Ignas | DeFi Research
Ignas | DeFi Research

@DefiIgnas

16 Tweets 7 reads May 10, 2023
1/ Let's take a break from memecoins and check what's new in #DeFi.
I'm tracking the VC money flow to identify new DeFi trends.
Here are 5 innovative DeFi projects that just raised funds: 💸
2/ There were 130 crypto fundraising deals worth $1.34B in April.
The dollar amount is much lower than March, when just four projects (Stripe, Ledger, Matter Labs, and eToro) raised a total of $8.2B.
Overall, the fundraising market is not showing any change in trend.
3/ When it comes to DeFi, there's an upward trend in the dollar amount raised!
23 DeFi projects managed to raise funds last month, accounting for $249M USD, which is 2.5x the amount raised in March!
Surprisingly, the DeFi sector now attracts more money than NFTs & CeFi!🚀
4/ I focus on seed round investments by prominent VCs.
Most of these projects don't have a token yet.
I believe that early-stage projects that secure funding during bear markets have a good chance of thriving in bull runs.
5/ My top 5 projects from last month:
1️⃣ @CatalystAMM is cross-chain liquidity layer, designed for a world where every app will have its own blockchain.
It's built to connect any chain's liquidity to another's, facilitating seamless value transfer from day one.
6/ Catalyst allows swapping of native assets (no need for wrapped tokens) and offers the first permissionless cross-chain pool creation.
It fits neatly into the modular and multi-chain narrative.
The team raised $4.2M from Robot Ventures, Circle, Hashkey, Spartan, and others.
7/ 2️⃣ @SwaapFinance is a next-gen AMM.
It addresses the impermanent loss (IL) issue and reduces trading costs using dynamic spread and price oracles.
The Swaap v1 launched in July, recorded less than <1% IL for WBTC/WETH/USDC pool.
They will also airdrop Swaap tokens to LPs.
8/ The announced v2 introduces more advanced market-making models, greater token variety, and choice between high-yield and low-risk strategies.
There are currently waitlists for both, Catalyst and Swaap.
Swaap team raised $4.5M several VCs and angel investors.
9/ 3️⃣ @fareprotocol is in stealth mode and doesn't want to be noticed just yet.
Their Twitter account was created 9 months ago, and their Discord is dead silent.
However, they just raised $6.5M USD from top investors like Republic, Arrington Capital, Quantstamp among others.
10/ $FARE leverages probability smart contracts, offers a new spin on token dynamics.
Its 'win or lose' system, akin to a casino, burns/mints FARE tokens based on transparent, on-chain probability events.
But, instead of a 'house' profit, all collected FARE get redistributed.
11/ 4️⃣ @pear_protocol is a narrative trading platform simplifying crypto pairs trading.
Long one token, short another with leverage in a single transaction.
App is not live yet.
12/ Traders use $USDC as collateral, choose long/short leveraged pairs, and execute the position in a single transaction, which is represented by an ERC-721 tokenized receipt.
Team raised $1.25M USD from Flow Ventures, Portico, and JY Capital.
13/ 5️⃣ @playbuxco is totally different from what I've covered so far.
Playbux also explains why BNB Chain has so many users.
It just raised $2M from Binance, Gate, Tron, Certik, and others.
It's already the 12th top crypto dApp by wallet activity.
14/ Playbux is a two-tiered protocol:
First, it's a metaverse platform where users buy & spend $BRK to play with claw machines.
You can win rare NFTs and combine or trade them on the NFT marketplace.
15/ The second part is a "Shop to Earn" platform, where you can get 5% cashback on online purchases in BUSD.
Over 20k merchants are included, such as AliExpress and Alibaba.
You can use earned BUSD in-game or cash out.
Seems like most users are from Asia.
16/ There's more to it, but it made me realize that most of DeFi is complicated and targeted towards a small % of crypto users.
dApps like Playbux bring in a new class of users who look for tangible benefits.
They're also gas fee-sensitive and don't care which chain they use.

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