With native cross-chain trading and very attractive Bitcoin APYs, Thorwallet offers a user-friendly UI with all the trimmings this Christmas
As we near the end of a spectacularly explosive year for the growth of DeFi and blockchain technology in general, both interest and investment in the industry are at an all-time high. Institutions continue to explore the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum as major investment assets, but decentralized finance solutions have also becoming major forces to be reckoned with; offering financial inclusion to millions of unbanked people around the world, DeFi products are enabling people everywhere to unlock new and independent sources of income as the global economy continues to struggle with the fallout from COVID-19.
Taking a look into blockchain infrastructure, several popular blockchains have grown both in terms of capabilities and ecosystem size in recent months; THORchain is one such example and, having steadily expanded its reach within the industry, the Cosmos-based blockchain protocol is today the home for an array of exciting projects offering a multitude of crypto and DeFi services.
THORWallet Pushes the Envelope for DeFi 2.0 Products
Amongst many innovative solutions being built on THORchain is THORWallet, a non-custodial wallet that looks to pander to both DeFi power users and mainstream consumers with 2 separate mobile applications available to the public. Both THORWallet products offer feature-rich user experiences and exposure to DeFi, with multi-chain savings accounts, liquidity provision capabilities and synthetic asset trading just some of the many things on offer; the retail targeted app strips away some of the more complex attributes of the THORWallet application but continues to extend access to a large majority of the benefits on offer.
THORWallet has been built to complement THORchain’s cross-chain functionality and users of the THORWallet app are able to swap Layer 1 tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in a completely decentralized manner with no middlemen. This improves massively on swapping options available on many other popular blockchain platforms which offer only wrapped assets, keeping custody of the native assets. By doing this, THORWallet is also able to offer users a way to earn yield on their Bitcoin whilst keeping complete custody of their assets at all times.
Previous Funding and the Upcoming MISO IDO
The THORWallet team successfully raised over $3.4 million during private rounds led by THORchain, Fomocraft, Nine Realms, 0x Ventures and several other leading funds in the blockchain investment space. THORWallet’s native TGT multi-utility token serves a variety of purposes within the THORWallet ecosystem such as node operation and as a tool for gamification and community incentives such as airdrops, as well as unlocking premium features for holders.
Having already concluded the first phase of their public token sale on THORStarter, which sold out in just over one minute, phase 2 of the public token sale will take place on Sushi MISO on December 20th 2021. Token holders are currently able to stake their TGT, with rates for single-sided staking sitting at 800% and 1200% for eth-tgt pooling respectively.
“We are thankful to have received considerable interest and support from both reputable funds and the public and we are excited to open the doors to future THORWallet users with the upcoming MISO IDO. The THORchain ecosystem continues to grow rapidly and we’re proud to be one of the projects driving that growth.” – Marcel Harmann, THORWallet Co-Founder and CEO.
Flickto has seen tremendous success since its first launch on Nov 1st. The number of delegates on the platform has grown rapidly, as has the volume of ADA staked. Less than one month after launch, more than 1.5 ADA has been staked on its ISPO delegator pool.
The project is revolutionizing the way that media financing is carried out. Flickto uses the ISPO pool to fund projects through community partnerships. The media launchpad provides creators with the financing they need to produce their content, while simultaneously providing users the ability to earn passive income by way of distribution royalties after the projects are completed.
Staking In Flickto ISPOs
Users can stake and earn rewards by staking their ADA and earning Flickto’s native token FLICK. Staking with FLICK tokens gives the user the right to vote for the projects which they would like to see funded. Then when the projects are approved by the broader community via voting with staked FLICK tokens, financing is provided until the project is distributed. At which point users will start earning royalties.
Users are able to fund projects that will eventually be seen on the big screen in theaters and also on their TV screens. This takes the power over the media industry out of the hands of a few conglomerates and puts it in the hands of the community, completely eliminating the barrier to entry for industries such as this.
In addition to the rewards from staking FLICK and ADA, participating in voting also earns users rewards. It also makes users eligible for extra rewards, like the just-concluded airdrop that saw two NFTs go to users who have staked in the pool.
Where Media Meets Blockchain
Flickto is the first of its kind on the Cardano blockchain and as such has recorded much success since launch. It entered into a partnership with media industry veterans Ben Morris and Geraint Harvard Jones, who serve as advisors to the project. With decades of experience between the two, they will guide Flickto as they navigate the media project financing space.
Artists from various genres can be selected by the community for financing. Flickto is not just limited to film and TV production. NFT artists and content creators are another example of projects that users can vote on.
FLICK Private And Public Sale
Flickto has completed the first phase of its Private Sale round with great success. The next opportunity to acquire FLICK outside of the ISPO is via the upcoming IDO. The private sale gave users the opportunity to purchase the tokens at a low price.
The Cardano-based project will help accelerate Flickto to provide efficient and transparent crowdfunding services.
The total supply of FLICK tokens is capped at 5,000,000,000 with a total of 1,000,000,000 FLICK tokens going up for sale in the private sale.
Around the Block from Coinbase Ventures sheds light on key trends in crypto. In this edition, Justin Mart andConnor Dempsey explain what Loot Project is and why it’s interesting.
Pictured below, is a Loot bag: A text file consisting of 8 phrases overlaid on a black background. As it turns out, this text file is also an NFT, “Loot Bag #748,” and it sold for 250 ETH, or about $800,000at current prices.
So what can you do with it? Not much… for now, at least.
Dungeons & degens
On August 27th, Dom Hoffmann, who notably co-founded Vine, introduced Loot. A project consisting of 8,000 NFTs full of words that depict “randomized adventurer gear.” Closer inspection reveals items that a character might wield in a game like Dungeons & Dragons. A Short Sword, or Divine Robe of the Fox,for instance.
While we’ve seen a lot of NFT drops over the last few months, two things set Loot apart. First, these NFTs could be claimed for free. The claimee simply had to pay the standard Ethereum gas fee. The other more obvious differentiator: these NFTs are just a bunch of words.
Despite the glaring lack of chimp or penguin art, once claimed, these plain text NFTs quickly started selling for tens of thousands of dollars. At the time of writing, $230M in Loot has changed hands.
One’s knee-jerk reaction might be to dismiss Loot as just another symptom of speculative NFT fever. Loot does, however, introduce an interesting new NFT primitive. Before we get to what makes it interesting, it helps to understand a bit more about what a Loot NFT is.
Instead of just being a single provably scarce image, each of the 8 items within a given Loot bag has smart contract readable parameters. On top of that, each of the 8 items has its own rarity within the broader Loot universe.
Returning to Bag #748, while 6 of the 8 items are deemed “common”, the Short Sword and the Divine Robe of the Fox are decidedly rare. The Short Sword appears only 325 times across 8,000 Loot bags while the Divine Robe of the Fox appears only once.
Ok, so we have NFTs with Dungeons and Dragon-ey words on them that are smart contract compatible, with some words appearing less frequently than others. So what?
A community owned gaming platform
People appear to be excited about Loot not because of what the NFTs are, but what they could be. These NFTs were released into the wild and left to the interpretation of anyone who found them interesting. Anyone can build something using Loot NFTs as a foundation.
A sound analogy comes from Avichal Garg at Electric Capital, who likens Loot with a 52 deck of cards. Where on its own, a deck of cards is just 52 pieces of paper with pictures on them. With a bit of ingenuity, it’s also the foundation for thousands of games, from Poker, to Hearts, to Crazy 8’s.
Similarly, Loot and its 8,000 NFTs can serve as the foundation of an entire gaming metaverse. The ideal end state being an entire ecosystem of games where Loot items like the Divine Robe of the Fox serve different functions: think Dungeons & Dragons in the metaverse. Whoever builds something on top of Loot NFTs can determine the function served by a given item.
By building the foundation of a game, without building a game itself, Loot leaves its fate in the hands of a decentralized community. Whether or not one thinks it will be successful, it’s an intriguing idea to many.
So what are people building?
Early Loot experiments
For one, the image I showed above ranking the rarity of Loot bag #748 comes from an application built by someone named @scotato in the Loot community. By pasting your Loot contract address into 0xinventory.app, NFT owners can see the rarity of their Loot bag (note the ranking system was also devised by the community).
Another project called Lootmart will allow Loot holders to unbundle their Loot Bag into individual NFTs to swap items with other Loot holders, complete with AI generated images of individual items.
Similarly, lootcharacter.com was created to generate pixelated characters based on Loot bags. Here’s Bag #748.
A community member also spun up an ERC-20 token called Adventure Gold ($AGLD) while he was waiting at an airport. Anyone with a Loot bag could claim 10,000 $AGLD. FTX created spot and futures markets for the token and it hit a high of $7.70, meaning Loot holders were essentially gifted tokens worth $77,000 at their peak.
The idea behind $AGLD is that it can serve as an in game currency woven into a game that gets built some day. But like Loot itself, its value is up for interpretation. This didn’t stop people from incorporating it into other budding Loot projects, including a Loot themed “choose your own adventure” story, where $AGLD holders can vote on the direction of the story.
In Chapter 1 of, “Holy War Lore”, $AGLD holders were allowed to vote on whether a man wearing a Divine Robe should put on a Demon King’s crown to absorb his powers (they voted that he put on the crown). In Chapter 2, the crown gets the man into trouble and there’s currently a vote on how he should handle the situation.
These are just a few examples of what the grassroots community of Loot enthusiasts has created so far. The Loot discord reveals wide ranging discussion with distinct channels for builders, artists, writers and a whole lot more.
Creating value from chaos
To recap, Loot is interesting because it inverts the typical gaming and community development path. The Loot creator simply built the foundation of a gaming universe and threw it into the wild to see what others would do with it. And so far, it has energized a diverse community, with a host of new Loot projects in development.
This excitement, coupled with the current NFT bull market sent Loot NFTs soaring, with the cheapest Loot bag trading for $23,000 today. There are however, no guarantees that anything resembling a real game or real utility ever gets built on Loot. Owning a Loot bag is a bet on future utility, which is up to the community to build.
This is the challenge that Loot faces. Can a decentralized community channel its enthusiasm into creating inherent utility in owning a Loot bag? That utility could come from creating strategy games similar to Axie Infinity where Loot items can be used in combat, artwork and avatars exclusive to Loot owners, or from some other application yet to be cooked up.
We are just two weeks into the project, so imagination is required today, but the appeal is tangible.
The cost of entry
A key question surrounding Loot is “Why would game developers build games that incorporate Loot bags when only a select few can afford them?” Developers build games that appeal to the mass market, but the vast majority of gamers are priced out of owning a Loot bag today.
The question of incentives lies at the heart of Loot’s future. Are there answers? Yes — a few. First, game developers who build on Loot have the benefit of bootstrapping their game with a core, passionate community of Loot enthusiasts. Second, and more importantly, there may be unique ways to incorporate Loot without pricing out the majority of the market. We can take inspiration from Axie Infinity and Yield Guild Games. When Axie NFTs got too expensive for most players to afford, lending markets emerged that let players borrow the NFTs needed to play in return for a portion of the winnings from Play to Earn games. We could see the emergence of Loot DAOs that devise similar solutions. Synthetic Loot is another solution being explored. Synthetic Loot lets anyone claim a pseudo Loot bag that can’t be sold or transferred but can be used in Loot games, should a developer choose to allow it. This in theory can open the door for more players.
While many questions remain, we’re in the early stage of a radically new kind of project that’s completely inverted the typical game development model. A self organized grassroots community is now tasked with taking Loot’s foundation and building something real, with all of the tools that crypto, NFTs, and metaverse economies have to offer. The burning questions surrounding Loot’s future make it one of the most captivating experiments in crypto; one that will be fascinating to watch play out over the coming months and years.
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In the last 24-hours, Terra (LUNA), a blockchain protocol focused on building a global payments system powered by the UST stablecoin, rallied to a new all-time high at $45.
LUNA/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since bottoming at a low of $5.61 on July 20, the price of LUNA has ripped 720% higher to a record high at $45 on Sept. 10.
The swift rally also lifted the total value locked (TVL) on the Terra protocol to a new all-time high at $7.83 billion on Sept. 5, making Terra the fourth-ranked blockchain platform by TVL according to Defi Llama.
Total value locked on Terra. Source: Defi Llama
Related: Altcoin Roundup: Layer-one protocols chip away at Ethereum’s dominance.
A new funding initiative boosts LUNA price
A scroll through the project’s Twitter feed shows that the surge in price followed the announcement of ‘Project Dawn’, a new funding initiative for the Terra ecosystem meant to help improve critical infrastructure and accelerate the growth of the ecosystem.
1/ TFL is announcing Project Dawn, a new funding initiative for critical infrastructure improvements and core technologies to supplement the accelerating growth of the Terra ecosystem.
According to Terra co-founder Do Kwon, Project Dawn has allocated $150 million to “build a core Cosmos contributor organization, invest in the ecosystem’s node infrastructure, and diversify the validator and oracle infrastructure.”
Another source of excitement for the Terra community is the upcoming launch of its Colombus-5 mainnet upgrade on Sept. 29, which is “Terra’s most significant mainnet upgrade” according to the project.
1/ The Columbus-5 mainnet deployment will be delayed ~3 weeks until a new block height of 4,724,000, roughly equivalent to the following times:
9/29 at 20:30 PST 9/30 at 03:30 UTC 9/30 at 12:30 KST
On top of developments to the main protocol, LUNA price has also benefited from the expansion of the Terra ecosystem which has seen new DeFi protocols like AlphaDeFi launch and begin to attract liquidity.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
