With the Arbitrum airdrop, new liquidity may bring strong volume to projects in the ecosystem. Here is a list of Arbitrum small-cap projects that I am taking a close look at.

TridentDAO (#PSI ) -Often called the next Treasure, Trident is building a gaming ecosystem and 2D roguelike MMO with a risk to earn model. The team recently launched oasis swap, Trident’s new ecosystem DEX and are looking to airdrop its new $INK token next which would be a secondary token alongside its native token $PSI.

Premia Finance - In my honest opinion, Premia has been one of the most underrated options protocols out there. It has American style options and is hard at work with launching Premia v3, which allows for permissionless pools. Premia is a multi-chain decentralized options market based on a pool-to-peer architecture. Think Uniswap V2 but for options. Similar to most DEXs, LPs facilitate the transaction, but in this case, they are underwriters. This means they earn options premiums.

Premia V3 is the main reason I'm excited. While we don't know all of the details yet, the main selling point of this upgrade will be the introduction of Uniswap V3-style concentrated liquidity on Premia. This will shift Premia to a hybrid AMM/Orderbook.

Y2K Finance (#Y2K ) - Y2K is a DeFi project on Arbitrum providing users with derivative products based around the peg of 'stable' assets. This is an expanding list which not only includes a variety of stable coins but also more exotic assets with WBTC, stETH and USDD. They have their main product Earthquake which allows users to essentially buy/sell insurance for the de-pegging of these assets via CAT Bonds. Y2K have in house maths on the strike prices for these assets.

The recent USDC situation has proven the use case of speculating and hedging stablecoins/derivatives and Y2K has the first mover advantage in this market.

$Y2K has a max supply for 20 million, currently around 1.5m in circulation. Y2K can be paired with ETH in the 80:20 Balancer pool and locked for either 16 or 32 weeks created vlY2K tokens - the revenue generating assets for the protocol.

Y2K is one of my favourite protocols to use every week, they've been building and adding more features to their dApp and I think have the potential to only grow further. With its upcoming secondary market and market expansion, more eyes will be on Y2k.

Smolverse - Smols are the icons of Arbitrum and Treasure Dao (#magic ) With new liquidity coming in for Treasure and a new upcoming game for smolverse, the ecosystem is definitely worth looking at if more people join the Magic ecosystem. Alongside this, when I was doing research on seed raises I found out that Alongside this, when I was doing research on seed raises I found out that Strider DAO, the studio building the smolverse game, raised $5.5M in funding. I'm not sure if this will have a direct impact on the development of the game but it's something to look at.

Camelot Dex (#Grail ) - $Grail has been on a tear recently and has cemented Camelot as the premiere community driven DEX on Arbitrum. As more volume flows into Arbitrum, new projects will want to incentivize volume on the DEX which could drive revenue for xGrail holders.

The project is nearing ATH so you might want to be careful, but this project is definitely something to keep in mind in the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Dopex (#dpx ) - As one of the fastest moving options protocol, I have been impressed with what $DPX has pulled off in the past few months. The community is strong, and more liquidity in Arbitrum could lead to more traders who want to speculate on $ARB prices with Dopex.

SperaxUSD (#SPA )- Sperax is a stablecoin issuer that offers farming as a service with its Demeter release. As more volume flows into Arbitrum, new projects may seek to launch v3 incentivized farms with Demeter.

Note that the project did suffer a $300k exploit recently, but the team made affected users whole. Also, there have been some rumors of a new update with Sperax, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

GammaSwap Labs - The first protocol enabling users to turn their impermanent loss (IL) into impermanent gain.

Gamma swap hasn't launched yet, but this project is definitely something you want to keep a close eye on for potential airdrop opportunities. The team announced a $1.7m seed raise on Feb. 6th and have not announced anything regarding a public sale yet.

The project is currently in test net with a public launch upcoming.

That's all. If you enjoyed this article, a like, follow, and share would help out a lot!

This thread is for entertainment purposes only. Not Financial Advice #dyor

CC: Minty-@DefiMinty on Twitter.

$VELA - VELA EXCHANGE

Current Price: $5.30

Market Cap: $34,621,319

Total Supply: 10m - 50m

Vela Exchange is an decentralized trading platform (DEX) and a permissionless, self-custody-driven perpetual exchange built with innovative blockchain architecture to ensure fast transactions, secure trading, and extensibility into additional synthetic options and derivatives. The rewards structure of Vela Exchange is carefully balanced to manage token and reward supply while maintaining high incentives for liquidity provisioning and trading.

What makes $Vela unique?

Vela makes trading efficient, fast, and secure. The exchange offers advanced order types and an intuitive UI/UX experience, allowing users to make the most of their trading activities. Vela also offers institutional-grade APIs and a robust risk management system, enabling traders to manage their portfolios and control their risk. Additionally, Vela has a deep pool of liquidity, which ensures traders get the best possible prices when trading digital assets.

Vela also provides its users with a variety of educational resources, such as market insights, trading tips, and more. This helps traders stay informed and make more informed trading decisions. Additionally, Vela has a customer support team that is available to answer any questions or concerns users may have. Finally, the exchange offers users a secure platform, with the latest encryption technology and advanced authentication protocols to ensure the safety of users' funds.

Things to note about Vela Exchange:

It is still in BETA Phase

Has a huge VELA community and a highly responsive team

Has a unique UX/UI design platform.

VELA is the utility token of Vela Exchange.

eVELA (escrowed VELA) is non-transferable and can be unlocked by staking into a vesting contract, which unlocks the same amount of VELA tokens on a linear vesting period of one year.

The team has a buyback model for VELA. The buyback will be based on a percentage of fees generated from both spot (30%) and perpetual trading (20%). VELA tokens bought back will be reserved for eVELA rewards that will be distributed to VELA and VLP stakers, eliminating the need for inflationary tokenomics to incentivize liquidity. 

VLP is the token that users receive for providing liquidity to the protocol. Users can deposit stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, or DAI, and receive VLP tokens that represent their stake in the pool. VLP holders will earn 50% of the fees generated by the perpetual exchange. Users can also stake VLP to earn an additional 10% of the total fees generated by the perpetual exchange in the form of eVELA. This is not unlike GMX’s GLP liquidity model, except that on Vela Exchange, only stablecoins are accepted as liquidity.

Fees on the perpetual exchange will be a flat 8 bps closing and opening a position. As mentioned previously, VELA/eVELA stakers can earn fee discounts, depending on the amount of VELA/eVELA tokens staked. Discounts start from 2% and can increase up to 50%. 

With heavy investment backing from the likes of Jade Protocol, Vela Exchange is one of the protocols at the forefront of trading in DeFi. it allows perpetual swapping and also grants its users a leverage option of 30x while they are trading any of their supported tokens.

In terms of backers, the team has raised ~$2.1 million from various funding rounds and has strategic partnerships with Big Brain Holdings, Jade Protocol, Magnus Capital, Orange Dao, and Quantstamp. 

Vela Exchange will have three main products: 

Perpetual Exchange — Fully on-chain order book perpetual exchange where users create positions against synthetic assets with up to 30x leverage. Users deposit stablecoins such as USDC as collateral. 

Spot Exchange — Fully on-chain order book exchange where users can trade assets depending on available spot markets

OTC P2P Platform — Decentralized P2P OTC trading platform where users can trade assets publicly or privately to avoid slippage or frontrunning. This was the original product when Vela Exchange was known as Dexpools. 

Tokenomics

VELA will have a total supply of 50 million tokens.

Community Incentives: 30% of the total supply will be set aside for community incentives and will be limited to 5% usage per year. These funds will be used for incentives like rewards for liquidity providers, market makers, beta testers, and other incentives. 

Growth Fund: 19% of the supply will be reserved for future grants, DEX liquidity, market maker allocation for CEXs, and the liquidity provision incentive program.

Marketing: 5% of the supply will be used for marketing rewards such as airdrops, KOL partnerships, and other partnership efforts. These funds are limited to a 2% usage per year. 

Core Team: 16% of the supply goes to the core team, which will be on a 6 month cliff with linear vesting for 36 months. 

DXP Allocation: $DXP supply minted until Jan 26th 2023. All of which will be claimable 1:1 for VELA.

Investors: 5% of the supply allocations will be subject to new cliff and vesting periods.

Advisors — 2% of the supply are allocated to advisors and are on a 6 month cliff with linear vesting for 18 months.

Conclusion

Vela Exchange is one of the latest protocols to step into the growing DEX category. Its competitors, protocols like GMX, GNS, Injective’s Helix, and Kujira’s FIN that use order book- or synthetic based trade execution models, are gaining traction in a space that is currently dominated by automated market maker (AMM)-based holders like Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Balancer.We see this happening due to the similarity in trading experience that order book based DEXs provide to that of CEXs. This also points to a shift in priorities for investors, who have begun to look for protocols that not only provide great UX and CEX-like functionality, but also provide investors with a sustainable yield from the distribution of protocol revenue.

A major issue for DEXs is the ability to attract liquidity. Failing to do so results in slow execution, high spreads on order book DEXs, and high slippage on AMM DEXs. AMMs like Uniswap make use of inflationary tokenomics to incentivize liquidity provision, while order book based DEXs typically do the same by offering incentives to users who provide liquidity (GMX’s GLP, or dYdX’s market maker rewards). Vela Exchange, being an order book DEX, makes use of GMX’s GLP-incentivized liquidity model as well as offers incentives for market makers, thus ensuring that the protocol can get off the ground running in terms of attracting liquidity. However, unlike dYdX in its current state, VELA is non-inflationary and can be sustained by protocol revenue in the long term. 

Haven moved to arbitrum network, traders are betting on Vela taking a share of Arbitrum’s growing DEX activity and potentially mounting a challenge to the dominance of the derivatives exchange GMX. Perpetual-focused GMX emerged as a leader in the sector last fall, surpassing DEX giant UniSwap in daily trading fee earnings at one point. Gains Network, a DEX initially launched on Polygon and then expanded to Arbitrum, generated over $1.5 billion in trading volume on Arbitrum after nearly a month of being deployed.

Note:

This is NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISE! Do your own research (DYOR)

#crypto2023

CORE

Current Price: $2.98

What makes core unique?

CORE is a new blockchain that hopes to revolutionize web3 design. It attempts to provide scalability, security, and independence by combining proof of work (PoW) and delegated proof of stake (DPoS) mechanisms.

Core’s primary goal is to solve the blockchain trilemma, which is the concept that decentralization, security, and scalability can’t all be represented in one blockchain.)Theoretically, every developer has to sacrifice one of the three features when creating a blockchain. For example, Bitcoin is both secure and decentralized, but it's not extremely scalable.

In an attempt to solve this problem, the Core network operates on the Satoshi Plus consensus. Their unique consensus mechanism allows Core to simultaneously use the mechanisms from multiple different blockchains at once. It achieves decentralization by using the Bitcoin computing power with its PoW model. At the same time, a DPoS system provides scalability, and the consensus mechanism of the whole network helps the blockchain maintain optimal security.

Core blockchain system comes with various components that will be highly useful; which are Satoshi Plus consensus (which i mentioned above) and EVM-compatibility (here, Core network ensures that its users can carry out exchanges with the main EVM. People can use the Core blockchain for its affordability, speed and flexibility, and then they can run the same functionalities on the EVM to make their DApps more accessible to the public.)

Other notable components of CORE are: DAO governance, Staking, Integration with 0x, and Censorship resistant (meaning it's almost impossible for a few people to take control of the platform.)

So why CORE?

If you research Solana, you will note that it tried to provide the same outcomes as Core, but it approached the situation from a different angle. To enhance scalability while maintaining some decentralization, Solana used proof of history (PoH) and sharding to manage their blockchain. Solana is one of the most scalable chains, but it has a fair amount of security setbacks. There have been several notable chain restarts and block production halts, so some are wary of using this system. In addition to being more secure than Solana, Core is also more affordable.

In conclusion, Core’s unique Satoshi Plus consensus mechanism combines PoW and DPoS mechanisms into a single, stable blockchain. This has the potential to provide an unprecedented blend of security, decentralization, and scalability.

Core has a market cap of $168 million and a total supply of 2.1 billion tokens, while Solana has a market cap of $9 billion and a supply of 541 million tokens.

CORE has a large supply, but i am rooting for it to have $10 billion in the next few years

Fantom is a top cryptocurrency that has been gaining a lot of attention in the blockchain world. However, there has been some discussion recently as to whether Fantom is "dead" or not. In this article, we will take a closer look at the current state of Fantom and whether or not it is still worth investing in.

Fantom is a high-performance, scalable, and secure smart contract platform. It is designed to overcome the limitations of existing blockchain platforms by providing faster transaction speeds, lower fees, and greater scalability. Fantom uses a consensus algorithm known as Lachesis, which is designed to allow for near-instant finality of transactions.

One of the key advantages of Fantom is its low transaction fees. This is a critical factor in the success of any cryptocurrency, as high transaction fees can discourage users from using the platform. Fantom's low fees make it an attractive option for users who want to transact quickly and cost-effectively.

Another advantage of Fantom is its scalability. The platform is designed to handle a large number of transactions, making it ideal for use in applications that require high throughput. This makes Fantom a good choice for applications that require real-time data processing, such as supply chain management, logistics, and finance.

Despite these advantages, there have been some concerns about the viability of Fantom. One of the main issues is the lack of adoption. While Fantom has seen some use in niche applications, it has not yet gained widespread adoption in the broader cryptocurrency community. This can be attributed in part to the fact that Fantom is a relatively new platform, and it takes time for new technologies to gain traction.

Another concern is the competition. There are many other smart contract platforms that are vying for market share, including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Solana. These platforms are well-established and have a large user base, which makes it challenging for Fantom to compete. However, it is worth noting that Fantom's unique features and low fees may give it an edge over its competitors in certain use cases.

So, is Fantom dead? The answer is no. While it may not have gained widespread adoption yet, the platform is still relatively new, and there is plenty of room for growth. Fantom has a strong team behind it, and it is actively developing new features and partnerships to expand its reach. In fact, Fantom has recently announced partnerships with Chainlink, NFT platform Artion, and decentralized prediction market platform Augur.

In conclusion, while there are some concerns about the viability of Fantom, it is far from dead. The platform has unique features that make it attractive for certain use cases, and it has a strong team behind it. As with any cryptocurrency, investing in Fantom carries some risk, but for those who believe in the project's potential, it may be worth considering as a long-term investment.

Cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security and operates independently of a central bank. It is a decentralized form of currency that can be used for transactions, just like traditional fiat currencies such as the US dollar, euro, or yen.

One of the most well-known cryptocurrencies is Bitcoin, which was created in 2009. Since then, thousands of other cryptocurrencies have been created, each with its own unique features and use cases.

One of the key benefits of cryptocurrency is its decentralization. Transactions are recorded on a public ledger called a blockchain, which is maintained by a network of computers around the world. This eliminates the need for a central authority, such as a bank, to verify and process transactions.

Cryptocurrency transactions are also secure, thanks to the use of encryption techniques. The combination of cryptography and decentralization makes it nearly impossible for anyone to tamper with the ledger or steal funds from a cryptocurrency account.

Another advantage of cryptocurrency is its accessibility. With the rise of digital wallets, it has never been easier to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency. Transactions can be made quickly and cheaply, without the need for intermediaries like banks or payment processors.

While cryptocurrency is still in its early stages and its value can be volatile, many experts believe that it has the potential to revolutionize the financial industry. Cryptocurrency has the ability to provide financial services to the unbanked and underbanked populations, giving them access to the global economy.

However, despite its many benefits, cryptocurrency also has its fair share of challenges. One of the biggest concerns is the lack of regulation, which can lead to illegal activities such as money laundering and tax evasion. Additionally, the decentralized nature of cryptocurrency means that there is no central authority to provide customer support or resolve disputes.

Despite these challenges, the future of cryptocurrency looks bright. As technology advances and more people adopt cryptocurrency, it has the potential to become a mainstream form of payment and store of value.

In conclusion, cryptocurrency is a game-changing innovation that has the potential to revolutionize the financial industry. While it faces challenges, the benefits of cryptocurrency are too great to ignore. Whether you are a seasoned investor or a newcomer to the world of finance, it is worth considering cryptocurrencies as part of your portfolio.