8 potential DeFi protocols worth paying attention to

Original author: ROUTE 2 FI

Original translation: TechFlow

Hello everyone!

If you’re looking for airdrops, yield, or points programs, here are some DeFi protocols that may have potential. Let’s take a look.

Here are some DeFi protocols with untapped potential, including opportunities for yield, airdrops, and more, that you can explore today. They cover potential projects across different networks, whether EVM, non-EVM, or Cosmos, covering a wide range of DeFi areas such as derivatives, yield, decentralized exchanges (Dex), etc. These projects are highlighted for their significant support and yield opportunities, but this article does not constitute financial advice, please be sure to do your own research before interacting.

lets start:

1. dAppOS

dAppOS is an intent execution platform that makes blockchain and dApps intent-centric by creating a two-sided marketplace. What makes dAppOS unique is that it makes interacting with dApps seamless, user-friendly, and time-saving. Imagine that you need to trade GMX with 100 USDC on Arbitrum, but your funds are spread across different chains: 50 USDC on Arbitrum, 30 USDC on BNB chain, and 20 USDC on Ethereum. You need to bridge these funds, spending time and gas fees to transfer funds to Arbitrum for trading. At this time, dAppOS comes on the scene. With just one click, all funds will be available on Arbitrum in a few minutes. You don’t need to worry about allocation or the specific token used as gas fees. All of this is done through its interface, potentially protecting users from smart contract risks. dAppOS also has a series of well-known investors such as Polychain, Binance Lab, and Hashkey Capital, with a financing round of $15.3 million and a valuation of $300 million. dAppOS V2 has been integrated in perpetual contract exchanges (perp Dex) such as GMX and KiloEX, and you can check out more dApps in their ecosystem.

It is rumored that dAppOS V3 will be launched in conjunction with a token generation event (TGE), but there is not much discussion about dAppOS at the moment, and even the last post I found about it dates back to last year and had less than 100,000 views.

I have interacted with a few dApps in the ecosystem, but a tip is to pay attention to the newly launched dApps in the ecosystem as they launch prize campaigns for almost every new integration. A good example is the 50k Arbitrum trading contest that ended recently after integrating with Aark .

2. Symbiotic

After the success of Eigenlayer, the leader in the restaking space with over $18 billion in total locked value (TVL), competitors like Karak have quickly risen to the top, reaching over $1 billion in TVL in a short period of time. A newcomer to the space, Symbiotic, has taken a different approach and technology to try to stand out in the space. Symbiotic is permissionless and modular, which allows any protocol to launch native staking for its tokens to increase network security. Symbiotic’s core contracts are non-upgradeable (similar to Uniswap), which reduces governance power and allows the protocol to continue to operate even if the team leaves. More importantly, it supports multi-assets from any chain, making it more diversified than Eigenlayer, which only supports ETH and its derivatives. Symbiotic has completed a $5.8 million funding round co-led by Paradigm and Cyberfund (a company founded by Lido founder Konstantin Lomashuk), so the rumors of Paradigm and Lido funding Eigenlayer competitors are true!

According to an interview with Symbiotic CEO Misha Putiatin by Blockwork , he stated that “mainnet will be live with some networks around late summer”: We can speculate that it will be launched in conjunction with the Token Generation Event (TGE), which means that Symbiotic Token will be live before $Eigen is tradable, potentially stealing the re-staking narrative from the existing Eigenlayer. What’s even more interesting is that Symbiotic was running a points program, but the deposit cap was reached and the solution was to introduce another project, Mellow – a liquidity re-staking protocol (LRT) built on top of Symbiotic, similar to Renzo and Etherfi for Eigenlayer. You can earn points on Mellow and Symbiotic at the same time. Pendleintern has a great post on how to maximize your earnings by depositing on Pendle:

The second method is to deposit $mETH into Symbiotic when the cap is lifted, which gives 5x rewards every day during the Methamorphosis event for the upcoming Mantle liquidity re-staking token ($cMETH) governance token $Cook, while earning Symbiotic points.

3. Elixir

One of the reasons why decentralized orderbook exchanges lag behind centralized exchanges (CEX) is liquidity. Even the largest derivatives exchange by volume, Hyperliquid, is ranked 29th with an open interest (OI) of $440 million, compared to Binance’s OI of $15 billion at the time of writing.

A common unhealthy practice for projects to attract liquidity is an airdrop program, which only attracts short-term funds. The airdroppers transfer their capital to another protocol after making a profit, or rely on a group of KOLs to promote their exchanges, etc. At this time, Elixir appeared-Elixir is essentially a modular DPos network designed to provide liquidity support for order book exchanges. The network serves as a key infrastructure that enables exchanges and protocols to easily initiate liquidity for their order books. Elixir benefits both liquidity providers (LPs) and traders. LPs earn rewards through order book exchange incentive programs, while traders benefit from the tighter bid-ask spreads that exchanges can provide. This is not another Uniswap fork. As of the last report in May, they provided 40% of the total liquidity for DeFi order book exchanges and established partnerships with industry leaders such as Hyperliquid and Dydx.

They have also raised a total of $17.6 million from Hack VC, Arthur Hayes (who also funded another well-executed airdrop this year, and PMF – Ethena) at a valuation of $800 million.

The mainnet is expected to go live in August, and for this, they are running an event called Apothecary . Users earn potions by providing liquidity in a wide range of available pools. There are three strategies that can be used to earn rewards, the first is to lock ETH on the mainnet until the network goes live in August, which will give a 50% bonus, the second is to deposit through the Ordered Quantum Program to earn contracts powered by Elixir, and finally to stay active on discord .

4.Mitosis

As the number of chains and protocols proliferates, ordinary liquidity providers (LPs) face significant bottlenecks. You need to constantly follow the news to find the best returns, you suffer losses when transferring assets from one chain to another, and most LPs are stuck in a fuzzy points system that prevents you from accurately calculating rewards. Mitosis solves this problem by introducing a novel liquidity model – Ecosystem Owned Liquidity (EOL). EOL enables LPs and protocols to adapt to a multi-chain environment and obtain multi-chain returns without manually allocating funds, while providing a clear reward system that enables LPs to choose the best available options. Mitosis has completed a $7 million funding round led by Amber Group and Foresight Venture.

Their ongoing activity – Expedition supports Etherfi Liquidity Restaking Protocol (LRT) weETH, after depositing you can get the staking annual yield (APR) + restaking APR + Eigenlayer points + Etherfi points + Mitosis points. In addition, deposits on token-free second-layer networks (L2) such as Scroll, Linea, and Blast (Season 2) are also prepared for future airdrops.

The event has attracted more than 45,000 stakers, most of whom are small stakers with deposits ranging from 0-1 weETH. Depositing more than 1 weETH will put you in the top 3,000.

5. Infinex

Some of the issues that have hindered the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies are poor user experience (UX) and the learning curve that newcomers face. They need to learn about wallets, bridges, security, and more. Infinex accelerates mainstream adoption by unifying decentralized ecosystems and applications under a centralized exchange (CEX)-like UX, built for a Web2 audience while remaining fully decentralized. Imagine a scenario where newcomers don’t need to understand crypto terms like transactions, gas fees, etc., and can trade on-chain just like on a CEX, but 100% decentralized, that’s what Infinex is building. Infinex is built by the team behind Ethereum OG project Synthetic, a consistently top 10 derivatives protocol. While no funding has been announced, according to an interview with Kain, the founder of Synthetic, by Blockwork, he has invested $25 million to build Infinex, which shows his commitment and confidence in the project.

They have an ongoing program called Craterun where users can earn “boxes,” but instead of your typical deposit and earn points campaign, there’s a unique twist. Kain explained the reasoning for this approach:

Craterun is the culminating 5-week event (ending July 30th) that has raised over $100M in the first 10 days of the inaugural event. 5M crates are up for grabs, each with a 50/50 chance of winning 1000 Patron NFTs, 5000 Patron Passes, and a $5M prize pool, plus more. So you’re not just earning crates, you’re competing for actual rewards. You can deposit assets like USDe, stETH, wstETH, and ezETH and earn both rewards at the same time.

6. Hyperlane

Hyperlane is the first universal interoperability layer built for modular blockchain stacks. Unlike other interoperability protocols such as Wormhole and Layerzero, which only support EVM and non-EVM (such as Solana), Hyperlane supports EVM, non-EVM, and Cosmos blockchains (such as Tia, Inj, etc.). More importantly, Hyperlane allows anyone to deploy permissionlessly in any blockchain environment, allowing these chains to communicate seamlessly on other chains deployed by Hyperlane. Hyperlane has received support from well-known investors including Circle and Kraken Venture, and has raised more than $18 million, but its valuation has not yet been disclosed.

Interoperability and bridging protocols excel in the DeFi space because they have real product-market fit (PMF) and are profitable. A recent example is Wormhole, which has widespread distribution and remains a good choice for monetization even when Layerzero faces opposition. Inspired by these successes, I believe Hyperlane will develop along a similar trajectory. To maximize returns, you need to take the opposite strategy from most people: most people focus on EVM-to-EVM transactions and ignore Cosmos chains like Tia. As we saw with Wormhole, users who interact with non-EVM got a boost in the final distribution, and this situation may be repeated with Hyperlane. You can use their official bridge Nexus to transfer non-EVM assets between chains (like Tia), or use bridges that integrate with their partner projects (like Renzo , nautilus , forma ) and complete the ongoing Layer 3 tasks.

7. Shogun

Berachain is one of the most talked about projects for 2024 and is considered to be a memecoin-centric project like Solana. Currently Berachain is in the testnet stage, I believe the mainnet will experience a surge in token deployments due to this general perception. A very critical tool in decentralized exchanges are Telegram bots, as they make it a breeze to quickly swap and initiate operations, which are relatively slow and inefficient compared to the average decentralized exchange (Dex) user experience (UX). Shogun is building an intent-centric platform capable of broadcasting orders to any blockchain for processing, starting with Berachain. This platform is an aggregation layer between chains, eliminating the need for multiple exchange user interfaces through its intuitive Telegram bot. Shogun received an undisclosed funding round from Binance, as well as a $6.9 million round led by top investor Polychain.

They are waiting for the Berachain mainnet to launch and start operations, and currently in addition to participating in possible future roles on their Discord, you can also join their Telegram beta .

8. Infinity Pool

According to a report by Binance Lab last year, traders lost up to $892 million on oracle-related exchanges due to vulnerabilities that were susceptible to manipulation. Attackers profited by driving up the price of low-liquidity tokens on the targeted dApps and then exchanging their inflated tokens for other tokens.

Imagine a decentralized exchange that offers unlimited leverage on any asset, with no liquidation, no counterparty risk, and no reliance on oracles. This is the breakthrough that Infinity Pools is building. It is built on Uniswap V3 with centralized liquidity, and by leveraging the positions of liquidity providers (LPs) as a source of credit, repayment of assets can be made with any LP asset. They are backed by well-known investors such as Dragonfly, Coinbase Venture, and Wintermute. Infinity Pools is also the winner of the Blast Bang Bang competition. Although the mainnet is not yet live, you can turn on notifications on Twitter and Discord to get future updates.

That’s all for today, I hope you liked this article.

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