Many Ethereum projects today are with the main focus on defi. Decentralized finance aims to expand the use cases of cryptocurrencies from daily use and transactions to the real financial world realm.
The total value of crypto assets locked in Defi protocols rose by more than 2,000% in 2020. It increased from $650 million at the beginning of the year to $16.05 billion.
The popularity of Ethereum projects and decentralized applications (dapps) has increased the cost of transaction fees significantly being that it’s open source. This is where the competition comes in to have miners process their transactions more quickly. An ETH miner is more likely to add a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain the higher the transaction fee.
Here are some of Ethereum projects:
Maker DAO
While most stablecoins are centralized, MakerDao plans to decentralize its stablecoin dai.
Stablecoins are on a mission to improve the common issue of unstable cryptocurrency. The volatility of cryptocurrencies makes it hard for investors to rely on them as a store of value or means of exchange.
Uniswap
Unlike many exchanges, Uniswap is decentralized. A decentralized exchange dex usually means it does not control a user’s funds. Being the most well-known decentralized exchange, the Ethereum DeFi movement, which has recently experienced massive growth, is built around this exchange. The DeFi movement makes trading between coins easier.
The Uniswap Ethereum project attracted a “vampire” competitor as its sucks up its users. The official name is SushiSwap. A unique characteristic of Uniswap, the Ethereum project, is that it uses an automated market maker. The automated crypto maker is a trading system run by smart contracts rather than the original order book system.
What’s the difference between a centralized crypto exchange and an AMM-based exchange? Supply and demand determine asset market prices on a centralized crypto exchange. Whereas a pricing algorithm determines the price of assets on an AMM platform. Investors provide the gathered liquidity to carry out trades at a predetermined market price.
Chainlink
Chainlink is a crypto project, Ethereum-based, oracle platform. The chainlink platform works to connect smart contracts to real-time data (weather or stock prices.) Introduced in 2017, it only gained popularity in 2019, after its partnership with Google. Chainlink is a crypto asset that uses the ERC-20 on top of the Ethereum network.
Axie Infinity
Axie Infinity is a famous crypto-based online game. The goal here is for users to collect and raise characters known as “Axie.” Axies are part of the NFT gang. Every Axie is cryptographically unique and often even has monetary value.
Aave
Blockchain.com and Blockchain Capital, two renowned venture capital firms, recently contributed $25 million to the decentralized platform Aave. Aave is a platform for borrowing and lending, ranked the fourth largest decentralized finance (DeFi) app with a value of $1.14 billion.
