A look at a few DeFi cryptos

Decentralised finance, also known as ‘DeFi’, is increasingly making its presence felt in the financial ecosystem by eradicating the need for governed body-approved financial transactions. To eliminate the requirement of intermediaries, this novel digital financial infrastructure leverages smart contracts and cryptocurrencies. DeFi also allows transparency in transactions.  

Because of these advantages, DeFi with its native tokens has taken decentralised finance (DeFi) to new heights. On that note, let us look at a few DeFi cryptos.  

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Curve DAO Token (CRV)

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Founded in January 2020, Curve is a decentralised exchange utilising an automated market maker (AMM) for managing liquidity. Curve was founded by Michael Egorov, a Russian scientist with prior experience in cryptocurrency-related businesses.  

Since the second half of 2020, Curve has grown rapidly to become synonymous with the decentralised finance (DeFi) surge. CRV’s goal is to offer liquidity providers a fee payment mechanism, incentive structure, governance medium, and long-term revenue techniques. 

Curve formed a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) in August, with Curve DAO Token (CRV) as its internal token. A total of 1.68 billion tokens are available.  

Aragon, an Ethereum-based development tool, is used to connect DAO’s smart contracts to its users’ deposited liquidity.  

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Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink was established in 2017. Chainlink enables blockchains to safely interact with external events, data feeds and payment options via a decentralised oracle network. Thus, it delivers crucial off-chain necessary data by complicated smart contracts. 

Sergey Nazarov is the CEO and co-founder of Chainlink Labs. A big open-source community of security auditors, data providers, researchers, smart contract developers and node operators operate the Chainlink Network. 

Chainlink’s unique features include 

• Among the first networks to permit integrating off-chain data with smart contracts. 
• Utilises node operators to power a wide range of decentralised Price Feed oracle networks live in-production that secure billions of dollars for prominent DeFi applications like Compound, Aave , Synthetix etc. 
• Chainlink has evolved beyond cryptocurrency price data aggregation to DeFi protocols like Aave and much more.  
• Through 1,000 project integrations with 700 oracle networks, the ecosystem now has access to over 1B data points, safeguarding over US$75 billion in value. 

Fantom (FTM) 

Established in 2018, Fantom Foundation runs the Fantom product offering. Fantom operates as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) smart contract platform that offers decentralised finance (DeFi) services to developers. Fantom seeks to alleviate challenges that are related to smart-contract platforms with its in-house token FTM, particularly transaction speed, which developers claim to have lowered to under two seconds. 

There are 3.175 billion FTM tokens in total supply, with 2.5 billion FTM in circulation right now. The rest will be issued according to a schedule that will last until 2023. 

How does Fantom cut above the rest? 

As a layer-1 blockchain, Fantom utilises a new scratch-built consensus mechanism known as Lachesis to enable DeFi and other smart contracts-based services. 

Lachesis provides a much greater capacity and two-second transaction finalisation, as well as improved security over traditional proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm-based platforms. 

Similar to Ethereum, the project caters to developers intending to develop decentralised solutions.  

FTM, the company’s own PoS token, serves as the transaction’s backbone, permitting for staking and fee collection. 

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