Which cryptocurrency will be the best performer in the recovering crypto market? Will it be the governance token of an established DeFi protocol, a privacy-focused coin implementing DeFi features, or some other asset that we have not included in our this week’s selection of the top 3 coins to watch? Time shall tell, but we think the three assets that you are about to read about have a good shot at posting significant gains.
Outside of the crypto circles, a large amount of media attention was captured by the “Ever Given”, a container ship that ran aground on the bank of the Suez Canal, thereby blocking one of the busiest trading routes in the world. The attempt to refloat the ship finally succeeded on March 29, and the Canal is now open again. The 3rd project on this week’s list is in a way like the diggers and tugboats that participated in the vessel’s rescue operation – it tries to remove obstacles in the international shipping industry. The key difference is that it aims to do this by digitalizing the trade and transport documentation and not by physically removing the sand and pulling large vessels. Nevertheless, make sure to have a look.
1. Uniswap (UNI)
UNI is a governance token of Uniswap – an automated market maker (AMM) protocol. The platform, which facilitates quick swaps between different Ethereum-based tokens, has recently been struggling to keep its users and market share because of high fees on Ethereum. UNI tokens are ERC-20 tokens that allow holders to decide on the future of Uniswap by voting on proposals. The governance token holders also oversee the usage of funds from the community treasury, and the protocol’s fee switch.
Uniswap v3 Ethereum Mainnet Launch target is May 5
After much anticipation and even more speculation, the Uniswap team has finally revealed more details regarding the improved version of the popular DeFi protocol. According to the official blog post from March 23, the team is aiming to deploy Uniswap v3 on Ethereum mainnet on May 5, while layer 2 deployment on Optimism is going to follow shortly after. In fact, this makes UNI an interesting token to watch throughout the whole April and likely May 2021 as well.
Uniswap v3 will feature several important improvements for liquidity providers (LPs), which could result in an up to 4,000x increase in capital efficiency. A new feature called “Concentrated liquidity” will allow LPs to provide liquidity just to a specific price range. Thus, savvy LPs will be able to earn the same amount of fees with just a fraction of the underlying capital, provided the asset pair trades in the range that they are providing liquidity to. The concentrated liquidity could also be used to mitigate the risk of one asset in the pool significantly dropping in value. In addition, LPs will be able to place multiple positions per pair composing their own AMM curve.
Furthermore, Uniswap v3 will also include support for flexible fee tiers and integrate advanced oracles. The Uniswap team also revealed that since liquidity positions are now unique for each LP, they are no longer represented by fungible tokens but rather non-fungible tokens (NFT). Uniswap expects that over time, more complex strategies including auto-rebalancing algorithms, fee-reinvestment and lending will be tokenized, allowing LPs passively copy the strategy of other more experienced LPs.
A detailed technical description of the new features is available in the Uniswap v3 whitepaper. Developers are already able to test the Uniswap v3 smart contracts as they have been deployed to the Ropsten, Rinkeby, Kovan, and Görli testnets.
2. Horizen (ZEN)
Previously known as ZenCash, Horizen is a privacy-focused coin that enables encrypted messaging and utilizes supernodes and Zk-snarks technology. The project’s development is led by a decentralized governance community.
StakedZEN Set to Roll-out on Mainnet on March 30
Horizen team is looking to further boost the protocol’s utility and become more than just a pure privacy coin project. Therefore, the project is launching StakendZEN (stZEN), an ERC20 token representing ZEN, which will allow ZEN holders to take part in the Ethereum-based DeFi protocols while staking their ZEN coins to earn Horizen node staking rewards at the same time. The stZEN tokens will be issued and exchanged through StakeHound’s service at a 1:1 ratio compared to ZEN. The feature is scheduled to go live on Horizen mainnet on March 30. More information concerning the novel feature can be found here.
3. CargoX (CXO)
The CargoX Platform is an Ethereum-based blockchain document transfer platform. While the project’s main aim is to digitalize the logistics industry and improve its efficiency, the platform can also be used in financial, manufacturing, trading, energy, services companies, and even governmental agencies. This blockchain solutions enables a fast, secure, and auditable way to transfer original documents as well as ownership of these documents. In addition, it facilitates distributed teamwork even with assets that would normally have to be handled manually in the corporate office environment, which proved to be extremely useful during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CargoX platform to be used by Egyptian Authorities from April 1
The Bill of Lading (BL) is one of the most important documents in the international trade and transport. This hard-copy document is issued by a carrier, may it be shipping line or freight forwarder, and confirmed the receipt of goods, lists contract of carriage and ownership of the goods. Since the manual dealing with the Bill of Lading has already proved to be a bottleneck in the international trade, governments around the globe are looking for ways to digitalize the documentation (develop an electronic BL) and the workflow around it to facilitate even faster and frictionless import and export process. And this is where CargoX, which has developed a proof-of-concept solution that tackles exactly this problem, comes to play.
Furthermore, CargoX’s Smart Bill of Lading platform is already a fully functional product. In fact, in just a few days, Egyptian Foreign Trade authority is launching the pilot phase of an Advance Cargo Information System, which utilizes CargoX’s solution. From July 1, 2021, all Egyptian importers and foreign companies exporting to Egypt will be obliged to use CargoX’s Smart Bill of Lading. In addition, the platform’s utility is not limited to maritime transport but can also be utilized for cargo aircrafts, as well as freight trains. In addition, Indian Port Association (IPA) is also testing CargoX’s platform. Reportedly, more than 60% of Indian ports are favouring integration of the smart Bill of Lading. Given the support of the Indian Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs CargoX will likely make a big breakthrough to the Asian market as well.
Although the news has not been publicized a lot, the CXO is already up more than 40% in the past 7 days and around 140% in the past month. The fact that CargoX already has a fully functioning product addressing a real-world problem means that adoption should not be too big of a problem. In fact, the company has already secured invitations to collaborate from the World Economic Forum and the European Directorate Generale for Mobility and Transport Digitalisation of the Transport and Logistics Forum. To conclude, CargoX and its CXO token clearly have a huge potential to grow.
