc.
Konomi is a public chain developed based on Substrate. The first and most important product based on Konomi is the application of decentralized lending. With the release of the Polkadot parachain and the inter-chain communication protocol taking effect, Konomi can support more financial products for the Polkadot ecosystem. In the application scenario, there are mainly two application scenarios: the linkage between cross-parallel chain applications and the benefits of DOT ecological assets.
Acala is the first asset-backed stablecoin issuance platform based on the Substrate framework. At present, Acala's financial system includes liquidation, oracle service, support for cross-chain multi-asset mortgage, release of Staking liquidity, DEX, synthetic assets, etc.
Equilibrium is the original EOS-based DeFi protocol. It announced in September this year that it has become a partner with Polkadot. It will use Polkadot's Substrate technology to build Equilibrium's blockchain. grant funds.
The goal of Akropolis is to create a distributed financial network protocol that provides people with financial savings and value-added tools that do not have to rely on geographic location, counterparty or intermediary institutions.
It is worth noting that Akropolis was hacked in November, and 2 million DAI was stolen by hackers. In the same month, it reached a cooperation with yearn.finance. The specific content includes: Yearn and Akropolis merge development resources and increase TVL (locked volume) at the same time ; Akropolis can be connected to Yearn, Pickle and Cream protocols; Yearn can be connected to new investment strategies and business development experts developed by Akropolis.
financial management
The star projects of wealth management applications include Bifrost and Stafi, which provide liquidity for staking, Reef Finance, an aggregator asset management product, and Definex, a financial market protocol.
The Stafi protocol solves the contradiction between the security required by the system and the liquidity of its tokens by distributing ABS tokens to Staking participants. The ABS token is the certificate corresponding to the user's Staking assets. When performing Staking, the user will also obtain the corresponding ABS tokens to facilitate circulation and transactions.
stable currency
Reef Finance is the first cross-chain DeFi operating system built on Polkadot. It aims to provide users with an intelligent liquidity aggregator and income engine through a seamless user interface, so that traders can obtain liquidity from CEX and DEX for trading.
stable currency
summary
On Ethereum DeFi, the participation of ETH, various stable coins, and tokens issued based on ERC-20 such as COMP jointly builds the layers of DeFi Lego, and participates in this financial game as collateral in countless agreements. In this category, the Polkadot ecosystem is mainly represented by the decentralized stablecoins Acala and Bandot.
Acala generates the stablecoin aUSD primarily through overcollateralization, allowing users to send and receive USD across chains between any blockchain connected to Polkadot. The Bandot protocol supports value interoperability between different parallel chains, so that the value on the Polkadot chain can be quickly traded and circulated.
