Animoca Brands

Branded blockchain gaming & NFTs

Animoca Brands is a giant in branded blockchain gaming and the collectible NFT market. Funded by IDG and Intel Capital back in 2011, Animoca has been a veteran in the traditional gaming industry, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, and subsequently privatized in 2020.

Animoca has “developed and published a broad portfolio of mobile products including games such as The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes as well as products utilizing popular intellectual properties such as Formula 1®, Marvel, Garfield, Snoopy, Thomas & Friends™, Power Rangers, MotoGP, and Doraemon. Animoca Brands’ portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships includes Lucid Sight, Dapper Labs (creators of CryptoKitties), WAX, Harmony, and Decentraland”.*

A lieu of top blockchain VCs invested in its recent Venture rounds, including Coinbase Ventures, Huobi Capital, SNZ Holdings, Hashkey.

So, Animoca has great brand resources, a huge war chest, and an army of incubated or invested blockchain games. At this stage, it is hard for any other branded blockchain games to top that.

Forte.io

Token economy as a service for games

Founded in 2019, San Francisco, Forte provides “An end-to-end solution for token-based game economies and NFTs,” A great tool to help traditional games blockchain-fy. Token economy and NFTs will unlock the potential of the existing games to another magnitude.

Instead of aiming for individual games, Forte is a platform of tech, tools, and sometimes market-making aiming for long-tail games. It mainly uses layer2 technology to build portable sidechains for each game with smart contracts, multi-token wallets, white-label marketplace, etc. Andressen Horowitz joined its recent $185M Series A round in May.

Upshot

NFT appraisal

Upshot is an innovation where appraisers stake and answer binary questions about the NFT price; a DMI mechanism calculates the best score and incentives the most accurate answers.

NFT price discovery is not rational. The current stage collectible NFTs are speculative heavy, which renders price highly irrational and hence the price discovery protocol not useful. Like DeFi evolved from a meager TVL to today’s 100B TVL, the NFT market will also grow from a speculative collectibles marketplace to a sound ecosystem with insurance, and defi, where price oracles as such will be a key building block.

Lithium

Price discovery for illiquid assets

Like Upshot, Lithium uses the DMI mechanism and prediction market model to crowdsource wisdom for price discovery of illiquid assets such as pre-IPO evaluations.

Pawn.fi

NFT as collateral

Pawn.fi is built by Non-fungible Technologies, a decentralized lending/borrowing platform where people can use one or multiple NFTs as collateral to get loans. Users define their own loan terms, including the principal amount, loan duration, rate, and funding currency, and the platform provides escrow and settlement.

This new project, founded in 2021, recently received a $2.75M seed round, led by Hong Kong-based Lemniscap with participation from Arrington XRP Capital and some angel investors.

Aleo

ZKP based full-stack development platform for private applications

Privacy is a right. There has to be a privacy layer for the web3 stack. “The web will become private-by-default.”* “Moreover, privacy is not binary. It exists along a spectrum and matters more or less to different individuals and/or institutions depending on the context.”* Aleo is a ZKP based platform where developers can write private web Apps with the coding language Leo and complete dev tooling.

Donut

Fixed-rate DeFi Yield

Donut is an iOS mobile app offering fixed-rate savings to the public.

It recently rolled out three plans, including 4% APY Save, 5–7% Build, and 6–10% Grow. With the 4% APY fixed-rate savings, Donut converts USD to DAI and lends it to a trusted pool of institutional borrowers; with the Grow plan, Donut generates higher yield through Yearn, while the Build plan is half Save and half Grow.

Fixed-rate savings via DeFi is likely to achieve massive mainstream adoption because it solves a concrete demand.

Enso Finance

DeFi Metastartegies

Enso has not been launched yet. Enso combines social trading with multi-sig syndicate and DAOs. It is likely the platform that gives birth to a true DAO.

SynFutures

AMM model derivatives dex

SynFutures is a derivative dex with the AMM model. Its V1 offers fixed margin futures followed by index futures products with no natural market makers, with shared margin futures and cross margin futures lined up further down in the roadmap.

SynFutures will enable users to list assets, which will unlock more potential than centralized listing, with a wide range of supported token standards from “Ethereum native, crosschain digital assets, to the real-world assets”.

Though still at closed alpha, SynFutures is definitely another project to pay close attention to.