The Rise of DeFi in Cardano: Genius Yield ISPO Attracts over 135 Million Delegated ADA
Genius Yield, a decentralized finance (DeFi) dApp building on the peer-reviewed Cardano blockchain, has attracted over 135 million in delegated ADA less than two weeks after launch!
135 Million Delegated ADA Staked in Genius Yield’s Four ISPO Pools
By December 30, Genius Yield had 135 million delegated ADA channeled to its four official initial stake pool offering (ISPO) pools, indicating support and excitement from the community.
On December 16, Dr. Lars Brünjes, the Genius Yield CTO and IOHK’s Director of Education remained confident on the project. Buoyant, he cited the high participation rate among ADA holders. Less than 48 hours after the ISPO started, over 75 million ADA had been delegated to Genius Yield’s four official ISPOs in GENS1, GENS2, GENS3, and GENS4. By late December 2021, users could stake to all pools, attracting 135 million in delegated ADA from holders across the globe.
“We launched two pools two weeks ahead of the start of our ISPO and started seeing incredible numbers really fast. We added two more as we were nearing the launch to avoid saturation. While we’re confident in our team and what we’re building, seeing our community rising to the occasion by delegating so much so early is encouraging. It means that what we’re trying to achieve really resonates with people,” said Dr. Lars Brünjes, the Genius Yield CTO and IOG’s Director of Education.
ISPOs Promote Financial inclusion, Taps Cardano’s Architecture
An ISPO is a crowdfunding model unique to Cardano because of the blockchain’s non-custodial stake pool delegation structure on the Ouroboros Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol.
Evolving from other custodial fundraising and project support approaches like Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs), and Initial DEX Offerings (IDOs), ISPOs bring to the table more fairness, transparency, security, and inclusivity.
Unlike ICOs–U.S. regulators say most projects were minting and selling unregistered securities–ISPOs promote inclusion and more control for the investor. By delegating ADA, investors don’t transact. Instead, the ISPO project receives funds from the diverted blockchain staking rewards. For participating in the Genius Yield ISPO, the investor receives GENS, the Genius Yield’s native token, distributed at the end of the ISPO, which would take 36 epochs. Delegators will receive a share of the 10 million GENS and more bonuses, including NFT rewards, depending on the holding period. Furthermore, the investor retains control of the delegated ADA from their Yoroi, Daedalus, Trust, Atomic, or any other supported ADA wallet.
DeFi is a $24 Billion Industry, Cardano Projects Rising
Genius Yield is building a concentrated liquidity decentralized exchange based on the order book model and a smart liquidity management protocol taking advantage of Cardano’s UTXO approach and smart contracting architecture. The objective of Genius Yield is to provide capital efficiency and fine-tune control for liquidity providers who, like in other DeFi protocols in Ethereum or the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), can create liquidity pools.
While DeFi is an umbrella term for financial applications leveraging the distribution of blockchain to eliminate gatekeepers, decentralized exchanges and yield maximizing dApps dominate. DEXes in Ethereum and BSC like Uniswap and PancakeSwap cumulatively manage over $13 billion of assets as of late 2021.
Overall, trackers reveal that over $245 billion of assets are locked in DeFi dApps across various smart contracting platforms. A bulk is locked in Ethereum. A notable percentage of total value locked (TVL) is distributed amongst emerging ledgers like Solana and the BSC.
Following the activation of smart contracting in Alonzo, analysts expect Cardano-based projects to carve out a considerable market share in total value locked. Currently, projects are actively building and looking to deploy their solutions, drawing maximum benefits from Cardano’s architecture.
From projects such as Meld, which is building a non-custodial banking protocol, the Ardana Project—a decentralized exchange stable asset liquidity pool and on-chain asset-backed stablecoin protocol, to Paribus—an interoperable lending and borrowing protocol for synthetics, NFTs, and liquidity positions, developers are hard at work. In a tweet, IOG—the development wing of Cardano, pointed out Genius Yield’s work of planning to launch the first non-custodial concentrated liquidity decentralized exchange based on an order-book model on Cardano in early 2022.
