Polygon Ecosystem Altcoins To Be Aware Of
Let's take a quick look at some projects and altcoins within the Polygon ecosystem that have noteworthy blockchain utilities.
HarrEGC
Video credit: Chris from Cheeky Crypto
Chris covers altcoins that he believes could perform very well in the next bull cycle.
Table of contents:
- Beefy Finance Multichain Yield Optimizer
- WOO Utility Token
- Band Protocol
- The Graph
- Render Network
- Chainlink Oracles
- Decentraland Metaverse
- Gala Games
Beefy Finance Multichain Yield Optimizer
Beefy Finance Homepage | Beefy Finance Documentation
Beefy is a Decentralized, Multichain Yield Optimizer that allows its users to earn compound interest on their crypto holdings.
Beefy earns you the highest APYs with safety and efficiency in mind. Through a set of investment strategies secured and enforced by smart contracts, Beefy automatically maximizes the user rewards from various liquidity pools (LPs), automated market-making (AMM) projects, and other yield farming opportunities in the DeFi ecosystem.
The main product offered by Beefy Finance are the Vaults in which you stake your crypto tokens. The investment strategy tied to the Vault will automatically increase your deposited token amount by compounding arbitrary yield farm reward tokens back into your initially deposited asset.
Despite the name Vault suggests, your funds are never locked in any Vault on Beefy: you can always withdraw at any moment in time. DeFi applications are unique in the sense that they are permissionless and trustless, meaning that anyone with a supported wallet can interact with them without the need for a trusted middleman. While you have funds staked in a vault, you remain 100% in control of your crypto. For all the vaults deployed on every blockchain, Beefy has its multiutility token BIFI at its core.
Platform revenue is generated from a small percentage of all the vault profits and distributed back to those who stake BIFI. The revenue sharing mechanics entail you can stake BIFI to either earn more BIFI in a BIFI Maxi Vault, or earn blue chips like ETH, BNB, FTM, MATIC, AVAX, and more in the BIFI Earnings Pools.
WOO Utility Token
WOO Token Homepage | Learn more about WOO WOO Token is a utility token deeply embedded within WOO Network's CeFi and DeFi products and services with various staking, discount, yield, and governance utilities.
Currently, 50% of revenue generated across WOO Network’s services contribute to the monthly buyback and burn through the purchasing of WOO tokens off the secondary market to remove them permanently from the circulating supply. Furthermore, this buyback is then matched with a monthly burn from the Ecosystem Reward pool for the WOO token, which lowers the maximum supply and decreases its Fully Diluted Value (FDV).
Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle aggregating and connecting real-world data and APIs to smart contracts.
The protocol is built on top of BandChain, a Cosmos-SDK-based blockchain designed to be compatible with most smart contract and blockchain development frameworks.
The network is designed to modularize and offload heavy and resource-intensive tasks (i.e., fetching data from external sources and aggregating them) from the smart contract platforms onto itself. This not only prevents such tasks from congesting or causing high transaction fees on the destination network, but the same data points can be packaged, used, and verified efficiently across multiple blockchains.
Its flexible design allows developers to query any range of data types, including both on-chain data (token balances, transaction data, etc.), real-world events (sports scores, flight status, weather, etc.), and any data that is available through the web or any other mediums (stocks/token prices, random numbers, etc.)
Since the launch of our GuanYu mainnet back in October 2020, we have seen an exponential increase in adoption in a diverse array of use cases. From applications in lending, money markets, gambling, asset, and tokenization, to both on-chain and real-world insurance.
With the Phase 2 (Laozi) upgrade, we aim to expand further the scope of what is possible with our oracle through multiple ways. Two, in particular, include the option for data providers to receive payment directly on-chain from developers using their services on BandChain and allowing for cross-chain oracle requests through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) standard.
The new feature also enables a new cohort of products and services that Band oracle can provide to developers. Some examples of these are a more decentralized price oracle, verifiable randomness, and facilitating cross-chain communication.
The Graph
The Graph Homepage | Learn More About The Graph
The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains, starting with Ethereum. It makes it possible to query data that is difficult to query directly.
Projects with complex smart contracts like Uniswap and NFTs initiatives like Bored Ape Yacht Club store data on the Ethereum blockchain, making it really difficult to read anything other than basic data directly from the blockchain.
In the case of Bored Ape Yacht Club, we can perform basic read operations on the contract like getting the owner of a certain Ape, getting the content URI of an Ape based on their ID, or the total supply, as these read operations are programmed directly into the smart contract, but more advanced real-world queries and operations like aggregation, search, relationships, and non-trivial filtering are not possible. For example, if we wanted to query for apes that are owned by a certain address, and filter by one of its characteristics, we would not be able to get that information by interacting directly with the contract itself.
To get this data, you would have to process every single transfer event ever emitted, read the metadata from IPFS using the Token ID and IPFS hash, and then aggregate it. Even for these types of relatively simple questions, it would take hours or even days for a decentralized application (dapp) running in a browser to get an answer.
You could also build out your own server, process the transactions there, save them to a database, and build an API endpoint on top of it all in order to query the data. However, this option is resource intensive, needs maintenance, presents a single point of failure, and breaks important security properties required for decentralization.
Indexing blockchain data is really, really hard.
Blockchain properties like finality, chain reorganizations, or uncled blocks complicate this process further and make it not just time-consuming but conceptually hard to retrieve correct query results from blockchain data.
The Graph solves this with a decentralized protocol that indexes and enables the performant and efficient querying of blockchain data. These APIs (indexed "subgraphs") can then be queried with a standard GraphQL API. Today, there is a hosted service as well as a decentralized protocol with the same capabilities. Both are backed by the open-source implementation of Graph Node.
Render Network
The Render Network is designed to connect users looking to perform render jobs with people who have idle GPUs to process the renders. Owners would connect their GPUs to the Render Network in order to receive and complete rendering jobs using OctaneRender. Users would send RNDR to the individual performing the render work and OTOY would receive a small percentage of RNDR for facilitating the transaction and running the Render Network.
Once they’ve registered their idle GPUs on the Render Network, these GPU owners become “Node Operators” and are able to earn RNDR Tokens. They do this by accepting jobs from users in need of rendering work, known as “Creators”, who send their files to the Render Network, where they are assigned to Operators. Render receives a small percentage of the RNDR paid out in order to maintain the network and facilitate the transaction.
Chainlink Oracles
Blockchain oracles are often viewed today as decentralized services with one objective: to forward data from off-chain resources onto blockchains. It’s a short step, though, from forwarding data to computing on it, storing it, or transmitting it bidirectionally. This observation justifies a much broader notion of oracles’ functionality. So too do the growing service requirements of smart contracts and increasingly multifaceted technologies that rely on oracle networks. In short, an oracle can and will need to be a general-purpose, bidirectional, compute-enabled interface between and among onchain and off-chain systems.
Oracles’ role in the blockchain ecosystem is to enhance the performance, functionality, and interoperability of smart contracts so that they can bring new trust models and transparency to a multiplicity of industries. This transformation will come about through broadening use of hybrid smart contracts, which fuse blockchains’ special properties with the unique capabilities of off-chain systems such as oracle networks and thereby achieve far greater reach and power than on-chain systems in isolation.
Decentraland Metaverse
Decentraland Homepage | More About Decentraland
Decentraland is a decentralized virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Within the Decentraland platform, users can create, experience, and monetize their content and applications.
Enter and explore decentraland
The finite, traversable, 3D virtual space within Decentraland is called LAND, a non-fungible digital asset maintained in an Ethereum smart contract. Land is divided into parcels that are identified by cartesian coordinates (x,y). These parcels are permanently owned by members of the community and are purchased using MANA, Decentraland’s cryptocurrency token. This gives users full control over the environments and applications that they create, which can range from anything like static 3D scenes to more interactive applications or games.
Gala Games
Gala Games Homepage | More About Gala Games
The decentralized Gala Games ecosystem aspires to blow the doors wide open and give players back the control they deserve. Through decentralization, players not only own their in-games items, but they have a voice in how the Gala Games roadmap develops. Players and node owners will be enlisted, via distributed voting mechanisms, to help determine what games should be added to the platform or what should be funded by the decentralized Gala Games ecosystem.
