April 12, 2022 — In the previous article, we talked about what dApp staking is and why it’s critical for our ecosystem to flourish. If you have not read that article, I suggest you first read it prior to reading this one. Here, I’ll be going over the top projects on Astar. The reason for highlighting these projects is to give you a high-level overview and educate those interested in becoming dApp stakers (i.e. nominators) as we kick off our #Build2Earn dApp staking campaign.
Smart contract developers are choosing to build on top of Astar Network in large part because of our #Build2Earn program. By staking Astar tokens on dApps you believe in, you are helping to support the developers that are building on Astar while at the same time getting staking rewards from your staked tokens — a win-win.
With that said, it’s important to be informed about the projects you choose to stake your tokens on, and the intention behind this article is to give you more information about some of the notable projects currently in our ecosystem that you can support with staking. Without further adieu, here are the top projects currently on Astar.
Important note: Although we are focusing primarily on dApps, we have also included a few Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and a couple of infrastructure projects–-including Astar Network — to the list, because supporting such projects is crucial for the ecosystem to grow as a whole.
DAPPS
ArthSwap
Who They Are
ArthSwap is the №1 decentralized exchange platform (DEX) with the largest community on Astar Network. With a simple UI and design for high APY, it enables high-frequency trading on Astar Network. ArthSwap was launched on January 22, 2022. In just one month, ArthSwap has exceeded $120 million in TVL and its community user base has expanded to more than 200K on Twitter, Discord, and Telegram combined. These are the biggest metrics in the Polkadot ecosystem!
Roadmap
In the coming months, ArthSwap will implement its own staking feature and integrate a lending platform and zap function. In addition, ArthSwap will release its IDO Launchpad and will list on CEXs. It will also have its IDO in April.
Recent Achievements
ArthSwap recently hit $120M TVL and is now officially the biggest DEX on Polkadot. It is gearing up to roll out its IDO launchpad in the coming weeks and will initiate the first IDO on Astar.
Big Goal
ArthSwap is aiming to hit $1B TVL this year and to be the leading DeFi one-stop-shop in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Social Links
Starlay Finance
Who They Are
Starlay Finance is a non-custodial lending protocol on Astar Network. Depositors can provide liquidity to earn interest as stable passive income, while borrowers can leverage their assets without selling them out. With Starlay Finance, the Astar ecosystem is in the process of becoming a huge marketplace for storing all kinds of tokens on any kind of chain.
Roadmap
In May, Starlay will have its IDO on ArthSwap’s IDO launchpad. In May, it will implement a vote escrow functionality called “ve”. Starlay aims to be the first lending protocol to successfully integrate the vote escrow. For more details about this implementation and roadmaptofuNFT is a permissionless, decentralized and full-featured NFT marketplace. tofuNFT provides numerous creative improvements to the existing marketplace experience like incentivized bidding, real-time notifications, attributes filtering, bulk listing, and rarity explorer.
you can read this article.
Recent Achievements
Starlay has been one of the biggest success stories on Astar Network, reaching $250M in TVL and $150M in borrowing volume in less than a month since going live. It is the largest TVL DeFi protocol on Polkadot.
Big Goal
Starlay is aiming to achieve $3B TVL on Starlay and $10B on Astar Network as a whole by the end of 2022.
Social Links
tofuNFT
Who They Are
tofuNFT supports 25+ chains, including BSC, Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, Arbitrum, Optimism, and of course Astar. It is not only Astar’s №1 trading volume NFT marketplace, but also is top ranking in volume on several chains. Up until now, tofuNFT has focused on sidechains, primarily BSC and Avalanche, but entering 2022, it will be working with Ethereum’s Layer 2, such as Arbitrum and Metis, and Polkadot’s ecosystem, such as Astar and Moonbeam.
Roadmap
In the coming months, tofuNFT will be enhancing its current v2 and developing v3. It will be developing its API and a swap function. In addition, it will begin supporting ERC1155 and WebGL NFT.
Lastly, tofuNFT plans to add more than 20 new chains in the first quarter of 2022 and to accommodate more than 30 chains by the end of the first quarter. This number is not only the highest number of chains supported by any NFT marketplace, but also the highest number of chains supported by any dApp.
Recent Achievements
tofuNFT became the top volume NFT marketplace on layer 2 and in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Big Goal
tofuNFT’s strategy is to focus on EVM chains, which have lower gas costs, compared to that of Ethereum’s mainnet. The immediate goal is to be the most powerful marketplace for all chains and to be the best marketplace for NFT with utilities such as DeFi and GameFi.
Social Links
DAOs
Astar Degens
Who They Are
Astar Degens is a community governed DAO formed with a mission to incubate promising projects and bring innovative ideas to the Astar ecosystem. Astar Degens are passionate Astar community members, galvanized around a 10,000 strong NFT collection with the community and treasury structure to support the developing Astar ecosystem.
Think of an NFT project like Bored Ape Yacht Club but with the majority of the mint revenue set aside for Astar Degens’ community VC fund, the NFT used to vote on proposals and NFT owners accruing value as they invest and partner with early-stage Astar projects.
Community participation and DAO voting will direct Astar Degens’ treasury toward supporting promising creators within the Astar ecosystem. Whether you are a developer, artist, creator, influencer, or any other community member with a great idea — all are welcome and all will be rewarded for constructive contributions.
Roadmap
This upcoming quarter will be a busy one for Astar Degens. It will launch focused community groups known as Tribes to power Astar growth. Similar to guilds or houses in other DAOs, they will become the powerhouse of the community built around the skills, experience, and passions of our great community members.
Astar Degens will be receiving its first seed investment from its DAO VC fund. The funds will be used to make the first investments and partnerships with early-stage Astar projects. Lastly, it will join and implement the Astar dApp staking program.
Recent Achievements
Although the DAO has a short history, Astar Degens is proud of its many achievements so far and of the rapid growth of its engaged and active community. Beginning with the initial NFT launch & the first DAO governance vote. Astar Degens launched its first NFT and 10,000 Degen Ape NFTs were sold out within 36 hours.
In the coming days, Astar Degens will be announcing its first official partnership with Starlay Finance. Astar Degens’ VC fund will be an early-stage investor in the project with 50% of its investment being allocated to the treasury and 50% of investment being airdropped to NFT holders.
Big Goal
One near-term initiative that Astar Degens is currently building out is formalizing its community efforts into teams or community-focused groups. Astar Degens have called these Tribes in keeping with its community identity and NFT.
The Tribes will become the powerhouse of the community and are being organized around the skills, experience, and passions of its great community members.
Social Links
Community Rewards (Astar Ambassadors)
Who They Are
Astar Ambassadors play a crucial role in building awareness, fostering our community, and expanding Astar’s global presence. Astar Ambassadors contribute to our ecosystem with content creation, community management, meet-ups, and more.
Roadmap
The community rewards contract is designed to offer financial support to Astar Ambassadors for managing all local communities worldwide. Every month a part of the rewards are used to pay Astar Ambassadors for their excellent work, and another part can be requested for local community campaigns, meet-ups, and much more.
Recent Achievements
Astar Ambassadors have been hard at work managing local communities all over the globe. They have been supporting early projects in the Astar ecosystem by giving them awareness in our community. They have been, and will continue to be an integral part of our ecosystem as we continue to grow in 2022.
Big Goal
Expand our global presence by having at least one Astar Ambassador in every major city.
Social Links
OnFinality
Who They Are
OnFinality is a SaaS platform that provides infrastructure and developer tools that save developers hours and allows teams to grow with confidence. Its mission is to help blockchain and dApp developers build the decentralized future faster.
OnFinality is a trusted partner supporting 42 parachains and networks from their first block onwards. OnFinality serves almost a billion responses each and every day to their scalable enhanced API service.
Roadmap
OnFinality is constantly improving its service to scale and provide improved performance to all customers
Enhanced API Dashboard
OnFinality’s customers use their service to help manage and analyze the health of their networks. OnFinality wants to provide a richer set of performance data to their customers to allow them to better understand and improve their codebases, as well as identify issues or bugs relating to new versions faster.
The next stage is to deploy the next version of their Dashboards, this time with an Enhanced API Dashboard, allowing API customers to view analytics and analysis including CPU load and response times.
Intelligent Routing Improvements
Currently, OnFinality uses Archive nodes within their enhanced API service to ensure that all requests can be answered by any node. They want to improve this by improving their intelligent routing strategy to take the node type into consideration. When their gateway receives a request, they should route the request to the closest appropriate node (e.g. a full or light node) by applying heuristics to make a probabilistic determination of what sort of node can satisfy a request. This development is a key part of OnFinality’s drive to scale and enhance the performance of their free service to the community while driving down costs.
Recent Achievements
1 Billion Daily Requests
In January 2022, OnFinality surpassed a milestone of handing over a billion responses in a single 24 hour period across all supported parachains and networks. This is over 11,500 responses through their infrastructure each and every second!
Support for over 40 Parachains at Launch
OnFinality is dedicated to Polkadot, it’s their home and they do a lot of work with core teams to provide services that solve problems and help with development.
OnFinality now supports over 40 different parachains and networks within the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem and this is growing every week. They’re particularly proud of their support of many networks from their first genesis block, it represents how OnFinality works with teams throughout the development lifecycle.
Big Goal
Multi-chain support
OnFinality is native to Polkadot, it’s their home and they’ve worked hard to build relationships in this ecosystem.
The core premise of Polkadot is to create a thriving community of developers, users, and businesses that will tap into its multichain interoperability. OnFinality stands by the idea that a community of blockchains, working together to encourage web3 adoption is the future and they also believe Polkadot will be a leading player in that initiative.
But they also believe in a multi-chain future. They know that there are going to be many different blockchains working together to solve different problems. Their long-term plan is to take OnFinality and adapt it to work for other blockchains that don’t have satisfactory infrastructure services.
There are a lot of developers building applications and networks on different chains that can use OnFinality — one day they might be able to help them. Their multi-chain approach that they’ve needed to make for Polkadot means we are uniquely suited for this challenge.
Social Links
Astar Network
Who We Are
Astar Network is a company that makes core decentralized protocols to make Web3.0 happen. We are creating the infrastructure to enable people to own their data and assets. Our goal is to create the internet of tomorrow by connecting all of the major L1 blockchains and creating a multi-virtual machine smart contract platform.
Roadmap
The contract for dApp staking is used to support our infrastructure needed to run all our public nodes and nodes that provide toolings for our developers. You can find our full roadmap here.
Recent Achievements
Since launching in January 2022, Astar has become the number one parachain on Polkadot with the most TVL ($2B+). Out of all of the Polkadot parachains, we have transferred the most assets from Ethereum, Polygon, and Cosmos via our Celer cBridge.
Big Goal
Taking the next steps towards becoming a DAO.
Social Links
#Build2Earn: Top Astar Projects for Staking on Astar was originally published in Astar Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
