Is This the DeFi Infrastructure of Tomorrow?

Decentralized finance is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing use-cases for blockchain technology.

In the last year alone, we have seen the emergence of hundreds of novel DeFi solutions across dozens of blockchains, providing cryptocurrency holders with more utility, while making decentralized technologies more attractive to the masses.

But despite the staggering growth in DeFi users and locked value, the DeFi space is still arguably in its earliest days of development and the platforms that will shape the future of the space are still being built. Here, we take a look at some of the platforms laying the foundations of the future DeFi industry.

As we previously touched on, interoperability is set to become one of the dominant foci of blockchain developers in the coming months and years.

This is exactly the main focus of Wanchain — a platform that looks to bridge both private and public blockchains together to produce a more cohesive cross-chain ecosystem supported by blockchain agnostic applications.

Wanchain believes that true DeFi is interoperable. In line with this vision, they created the world's first direct Bitcoin-to-Ethereum bridge, allowing users to use their BTC within Ethereum's rapidly expanding DeFi network.

The platform recently completed its Jupiter hard fork, making the platform 100% compatible with Ethereum dApps while retaining compatibility with existing Wanchain tools and SDKs. By enabling developers to create powerful cross-chain applications and empowering end-users with ring-signature enabled transactions, Wanchain looks to produce a DeFi landscape that is free of compromises.

Wanchain developers are currently working on their next breakthrough, dubbed 'X-Rollups', which they hope will help to eliminate Ethereum's congestion and high fee issues — making Ethereum more capable than ever before.

Cryptocurrency staking is an incredibly popular way to not only help secure proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, but also incentivize token holding through the distribution of rewards.

But until the development of KIRA Network, these rewards could only be earned by staking assets native to a single blockchain. This not only limits the maximum potential value at stake, but also the range of assets that can be staked.

KIRA is unique in that it unlocks the liquidity of potentially trillions of dollars worth of digital and tokenized physical assets, by allowing anybody to stake their asset tokens to the KIRA platform thanks to its Multi-Bonded-Proof-of-Stake (MBPoS) consensus scheme.

KIRA Network also goes one step further toward unlocking the utility of both digital and real-world assets. While most blockchains require you to lock your assets for a fixed period of time to earn staking rewards, KIRA Network preserves the liquidity of your assets by issuing 1:1 derivative tokens for each asset staked.

Being fully liquid, these derivative tokens can be further used through the KIRA DeFi landscape — such as for yield farming, collateral, asset synthesis and more.

Decentralized file storage has long been hailed as one of the most attractive use cases for blockchain technology. In recent years, we have seen the advent of a range of decentralized file sharing solutions, including the likes of Filecoin, BitTorrent, and arweave — each of which has its pros and cons.

But while the decentralized file storage space is becoming increasingly stratified and popular, there still lacks a one-size-fits-all solution, or an aggregator that makes the best features of each solution available to everyone. That is, until Coldstack came around.

Coldstack is a platform that is shaping up to become the 1inch of decentralized file storage, by providing an AI-powered aggregator for decentralized cloud solutions like arweave and Sia. With Coldstack, both individual and business clients can quickly find the best platform for their needs, and can easily move their files to decentralized storage thanks to Coldstack’s Amazon S3 API compatibility.

The platform also includes novel NFT functionality, allowing users to easily tokenize any uploaded file using the ERC-721 or ERC-1115 standard — which can then be easily sold on a compatible marketplace, such as OpenSea or Rarible.

Polkadot has emerged as one of the most promising blockchain platforms in recent years — largely owed to its capacity to bring together otherwise isolated blockchains with its relay chain, bridge and parachain technology.

ParaState is one of the projects looking to harness the capabilities of Substrate by bringing Ethereum smart contracts to the Polkadot ecosystem. ParaState has set out to bring crucial Ethereum DeFi infrastructure, including AMMs, price oracles, stablecoins and more to the cross-chain network.

Billed as 'Ethereum on steroids,' ParaState looks to unlock the utility and capabilities of decentralized applications through the use of a custom Ewasm virtual machine, which can run Ethereum code with no modifications.

The Alameda Research-backed project is currently running on its testnet, known simply as Plato, and already supports over 20 different programming languages for smart contract development. The mainnet release date is yet to be announced.