Top 5 DeFi Projects to Watch For The Rest of May

With the crypto market gearing up for another potential DeFi summer, now’s the time to pay attention to the up-and-coming projects that may take the space by storm in the months to follow. Let’s take a look at five of the most promising protocols making moves this May.

deFIRE is a decentralized smart order routing engine built on Cardano. Incubated by Occam.FI, a fintech focussed on developing the Cardano network, and in partnership with crypto exchange platform Changelly and leading data aggregator Coin360, deFIRE recently raised over $5 million in a pre-IDO funding round, with investment coming from VC funds such as Morningstar and SwissBorg Ventures.

With the Cardano network primed for massive flows of on-chain liquidity once smart contracts are released, deFIRE offers a limit order algorithm, optimal trade execution, trustless price feeds and aggregated liquidity services for users of Cardano’s nascent DeFi ecosystem.

Powered by the CWAP native token, deFIRE traders can engage in liquidity mining to earn CWAP rebates for using the platform, and stakers can receive a proportional share of fee distributions or referral rewards.

BXTB is a dual blockchain, dual token platform, with an initial focus on unifying the payment and settlement systems of the gaming industry but with attractive and more sustainable DeFi characteristics.

The community-driven BXTB DeFi protocol, governed by BXTB token holders, collateralizes existing stablecoins like USDT and DAI to create a yield generating "CHIP" reversible stablecoin. CHIP is hosted on a BXTB sidechain powered by Proof of Capacity - a low-energy, high-throughput consensus mechanism.

The resulting token improves on the stability of the stablecoins deposited as collateral by delivering faster transaction speeds and lower costs. The transaction fees paid when transferring CHIP tokens on this sidechain are then paid out in YBXTB as yield, incentivizing holders to retain collateralization of the CHIPS in the ecosystem.

Mai Finance takes the MakerDAO style of stablecoin issuance and deploys it on the layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution Polygon with a dual token protocol known as QiDao.

MiToken is the stablecoin and Qi the governance token earned by participating liquidity miners. QiDao allows borrowers to access capital by leveraging their crypto assets (such as MATIC) as collateral to generate miTokens (such as miMATIC), held at a $1 USD soft peg. Supported collateral assets are selected via the QiDao community of Qi token holders who ensure price stability, fee structures, and efficiency.

The result is the ability to borrow at 0% interest, with only a small 0.5% closing fee when settling the debt, paid to the community treasury. It allows users to utilize token value without selling, to leverage collateral to generate stablecoins for further investment, or to consolidate high-interest debt in a 0% lending protocol, with no deadlines on repayments.

Mercurial Finance is building dynamic vaults for stable assets on the high-performance Solana blockchain, providing users the tools to deposit and mint stable assets to generate liquidity for themselves or others in the DeFi ecosystem.

Initially starting with an AMM vault for native and wrapped stables on Solana (USDC, USDT, wUSDC and wUSDT), Mercurial maximizes capital utilization by deploying assets dynamically to facilitate liquidity, low slippage swaps, lending, flash loans and composability with other decentralized protocols.

The native MER token powers the DAO program for system governance, and allows holders to earn a portion of swap fees and commission from yield farms, as well as providing a form of collateral to mint synthetic stables. Having recently completed an IEO, MER is set to be listed on FTX on May 21.

Archer DAO is a set of Ethereum smart contracts governed by ARCH token holders that control product decisions and configurations for the Archer ecosystem, such as Archer Swap.

Archer improves the efficiency of the Ethereum network and miner revenue by replacing low-value transactions with high-value ones, extracting more value from every block. Miners can integrate Archer in 5 minutes with just one line of code to earn more revenue. On-chain suppliers source profitable opportunities for the network, earning a share of the extra revenue they discover, and liquidity providers earn a yield for bankrolling suppliers in a gas-efficient manner.

As a result, Archer Swap allows DEX traders to make zero slippage trades with zero cancellation costs as they are only executed if successful. Traders can therefore set 0% slippage to avoid sandwich attacks and also avoid expensive swap failures. They can negotiate with miners so that miners only get paid if certain criteria are met. If not, the transaction isn’t included on-chain, changing the way traders manage transactions on Ethereum.

In such an exciting emerging industry, it’s important to cut through the noise of meme projects. Instead, look for the signal on offer from protocols like these that are doing the work to build out the future of decentralized finance.