Currently, the GR13 is kicking off, lasting half a month(from March 9th to March 24th ).

What is Gitcoin and Gitcoin Grants Round

Founded in November 2017, Gitcoin is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) platform that incentivizes developers to work on open-source projects.In the beginning, it was just a bounty platform, mainly to help project owners post bounty programs.

In February 2019, Gitcoin officially launched it’s initial Grant Round, with a result of 56 participants, 44k$ total donation.

With the development of Gticoin, the team has released many products like Hackathons, Grants, Kernel, and Kudos, etc, literally boosting the progress of open-source projects.So far, Gitcoin has provided almost $40 million of funding for open-source software and helped over 43,000 funders reach an audience of over 230,000 earners. Over 310,000 developers are active per month on Gitcoin. 

Gitcoin’ve run 12 quarterly grants rounds so far, which have collectively raised over $36 million for public goods, funding many projects like Uniswap, Dark Forest, Coin Center, POAO, Bankless, etc. During the GR12 in December 2021, the number shows that 3 million dollars were raised by 272k funders, which makes it the biggest round of funding on Gitcoin ever.

Basic Information of GR13

The overall structure for Grants Round 13 is similar to Grants Round 12, where we’ll again have three types of rounds:

1. Main round of $1.2M, primarily funding projects in the Ethereum ecosystem

2. 9 Ecosystem rounds(ZK Tech, Open Gaming, Polygon, ENS, Algorand, OlympusDAO, NFTs, Uniswap&Radicle)

3. 3 Cause rounds (Climate Solutions, Support for Ukraine, Longevity)

How To Donate

Step1 Enter the “Grants” and sign in

Enter the Gitcoin website, click the “Grants” from the “Products” section, enter the “Grants”, which is the home page of the GR13.

Click the “Log In” in the upper right corner, log in with your Github account, and authorize. If you are new to Github, please create an account.

Step2 Connect Your Wallet

Click “connect wallet” on the Grants Home Page, pick the right one. This passage take MetaMask as the example,.

Step3 Choose The Project You’d Like To Donate And Add To Cart

Look through and choose your interested project from the project list on https://gitcoin.co/grants/explorer/, or just search the name of project, add your interested one to cart.

Click the project to view specific information, including the home page address, twitter, contract address, introduction, team information, etc.

Step4 Checkout

Add the project you’d like to donate to cart, click “checkout”

Currently there are three Checkout options available：

Standard Checkout

Standard checkout is the easiest to use and initiates a direct transfer on Ethereum from your web browser wallet to the grant. However, the gas cost (transaction fees) for standard checkout may be higher.

zkSync Checkout

For larger cart sizes (up to 50 for zkSync), this rollup checkout method provides a much lower gas cost, but requires several extra steps in order to add funds to a zkSync account.

Polygon/Matic Checkout

For cart sizes 50+, Polygon checkout would be your best option, since Polygon doesn't limit cart sizes. Similar to zkSync, it requires several extra steps to bridge funds to Polygon, but again, offers much lower gas costs as compared to standard checkout.

Conclusion

As the Arsenal of Ethereum, for project team, Gitcoin is an incubator to promote projects, get investment, and attract technical talents. For developers, it is a stage to locate appropriate projects and exploit development capabilities. For investors, they can dig out some promising projects with great potential, funding it and getting involved in the incubation of it as early as possible, since many of the project will distribute certain amount of airdrops to Gitcoin donators in the future. Thus, Gitcoin is worth the attention from the crypto market.

Twitter: ma1long

Among the 30 winning projects, five of them are Infrastructure&Scalability projects, including Deus Ex Securitas, which uses machine learning to automatically audit smart contracts., Death Star, Hack and Scam Prevention with a MEV Frontrunne, Blocksnap, an On-chain Data Snapshots Made Easy, and etc. Six of them are DeFi projects, including SlowSwap, an MEV-resistant of Uniswap V2, and DustSweeper, which converts small tokens into ETH. Two of the DeFi projects are for NFT assets, which are Bunker.finance, a lending protocol backed by NFT collateral, and Mimicry Protocol, a derivatives protocol for NFT. There are also 5 Gaming&Metaverse projects and 4 DAO&Community projects.

In terms of networks building, nearly 20 projects will be built on multiple chains, the vast majority of which will be built on ETH or Polygon, with a few projects on Polka, BSC, Harmony, Algorand, Gnosis Chain, Metis, Arbitrum

Infrastructure&Scalability

Deus Ex Securitas：Using machine learning to automatically audit smart contracts

NLP models can classify solidity scripts by their vulnerability and could even point out what lines contribute to the vulnerable nature of the code.

Death Star

Death Star takes advantage of MEV to detect malicious transactions and fail them by outbidding them with an emergency transfer.

Users whitelist addresses in their approved "address book." When a token transaction to a non-whitelisted address occurs,the MEV frontrunner immediately sends a transaction that transfers all of a users' assets to a fallback address, with 2 times the gas of the detected transaction. This makes sure that the miner chooses your transaction before the malicious one.

Cannon：A Hardhat plug-in for declaring on-chain dependencies and enabling multi-chain development

Cannon is a Hardhat plug-in that allows you to configure your protocol's scripts, keepers, and on-chain dependencies for automated provisioning and deployment. Inspired by Docker and Terraform, Cannon comes with a built-in decentralized package manager (backed on Ethereum and IPFS) so users can easily share and download automations for existing protocols. With Cannon, validating frontends, constructing prototypes, and developing integrated protocols is easier than ever.

Blocksnap：On-chain Data Snapshots Tool

Blocksnap is a simple, powerful tool that makes it easy to capture snapshots of on-chain data, and utilize that data in your web3 application.

Blocksnap currently supports ETH Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism (but this approach works with any EVM compatible chain).

IdentDeFi：A decentralized & open standard for on-chain compliance that utilizes ZK proofs to retain user anonymity

IdentDeFi is a decentralized and open standard that allows DeFi primitives to recognize compliant users.

Users undergo KYC once, and upon verification are minted a non-transferrable NFT. Protocols can then check if a user carries a KYC NFT, allowing them to trade any permissioned or permissionless market.

Defi

SlowSwap：prevents MEV front-running and sandwiching issues

SlowSwap is an AMM with a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) that prevents MEV front-running and sandwiching issues. This project was implemented during the EthDenver 2022 Hackathon.

DustSweeper：Clean small token balances from your wallet and swap for ETH

DustSweeper allows users to swap small balance tokens for ETH without expensive gas transactions. Users just have to approve the tokens they’d like to sell, and “market taker” bots execute the swap.

DustSweeper is looking for crowdfund on Mirror currently, they’ve received 115 ETH，which is way beyond the original target: 50 ETH.Crowdfund contributors will receive 34% ownership of the DAO at launch (with 33% to the DUST treasury and 33% to liquidity incentives).

Bunker.finance：NFT-backed lending protocol offering instant liquidity via pooling

Bunker.finance is a decentralized protocol for NFT-backed loans. We use Compound’s pooling mechanism to facilitate instant borrowing and lending, removing the need for borrowers and lenders to wait to be matched with a counterparty. As a result, we are able to offer a superior UX to both borrowers and lenders.

Bunker.finance plan on integrating with Rarible's NFT indexer service to display NFTs in the modal which displays the user's NFTs available to deposit, once Rarible finishes adding support for CryptoPunks, which are the first kind of collateral we will support.

Mimicry Protocol：Defi derivatives protocol for NFT collections

Mimicry Protocol went far down that road of forking Synthetix but ultimately decided to leverage our own custom contracts and Scaffold-Eth instead. As a result our demo didn't fully implement the global debt pool, yield farming, and oracles that we had planned.

Nonetheless, they completed the following features:

• Connecting to Polygon via Metamask

• Deposit ERC-20 collateral and mint an ERC-721 to mark the position

• Collection appraisal middleware

• POC visualization of collateralized position data

• Burn ERC-721 to release collateral

ExchangeIt: Decentralized mobile marketplace

ExhangeIt is a decentralized mobile marketplace for individuals to create listings and submit offers for local goods around their location. Transactions are enforced by smart contract escrowing and completed using a GPS backed Chainlink EA. Disputes and bad actors are regulated by a DAO governance.

The main mechanisms for incentivizing people to meet and fully commit to their exchange obligations are based on two key functionalities:

1 Escrow for over collateralizing by enforcing a fixed deposit on both sides and a reward system;

2 Two-man rule for unlocking the escrow to retrieve deposit We've deployed a fully functional version of our mobile app on the Mumbai Testnet.

Skew You：Defi Vault to automate skew farming with risk mitigation for perpetual pools

Users can deposit funds into a vault that will automatically allocate their funds to highest earning skew arbitrage positions. We will use long and short positions, with leverage for increased capital efficiency. V1 uses Tracer Perpetual Pool tokens on Balancer and perpetual futures on GMX.

NFT

Supercool：A no-code NFT creation tool and tokenized social engagement engine

People can come to the Supercool on-chain drawing app and draw pixel art. They can either create pixel art from scratch or they can start off with templates. After drawing, people can mint their creation and share it on Twitter. The supercool engagement engine extracts Twitter engagement data like Retweets, Likes, and Comments and rewards drawings with the Supercool Social Token (SST) proportional to their engagement on Twitter. The Supercool Leaderboard pulls and displays this engagement data creating a gamified and fun NFT creation experience for users and shows you the most popular drawings. With the Supercool engagement engine, any NFT project can gamify social media engagement and strengthen their community in a fun way.

Gaming&Metaverse

Arena-Verse：The metaverse for athletics

Arena-Verse Create a metaverse for athletics that restructures the economics empowering the players.

• Create arenas and facilities for athletes in metaverse

• Structure governance with web3 tools

• Create insurance and financial products for athletes

ZK-Battleship：CryptoZombies for All Things Zero Knowledge

A on-chain battleship game using circom + snarkjs. If we had enough time the entire game would be played over p2p connection and the entire game would be rolled up into one transaction. Once we have completely built this product, we want to entirely document how to reconstruct it from scratch to do the same thing for zero knowledge that cryptozombies did for nft's. Game is not yet playable if you are here before code freeze

MoonScape：Multiplayer Web3 ARPG built with Unreal Engine

MoonScape is a simple, Unreal-based Web3 based ARPG deployed in-broswer via a React web app, with realtime multiplayer and network replication.

This project augments Unreal Engine with web3 functionality such as wallet-based login and user management, as well as programmatic NFT minting and trading triggered via in-game events and actions.

Funbug：P2E engine

Funbugᵍᵐ is an abstract P2E engine, decentralized and ready for any developer of a small game to implement and turn the game over to the community.

Space&the New Frontier

ZKmaps：Protecting user's location with ZK proofs

ZKmaps enables users to prove their location within a bounding area, GEOfencing, without disclosing thier excat location using ZK snarks.

In this case validating - (with a contract generated with circom) that the user was in ETHDenver within a specific time range (using theGragh). More specifically, this Proof-Of-Location-Protocol can be used for validating for POAPS DAOS for programatic funds dispersion, proving privately a location within a state or a city. Car hailing, location proximity matching, gaming and minting NFTS based on location and many more creative uses and utilities.

zkProof of Buffiness（zkPoB）：NFT Proof Tool

zkPoB is a mobile compatible tool that lets anyone prove they own a Bufficorn (or any NFT) without revealing what Buffi they own or the address they are verifying themselves with.

Fracture | Constitute：Document Recovery via Trusted Social Consensus

The UNHCR estimates that 84 million people are forcibly displaced globally. In many cases, it is unsafe to travel with any identification document, to ensure their protection when they finally arrive in a destination State, they are often registered by States or NGOs.

We want to provide an option for the forcibly displaced to recover their identity or any data that they may want to have from their home country without having to carry it on their journey.

22222.World：VIP Membership Through NFT Ownership

22222.World is an exclusive club of members. Each member purchases an NFT on Opensea. That NFT can then be easily verified using our website connected to any valid web3 wallet that contains the NFT. It allows for easy, decentralized sale and verification of NFT based VIP memberships.

Through Tableland integration small organizations are easily able to track attendance in a decentralized manner.

Wallet

Kiyomi：Multi-chain mobile wallet

With the latter in mind, Kiyomi presents the concept of the “mini app” inside the wallet. It is the ability to download mini-apps that suit the needs of the user, or that fit the needs of a particular blockchain ecosystem. In this context, in Kiyomi, a user may unlock mini apps or mini experiences based on the tokens held — for example, unlocking a mini-game for a particular NFT collection. The user may also download tools, in the form of a mini app, that allow the user to be more engage in a blockchain ecosystem — such as a governance mini-app for a DOTSAMA parachain.

The democracy mini-app allows users to view on-chain proposals, create proposals, second proposals, and vote for referendums directly from their wallet through the use of the democracy pre-compile.

DAOS&Communities

AcademyONE：An education platform for incentivize creation

AcademyONE is An education platform allowing projects to outsource and incentivize creation of high quality learning materials. A platform for educators to make money fulfilling bounties. A place to learn and earn governance rights in the process.

DoOrDon't：An evaluation of DAO

DoOrDon't supports new DAO joiners to evaluate the transparency and decentralization of a DAO. With the help of our trust scores, they will only join DAOs that align with their values.

Intuition：Theoretic Decentralized Identity System

Intuition is a peer-to-peer system for decentralized identity that is economically, reputationally, and “time”-collateralized, facilitating the construction of asymptotically probabilistic, non-deterministic peer-to-peer identity models. This system not only allows for new types of claims to be made, but also bolsters existing decentralized identity efforts through new efficiencies and “skin-in-the-game”.

Background Network：Decentralized Help Center as a service protocol

Background Network creates a help center with us (it is a web page). It is a forum like UI– similar to Stack Overflow. It can be whitelabled or hosted on our domain. (We can use Discourse) Users can sign in with their wallets and create a profile listing their communities to ask questions and answer questions. They don’t need to sign in to read the content. We can pre-populate the page with Q+A from their Discord help channel Community members are incentivized via tokens to ask relevant questions and share relevant answers.

Others

LOUDVRS

LOUDVERSE is a 2-sided marketplace for funding hard-to-quantify public goods like music, poetry, and theater. This project proposes an extension to Quadratic Funding to account for two key real-world economic constraints that apply to public goods projects:

Constraint on available funding pool

• Per-proposal minimum viable funding constraint

• The Pool Constraint is the overall amount of matching subsidy funding available for the given funding round. The goal is to use the available funds to fund the greatest possible amount of viable public.

Proof of Meditation

Proof of Meditation is an App to incentivize people to take more care of their health and emotional wellbeing through meditation. It can be used as DAO Tool.

How it works: users can decide on the first day of each month whether or not to join a 21-day meditation by choosing to meditate for 10 minutes each day and then staking tokens to bet on their goals, with a portion of the user's staking tokens locked into the pool for that meditation for each missed session. 21 days later, each participant will receive staking tokens, the number of which is related to the number of days clocked in, and the tokens in the pool will be distributed among users who have clocked in for 21 days.

Kudos：Rewards and Incentives for Farmers and Food System Supporters

Kudos has a food system made up of a complex network of farmland, farmers, farmers markets, logistics and distribution providers, co-operatives, distribution mechanisms, and other aligned parties.

A Guild can be defined as any group or individual who is able to make positive contributions to the Colorado foods system. A yet to be established DAO (in the works!) will provide Guilds with the ability to distribute kudos. Goals can be set for a wide range of environmental or social goals. Once goals are met, Guilds can distribute tokens to their contributors.

Colorado Aware: Moving Colorado To A Net Zero World One Notification At A Time

Colorado needs to make the transition to renewables as soon as possible. The 2040 goal set by Governor Polis is just the start. There is work to do technologically, culturally, and with regulations. A transition to renewables is a lot of work. Colorado Aware is an application to enable all of that. It is deliberately built as a change management approach to the renewable energy transition. It follows a strategic development that gradually moves users into a blockchain environment for distributed energy resource (DER) management and optimization.

Colorado Aware, with a true MVP beginning, will help optimize the onboarding of renewables to the grid, to our households and empower future innovation in energy (like tokenized conservation incentives, or peer to peer energy trading). This is just the beginning for Coloradans' to become Aware of their impact and partake in the state's transition to renewable energy.

Twitter: ma1long

2. Danielesesta and AndreCronjeTech contributed to the massive Avax boom, now they are shifting focus to Fantom. As one of the emerging L1s, FTM is in the same position with NEAR, with huge untapped potential.

3. With Avalanche's speed, gas fee, EVM compatibility, Solana's parallel tx processing, Terra's stablecoin-focused DeFi engine (SPELL) + one core community and multi-chain focus, Fantom will be undefeatable.

4. Advantages:

• The most undervalued L1 on a market cap/TVL basis and the 6th highest TVL overall

• The fastest time to finality of any L1 (currently 1 second) in consensus, with 300k TPS expected in the future

• Lachesis：Unique DAG-based aBFT consensus - > parallel tx processing

• EVM-compatible Opera mainnet

• DeFi Powerhouse + Aggressive Multi-Chain Strategy

• Cosmos -SDK compatibility

• 1.1B Ecosystem Fund for Developers

• The number of DeFi DApps are more than twice as many as Solana and 9 times as many as Luna

• Native Fluid Staking Model + On-chain Governance

5. Metrics: Fantom's MAU has grown 294 times in the past year, and now is 350K. The number of unique addresses and development activities has just surpassed AVAX. Daily tx counts keep rising since mid-December and now reach 700k, the same with AVAX.

6. FTM is re-enabling ATH, but analysis by comps is still incredibly cheap. Market Cap: crazy 1.2 TVL ratio.

6. Time To Finality(TTF) in consensus is more important than TPS, and FTM can have the fastest TTF of all L1s. While TPS processes the average value, TXS is not actually linearly confirmed when processing blocks - it looks more like a stepwise function. TTF is a more accurate measure of speed.

7. The finality, near-instantaneous finality of FTM puts it ahead of other L1s, as most of L1 use probability Nakamoto consensus, which requires waiting for about 25 transactions to be fully confirmed for ETH.

8. FTM's decentralization, DAG (directed acyclic graph) aBFT (Asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance) based consensus mechanism are achieved by Lachesis. Rather than executing blocks linearly, Fantom nodes independently "gossip events" back and forth until an absolute majority consensus is finalized. Unlike ETH, Fantom's multi-threaded architecture eliminates single-node capacity bottlenecks and allows it to scale in accordance with Moore's Law (e.g. Solana).

10. "If ETH is a decentralized computer, then Fantom is a network of potentially infinite decentralized computers." Fantom claims. Hot topic: "Finality and fast endpoint protocols are limited in the number of velidators."

11. Biggest obstacle of FTM：Lachesis consensus cannot really scales more than 1000s of validators. After 2000-3000, network starts to slow down. Its highly unscalable consensus.

12. EVM-compatibility：facing the great Alt-EVM war where everything can and will be forked, the most defensive moat is community and multi-chain integration. Fantom positions itself as one of the L1s who’s most likely to come out on top.

13. The most aggressive multi-chain expansion strategy: Fantom knows the benefits of bridging + yield for Avax growth. With multi-chain DApps, integrated bridges to more than 30 L1s, and Fantom-centric applications, you can be sure they will come for your TVL.

14. FTM plans to be the new base for blue-chip multi-chain deployment strategies such as YFI, SPELL, CRV, SUSHI, ICE, etc. FTM is compatible with Cosmos SDK, which means Fantom DApps can interoperate with Cosmos application-specific chains such as Terra_Money and OsmosisZone.

15. DeFi Stablecoin Engine: The Stablecoin Wars will trigger an explosion of mining proceeds, lending and leveraged cross-chain finance on FTM powered by MIM_SPELL.

16. The positive feedback loop created by Andre and Daniel's blue-chip suite of DeFi products reminds me of the role of pushing Terra_money and UST to the climax of DeFi growth. Crypto is a contact sport, and Andre Cronje Tech knows how to box

17. Felix, Fantom's Binance-powered hybrid CEX/DEX, will be launched in the beginning of first quarter and will eventually bring retail into FTM's ecosystem and provide significant liquidity with US CEX listings, Artion v2 (NFT), and Fantom name services.

18. Team: Religion is a strong medicine--shorting frog countries is a death wish. As seen by SBF + Solana, financial + human capital follow social capital. Danielesesta and AndreCronjeTech have the infinite gloves: TIME, SUSHI, ICE, MIM, SPELL, YFI, KP3R, CRV.

19. Modular Architecture: FTM architecture allows for the creation of app specific chains beyond Opera, customized for particular use cases as demanded by the app, but all interoperable and secured by Lachesis.

20. Thrive of the Ecosystem

**DEX：**SpookySwap、Spirit_Swap、CurveFinance、SushiSwap、MatchaXYZ

**Bridges：**MultichainXYZ、SynapseProtocol、RenProtocol、Allbridge_io、CelerNetwork

**Loan：**MIM_Spell、TarotFinance、Screamdotsh、GeistFinance

**Yield Optimizer：**finance_beefy、iearnfinance、reaper_farm、tombfinance…

**OHM：**xPhantomDAO、Spartacus_Fi、HectorDAO_HEC

**Oracles：**BandProtocol、Chainlink、API3DAO

**Data：**FTMScanHQ、TheGraph、Covalent_HQ

**NFT：**AndreCronje、ZooCoin、PaintSwap

P2E:  8Bit_Metaverse、TankWarsZone

**Wallet：**fWallet、Metamask、Coinbase Wallet、Ledger

Etc...

1. User-friendly UI and UX design culture experience.

22. Tokenomics: 53% was initially allocated to insiders, which has been diluted over time but is still high.

23. FTM releases schedule: all tokens from the team/backers have been vested. With 80% of the total supply is already in circulation, there is virtually no inflation/sales pressure! Only released staking rewards from FTM.

24. Fantom has ambitious plans, but hasn't delivered yet. Fantom claims 4k TPS and less than $0.0001 gas fee. While in fact, FTM's TPS is about 13.3 (even if the blocks are almost empty) and gas fee is about $0.25, nearly the Optimism level (even for a simple SpookySwap transaction).

25. Despite having similar gas fee to Optimism and lower TPS, FTM is still thriving.

26. It’s not possible and will not dilute the risk of FTM if you only want Hopium：

• Substantial execution risk with a large roadmap.

• Andre's departure at this stage could break the bull market.

• FTM has misplaced enterprise blockchain, CBDC, and partnerships with Middle Eastern governments such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

• L1 Rotatorr Narrative Extinction.

• Did FTM steal Hedera's DAG-based model? Perhaps. They certainly built their gossip/hash map patent, which is now licensed under the MLA, but its legality is in a gray area considering it was originally open source. HBAR is now more focused on enterprise blockchains.

1. The truth is Fantom is currently the least decentralized L1 chain. There are only 51 active validators and 3 of them can collude to hijack the network (33 %+). Despite the fact that these top validators are not malicious, the network crashed in February and analysis after shows that they just fell behind in block emissions and the dominoes stopped everything. Of course, investors have shown that they simply don't care (e.g. the degree of neutrality of BNB's BSC). But enable to list on a US exchange and gain legitimacy in the crypto-native community, FTM must be decentralized.

28. Only 53% of FTMs are currently staked, and it would be easier to increase the Nakamoto Satoshi factor if the remaining FTM holders staked fairly, reducing node hardware requirements (rn 2.5TB vs SOL's 2TB).

29. Fantom FDN stops using AWS to run your nodes and stops directing the community to perform AWS last month, which caused samedYdX literally crashed. A decentralized network run by a centralized AWS node is not really decentralized.

30. Lower minimum node staked threshold--currently self-staked cost to run the validator is about $1.5 million. Improving read-only/light node model, the light nodes currently have the same hardware requirements as full nodes. This is against the original intention.

31. In the whitepaper, Fantom's original intention was to "manage historical information without the need of external databases such as Oracle databases". Fantom succumbed to this promise (using mongoDB) to deal with the bloated state of FTM's rapidly growing transaction history.

32. More situations also means increased hardware requirements for full node storage, which is a decentralization issue. Fantom should pursue pruning and work with ArweaveTeam (decentralized storage) like Solana.

33. Currently, if Fantom cuts the malicious validator nodes you delegate to, you will also be penalized for losing all pledged tokens. This dangerous incentive is delegated only to reputable top validators, thus increasing the concentration of top validators.

34. My intention is to encourage principals to DYOR the validators, but the vast majority of FTM holders just want hassle-free delegation/stake. SFTM is basically just a wrapper.

35. We can improve FTM's liquid staking model by i) allowing re-delegation to smaller nodes during lock-in, or ii) implementing a Lido-like liquid staking derivative that abstracts the need for validators due diligence from the user and automatically selects the reliable one.

36. Making the governance system more agile and aligned with the community. Fantom's 5/17 on-chain proposals in the past failed to achieve a quorum, including one to reduce node hardware requirements.

37. In the end, I believe Fantom has the biggest advantage and risk of any L1 in 6 month, cause luck always favors the brave.

Twitter: ma1long

Bored Ape Yacht Club, or BAYC for short, is a digital collector's item that has become a big hit this year. In May 1st,2021, the BAYC NFT is minted at 0.08 ETH for a quantity of 10,000, and each NFT has 4-7 different attributes (including: fur, clothes, background, hat, mouth, earrings, glasses), which are randomly combined by code, and each NFT has different shape and rarity. The NFTS was swept away in less than 2 hours on the sale day, with total revenue reaching 800 ETH. Currently they are only traded on secondary markets such as Opensea, with a floor price of 95 ETH and trading volume reaching 348K ETH as of January 2021.

BAYC currently has a market cap of $739B, placing in the third place after CryptoPunks ($1,596B) and Art Blocks ($817B).

Overview

Cryptokitties NFT was all the rage back in 2017, but it didn’t become widely known until 2021. Many people ascribe it’s popularity to Covid-19, that people are staying at home and tend to be interested in something new, especially such virtual products with social attributes and invest in them. 

Here, I’d like to talk about its social attributes. Recently, I have noticed that more and more friends  are using their purchased NFT avatars (or copying them) on social networks such as Twitter, including BAYC's Bored Ape avatar. With the efforts of BAYC community, more and more people are using BAYC as their avatars, including many famous people, such as NBA star Stephen Curry and famous icon Britney Spears.

Because of the limited number of NFTS and the BAYC community will also combat the theft of NFT avatars, many people buy them from the secondary market, especially celebrities, social influencer and other famous people who care about fame(of course, many of them think highly of its potential value). Such celebrity effect zooms way up the prices of NFT avatars. Now, collecting BAYC avatars is not only a kind of speculation, but also a social identity for players in the encrypted field, and sometimes even a means to show off their wealth.

Background Story

The apes became billionaires after ten years due to their involvement in the encrypted field. At that time, all the liquidity mining had dried up, no mine left to dig, and life became very boring, so they grouped together to set up a Bored ape yacht club, going to bar, partying, playing graffiti, being a couch potato. 

Roadmap

BAYC has designed a roadmap which is well worth being learned among many competing projects. There are already a number of communities in other project copying it, such as airdrop NFT, a strong community consensus, all of which is made possible by creators’ careful operation.

By activating tasks in the community roadmap to unlock areas and benefits, most of which have been completed by now. BAYC's NFT, like a vip card or ticket, allows only the holder to participate in BAYC activities or enjoy member-only benefits.

The creators have given all the commercial rights of BAYC to the community members, who can use their own NFT to create various derivatives such as T-shirts, cards, mugs, etc, and all the income goes to the individuals.

NFT Derivatives

Bathroom

The web page, which can only be accessed by BAYC NFT wallet holder, is a canvas on which each Bored Ape can draw one pixel every fifteen minutes. It is a work of art made by members of the community from different countries and cultures around the world.

MAYC

In August 2021, BAYC sold 10,000 Mutant Apes through a Dutch auction, raising 2.8 ETH. While BAYC also airdropped 10,000 Mutant Serm to Bored Ape owners to mutate their own Bored Apes into Mutant Apes. There are three types of sera, M1, M2 and Mega Mutantt (M3), of which M3 is the rarest, with a price once reaching 222 ETH. The appearance of MAYC actually opens a relatively low threshold for newcomers.

MAYC Current floor price: 21.99ETH, trading volume 218.5K.

KENNEL CLUB

Each BAYC member can adopt a Dog NFT for free by paying the GAS fee.

Current floor price: 9.45 ETH, trading volume: 57.1 KETH. 

Others

In June 2021, BAYC airdropped a wearable hoodie to owners' wallets for the quick identification of their kind in the Metaverse, and a virtual party showcase in Decentraland (MANA) as well. BAYC also purchased a piece of land in The SandBox to create a venue for club members only.

In addition to above derivatives, BAYC also has other projects, such as the Bore APE Kids Club, a children's version of Bore APE, where you can get Bore APE haircut in the beauty salon.

BAYC does not only have online activities, but offline activities as well.

Token Issuance

Tweets about the Token issuance in October 2021.

In October 2021, the BAYC team claimed that they have been frequently asked by community members about when to issue the token and expand the project to Defi areas .

The team stated that it is a simple matter to issue ERC-20 tokens, but it is much more complicated to run legal, responsible, and sustainable tokens. For the sake of BAYC's members and the NFT community, the team hopes to execute in a more robust manner and must spare no efforts to build the token's functionality, governance mechanisms, benefits holders and expand the BAYC ecosystem.

BAYC is currently coping with Horizen Labs, the owner of privacy token $zen, and Fenwick & West, the legal team, intending to launch the token in Q1 2022.

This news had led to a spike in BAYC's NFT price and trading volume.

In December 2021, the BAYC team announced a partnership with Animoca Brands to launch a new derivative game in Q2 of 2022.

The Teammates

BAYC team is a typical grassroots team, with no bigwigs, no genius scientists, no famous investment institutions, just 4 good friends playing encrypted investment in their lives. Maybe it’s because of the early timing, such grassroots team just took off against the draught.

GARGAMEL

GORDON GONER

EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP

NO SASS

Conclusion

Many people would ask why spend so much money buying a boring ape jpg? From my perspective, apart from the hype value, social and networking expansion cannot be ignored. BAYC will not only hold various interesting activities online, but also activities and parties in the real life. Offline activities were constantly held in New York, England, and Hongkong etc, the team would rent a yacht and invite all NFT holders to come on board, many celebrities would also be present. Viewing from now, the BAYC community, if continues to flourish, will be an important part of the metaverse.

Twitter: @ma1long

Today, I'll give a brief introduction about Cosmos so that you could learn some of the most important updates of this project. 

What is Cosmos?

If you've never heard of Cosmos before, here's what you need to know. Cosmos was founded by Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman in 2014.

Cosmos was built by the for-profit software company Tendermint Inc. In the U.S.

The development of Cosmos is coordinated by the nonprofit organization Interchain Foundation in Switzerland. Cosmos raised $17 million through three token sales in 2017.

The Cosmos mainnet went live in March 2019 and has had no security issues since its launch. This is because the Cosmos blockchain uses a new proof-of-Stake(POS) consensus mechanism called Tendermint which is very fast and very secure. But it comes at the cost of centralization, as the Tendermint chain is limited to about 130 validators, while Cosmos itself has only 150 validators. ATOM is the Cosmos blockchain's native token, used for staking governance and to pay transaction fees

The annual ATOM staking bonus for principals and validators ranges from 14% to 15%; there is no minimum limit, but a 21-day lock-in period. Validators must also stake enough ATOM to be in the top 150, and any misbehaving validators will see their stakes cut.

As for governance, a minimum of 512 ATOM tokens must be locked up in order to submit a proposal. At least 40% of staking ATOMs must participate in the vote, with at least 50% of participating ATOMs voting yes and less than 33.4% of participating ATOMs voting no.

Any ATOM in a proposal that fails to meet the minimum number of ATOMs within two weeks or is rejected during the voting period will be destroyed.

Cosmos stake and governance can be accessed using the Keplr Wallet, which acts as a Web wallet, browser extension wallet, and even has mobile apps for Android and IOS devices.

Besides Cosmos, Keplr Wallet supports over 16 cryptocurrencies. It’s blockchain are built by using Cosmos SDK, a development tool created by Tendermint Inc. which makes it easy to build fast and secure cryptocurrencies from scratch.

Over 50 cryptocurrencies have been built by using the Cosmos SDK, including Binance Coin (BNB), Terra (LUNA), crypto.com coin (CRO) and Thorchain (RUNE).

Since all these cryptocurrencies use the same consensus mechanism, they can interoperate seamlessly, which means you can transfer tokens in seconds for a few cents. Because Cosmos' Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol or IBC serves as an interoperability standard, it is compatible not only with Cosmos-based blockchains, but also with any proof-of-stake cryptocurrency with fast determinism, such as Solana and Polkadot.

Iterations of Cosmos

It's been a few months since I last covered Cosmos, and a lot has happened ever since. In mid-October, Cosmos announced a partnership with a blockchain gaming company called Forte, which showed the integration of Cosmos ATOM tokens into the Forte wallet and opened the door for any game that wants to run a Cosmos-based blockchain for NFT.

Cosmos also confirmed a new cryptocurrency called Sagan, which will serve as a live test network for the Cosmos’ upgradation, similar to Kusama's upgradation to Polkadot.

In late October, Terra integrated IBC, bringing its decentralized stablecoin UST to other blockchains via IBC integration.

A Malaysian bank also announced a partnership with an enterprise-oriented Cosmos project called Irisnet, which will leverage Cosmos technology as part of its business.

Another big announcement in October was the raising of $2,100 by Osmosis, the largest DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem, which is currently locked up for a total value of over $1.2 billion.

In early November, Forte announced a huge round of funding, 0.725 billion dollars, from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Animoca Brands and even Warner Music Group.

Cosmos also started the Vega upgrade, which was completed in December. Vega introduced new features to Cosmos, such as transaction fee delegation and some performance optimizations.

In mid-November, a Cosmos project called Persistence raised $10 million from different crypto VCs, including Three Arrows Capital, Galaxy Digital, Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures and Alameda Research, which is closely associated with the FTX exchange.

In mid-December, Cosmos announced the completion of the much-anticipated Gravity Bridge, which will enable seamless interoperability between Cosmos' blockchain and Ethereum. Note that the Gravity Bridge is not yet connected to any Cosmos chains. However, it looks like the first one will be Osmosis.

A Cosmos project called Sentinel also launched its latest decentralized VPN mobile app to earn cryptocurrency by sharing bandwidth or paying for decentralized VPN services with fiat currency or sentinels native DVPN coins.

At the end of December, Cosmos announced the winners of its Million Dollar Hackathon, three of which are worth mentioning.

The first is Evmos.me, which enables the use of Metamask and Keplr with Evmos, an upcoming Cosmos project that deploys smart contracts using an ethereum virtual machine.

The second is an exchange feature called Cosmos Omnibus, which enables validators on the Cosmos-based blockchain to deploy their nodes on the decentralized storage Cosmos Project Akash network.

The third is a decentralized application called Nymdrive, which is essentially a decentralized cloud storage platform built on NYM like Google Drive or Dropbox. About that, Coinlist recently announced the NYM token sale, which is a pretty good token given that Coinlist only offers token sales for high quality crypto projects.

Another Cosmos project called Umee actually raised $32 million from over 63,000 investors at the end of December, and Umee will apparently become a DeFi project similar to AAVE.

ATOM's Price Analysis

All of Cosmos' announcements, upgrades and developments have been good for ATOM. However, it has only risen about 50% since I last reported this project in September.

Besides the general weakness we have seen in the cryptocurrency market since last December, ATOM has failed to reach the $45 mark in three attempts in the last few months. This means that if the price approaches these levels again, it could encounter a lot of resistance.

It's not just the cryptocurrency market or technology that is keeping ATOM down. For newcomers, ATOM is highly inflationary. It has an annual inflation rate of between 7% and 20%, depending on the percentage of ATOM that is staked to the network.

This high inflation is intentional and intended to discourage speculation and incentivize active participation in staking, either through the use of ATOM pledges or participation in other Cosmos blockchains.

Cosmos' target stake percentage is 67%, but as you can see, only about 63% of ATOM is staked. According to ATOMScan explorer, the small deviation from the ideal stake percentage corresponds to an ATOM inflation rate of over 9% per year.

Curiously, the circulating supply of ATOMs has actually increased by about 25% since August, suggesting that more ATOMs are coming from elsewhere.

I suppose that these extra ATOMs are coming from Tendermint Inc. and Interchain Foundation, whose ATOM allocations were completed last spring. This means they can technically spend their ATOM, and  the million dollar hackathon totally indicated that they are ready to leave no stone unturned to expand the Cosmos ecosystem.

Assuming that the other 66 million or so ATOMs entering circulation are sold at an average price of $25, such $1.65 billion selling is under great pressure, although I think the bulk of this ATOM is staked rather than sold.

Demand for ATOM has been quite large since the launch of IBC last year, and as far as I can tell, most of the demand has come from the aforementioned Osmosis DEX. This is mainly because you can't access Osmosis without ATOM because the OSMO coin itself is not available on any centralized exchange, which means if you want to access the emerging Cosmos project, you have to buy ATOM and transfer it to Osmosis.

Interestingly, there are exchanges offering to list OSMO coins. But Osmosis founder Sunny Agarwal told them that if your users want to own OSMO tell them to go to Osmosis DEX.

In addition, some Cosmos projects with initial DEX offerings on Osmosis only accept ATOM as an investment, and some Cosmos projects also airdrop their tokens to ATOM stakeers or liquidity providers.

Upgradation plan Part 1

It's hard to tell ATOM's price potential. Cosmos itself is a large-cap cryptocurrency, which means it will be hard for ATOM to pull up more than 3 or 4 times before the end of the bull market.

As usual, it ultimately depends on the Cosmos’ upgradation. This was released last July and it includes seven upgrades. There are five upgrades left, each with a different milestone.

The first is the Theta upgrade, which is expected to process by the end of this quarter. the Theta upgrade will allow for modified liquidity through governance, i.e. token pairs in Cosmos' Gravity DEX, which will be able to execute transactions in other blockchains connected to the IBC.

For example, you can sign transactions in the Osmosis wallet from the Cosmos wallet, thus eliminating the need to switch chains in wallets such as Keplr to sign transactions.

More importantly, the Theta upgradation will enable you to allow other users or applications to sign transactions in any of your wallets on other chains, opening the door to interoperable and decentralized applications.

The second upcoming upgrade for Cosmos is called Row and is expected to be completed by the end of the second quarter of this year, which is of course the end of June. The upgrade will enable Cosmos' governance module to interact with dApps and IBC-enabled blockchains. It introduces NFT to the Cosmos blockchain, as well as mobile stakes. Without much blockchain technology, mobile stakes will enable the use of staked ATOMs in decentralized applications.

Row will also introduce the option to redirect some ATOM inflation to the community vault, another IBC-enabled blockchain or even directly to the decentralized application to provide liquidity. This sounds very similar to Tezos' own liquidity banking business.

Upgradation plan Part 2

The upcoming third upgrade to Cosmos is called Lambda and is expected to be completed by the end of third quarter, which is the end of September. lambda will be huge project because it contains three important things.

The first important thing in Lambda is called exchange security, which will allow Cosmos verifiers to protect other Cosmos-based blockchains. This is important because one of the biggest barriers to entry into new Cosmos projects is not having enough money to protect their blockchain. This is because the security of a proof-of-stake blockchain essentially comes from the total value of the coins being stacked. This is why even large Cosmos projects like Osmosis plan to use its exchange security when Cosmos emerges. The total value locked up on Osmosis DEX is actually greater than the value stacked to obtain those funds.

The second important thing in Lambda is that it allows Gravity Bridge and Gravity DEX to stay on their own blockchain. This is important because it will take the pressure off the Cosmos blockchain and minimize the risk of congestion.

The third important thing in Lambda is the introduction of a chain name service, which I think is a decentralized digital identity. This is important because it creates a stronger governance structure in the Cosmos ecosystem and opens the door for things like decentralized credit scoring, allowing you to borrow more from the DeFi protocol.

The fourth and fifth upgrades to Cosmos, called Epsilon and Gamma, are expected to process at the end of this year and in the first quarter of 2023, respectively. The goals that need to be accomplished in these upgrades are not very detailed at this point, and I think they will change as we get closer, so keep an eye out for that.

Other Cosmos considerations are recorded at the bottom of the upgradation plan, which are privacy, smart contracts, and rollups. Unfortunately, no dates or more details are provided for these milestones

Other Cosmos considerations beyond the upgradation plan include the release of Sagan, the live test network I mentioned earlier, the Alpha version of emeris, which is the front edge of Gravity DEX, and the Emeris Web wallet, this will be the “cross-chain block portfolio”.

Simply put, the Emeris web wallet will be able to interact with multiple cryptocurrency blockchains at the same time, not just the Cosmos-based blockchain.

Speaking of which, Peng Zhang, the CEO of Tendermint Inc. also expects ETH to enable IBC once it transfers to PoS, which is currently not possible due to the slow finality of proof-of-work transactions.

Problems with COSMOS

My concerns about Cosmos, let me start by saying that Cosmos is one of my favorite cryptocurrency projects and I hold ATOM as part of my cryptocurrency portfolio.

Even so, there are certain parts of the project that need some major improvements, starting with development.

Many of the goals on the Cosmos upgradation plan I mentioned earlier should have been completed in the last year. While I'm inclined to say it may be caused by the shortage of developers, a recent report on cryptocurrency developers found that the Cosmos ecosystem has over 1,000 developers, making it actually the third largest project in terms of developers after Ether and Polkadot. The only problem is that this number seems to apply to the entire Cosmos ecosystem, not just the Cosmos blockchain itself.

In other words, many Cosmos developers may be working on other crypto projects, such as Osmosis, which is generating a lot of attention and liquidity in the Cosmos ecosystem.

This is related to my second concern, which is a competition coming exclusively from Cosmos' own ecosystem. As Osmosis founder Sunny Agarwal admitted in an interview, the Cosmos ecosystem would probably continue to exist without the Cosmos blockchain, due to the fact that none of the other Cosmos blockchains need Cosmos to run and ATOM doesn't need to pay transaction fees for those blockchains.

This is my biggest concern with Cosmos, the value capture of ATOM. Basic economics dictates that for prices to rise, demand must exceed any new supply, and ATOM seems to have a hard time maintaining that dynamic. Currently, the primary use of ATOM is as the key needed to open the door to the kingdom of Cosmos. But this role could easily be filled by another Cosmos token backed by an exchange. This means that Cosmos developers need to create more demand drivers for ATOM.

Alternatively, the Cosmos community could adjust the token economics of ATOM to minimize the source of new supply, which is a hot topic on the Cosmos Governance Forum. For what is worth, I believe Cosmos will find a way to add value to ATOM both inside and outside of its ecosystem, although from my perspective it seems to be focused on Vega updates. I really believe that 2022 will be an important year for Cosmos as long as we don't enter another crypto winter. Way to go!

Twitter: @ma1long