Given the staggering pace of innovation in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, there’s little wonder why many of those first getting to grips with these promising new platforms can feel simply bewildered about the sheer number of options available.
With DeFi platforms offering increasingly novel functionality and gradually encroaching on the territory of traditional finance platforms, more and more people are beginning to seek out and use DeFi solutions.
With that in mind, we scoured the crypto landscape to find four platforms that bring something new to an increasingly crowded segment.
1. Prophecy
Prophecy is an impressive new platform that looks to shake-up the decentralized finance sector with a range of innovative new financial solutions.
Its first flagship product is known as Prophet pools — a hybrid flash staking solution that allows participants to gain a rapid yield on their assets. With Prophet pools, users are able to stake their tokens into gamified yield pools and potentially net a massive return within just minutes, compared to potentially weeks or months at other platforms.
Users that didn’t win in a previous prophet pool are entered into a weekly blitz round, where they get another opportunity to strike it big.
Beyond this, Prophecy is pioneering a completely original consensus mechanism known as Proof-of-Committed Decay, or PoCD, which is designed to underpin a new economic system that favors liquidity, stimulates open market demand and boost the velocity of the platform’s native utility token — Prophecy (PRY).
Prophecy’s Prophet pools application is already live, but there are plans to launch a total of eight new financial applications in the next year alone — which will likely make Prophecy one of the biggest DeFi ecosystems around.
2. DuckSTARTER
DuckSTARTER is an upcoming token launch platform that is built to democratize access to promising early-stage investment opportunities.
It differentiates itself from other project launchpads in that users are able to boost their odds of being able to participate in highly sought after public sales by simply holding increasing amounts of DUCK tokens to reach a higher member tier.
There are four different member tiers, the lowest is bronze and the highest is platinum — these require users to hold 2,000 and 20,000 DUCKS respectively. The higher the tier, the better the perks for the user.
The platform includes a unique burn dynamic that will act to gradually reduce the circulating supply of both DUCK and DuckDaoDime (DDIM) tokens, since there will be a variable USDC fee charged for each project launched on the platform. This fee will be used to buy back DUCK and DDIM tokens, which will then be burned.
DuckSTARTER is currently being audited by the prominent security audit firm Certik and doesn’t yet have a firm public launch date — though it’s safe to say you won’t be waiting too long.
3. Evolution
Evolution Finance is an upcoming Ethereum-based money market that uses renVM and other popular asset wrapping solutions to port assets from a wide variety of native blockchains to Ethereum — and then allows these assets to be used as collateral for borrowing stablecoins, among other things.
It stands apart from other platforms due to the huge range of collateral assets it will support, allowing users to borrow more assets to effectively leverage their positions and making DeFi a more inclusive space.
Beyond this, Evolution Finance is unique in that the EVN token will be fully diluted at launch, ensuring participants never have to worry about changes to the EVN supply — with all decisions being made by community governance.
It also employs an aggressively deflationary tokenomics model, as each time EVM is sent, 0.4% of the transacted amount is burned. The rest of the 1.7% fee is distributed to liquidity providers (1%) and stakers (0.2%), with a small proportion (0.1%) being added to the developer fund.
4. Mirror Protocol
Mirror Protocol is a novel blockchain platform that allows users to easily create synthetic tokens that can be used to track the price of any real world asset — ranging from stocks, to commodities, derivatives and practically anything else.
These synthetic tokens, known simply as mAssets, can be created by locking up 150% of the value of the asset they track in TerraUSD — a stablecoin pegged at $1 each.
Part of the reason why Mirror Protocol is so promising is because it allows cryptocurrency users to easily gain exposure to a huge range of potentially lucrative assets without leaving the crypto ecosystem. This, because a huge variety of mAssets are already available to trade on the Mirror trading platform, including mAssets for popular stocks like Tesla (TSLA), Netflix (NFLX) and Amazon (AMZN).
Mirror's system uses a network of oracles to track the actual price of the assets underlying each mAsset, ensuring they closely match real world prices. It also employs a system that ensures the collateral used to mint mAssets always exceeds its market value and will automatically liquidate this collateral if it falls below a threshold to ensure the solvency of the market.