For years, Bitcoin has been forced to sit on the sidelines and watch as the trends go by the crypto industry, attracting multiple new users and developers to the sector of the blockchain that offers various services of development platforms. For many Bitcoin fans, this likely looked like one missed opportunity after another, as the way Bitcoin is — its very design and architecture — are preventing it from functioning as a development platform and offering the same features.
However, that might be about to change now, with the arrival of Sovryn — Bitcoin’s first and only native DeFi ecosystem that exists on Bitcoin and for Bitcoin.
What is Sovryn All About?
Simply put — Sovryn is a DeFi platform for Bitcoin. It is fully and truly decentralized financial protocol that exists within the Bitcoin ecosystem, and it offers users the ability to trade, lend and borrow funds, and more, with plans to introduce oracles, derivatives, NFTs, zero-interest loans, Bitcoin-backed stablecoins, and pretty much anything else that can be expected to be found in a DeFi ecosystem.
The project started working on the Sovryn DeFi protocol back in 2020, and at the time, it started with only 5 developers. By the time it launched — April 2021 — that number climbed to 60 individual contributors, and after a recent hackathon event, they attracted 1,400 developers who started submitting projects for the Sovryn ecosystem. So far, nearly 60 individual projects were submitted.
The company also managed to hit some rather impressive milestones. For example, it managed to raise $23 million from institutional investors, including Greenfield One, Monday Capital, Pomp, Collider Ventures, and others. It facilitated $568 million in transactions, and its TVL rose to $77 million in record time.
Benefits of Using the Sovryn Protocol
Sovryn is a protocol that aims to solve a number of problems that traders face even now, despite all the work that other projects have put in towards solving them. Those include things like high transaction fees, the need to give up personal information to use various projects, security issues, inefficient stablecoin liquidity, blockchain incompatibility across the entire DeFi ecosystem, and more.
Sovryn aims to solve these problems one by one. For example, it wishes to reduce gas fees to 1/100 of Ethereum’s fees. It already solved the problem of personal detail requirements by becoming 100% permissionless. A bug bounty event that brought so many new developers to it also helped increase security.
It also created xUSD pools for all stablecoins that will help solve the inefficient liquidity that they have to deal with. Another common issue that it solved is the blockchain’s incompatibility with the DeFi sector, which it solved by being EVM-compatible. As such, it can be used on all blockchain platforms, which opens an entire world of possibilities for the project.
Sovryn doesn’t plan to stop there, either. It will also create technical bridges for the transfer of assets on and off the Rootstock network, and even create a decentralized bridge that will connect Bitcoin to smart contracts. Its app is integrated with a fiat on-ramp, provided by Transak, where users can buy BTC with fiat directly.
It also aims to bring the Origins Launchpad — a launchpad for new and early-phase projects on Rootstock. Token allocations from these projects can be made available to Sovryn stakers, as well as the wider community.
In other words, there are many problems that the protocol has already figured out how to solve, as well as many unique upcoming solutions for the community to look forward to. But, in the end, this will be something that will finally allow Bitcoin to join the DeFi game, thus increasing its functionality and potential, giving it new use cases, expanding its purpose, and making it a capable competitor in the DeFi sector.
