Polkadot Ecosystem projects to lookout for!
Applications in the Polkadot Ecosystem can be parachains or parathreads on the Polkadot network or be on the Kusama network. In this article, I focus on applications that are already present as well as a few being built on Polkadot & Kusama along with a short description about a few of them.
Projects to watch out for!!
2020 has been the year of DeFi and DEX with decentralization being the center for most of the applications being developed be in finance, social media, rewards, investment and banking services, etc. A few of the applications in the Polkadot Ecosystem that have caught my attention so far are as follows:
Polkastarter: Polkastarter is a DEX built for cross-chain token pools and auctions, enabling projects to raise capital in a decentralized, permissionless and interoperable environment based on Polkadot. Its native token POLS was released recently. The project has garnered a lot of interest in he last couple of months, has a huge community of enthusiasts as well and the lift off on 15th was amazing.
Acala: Acala is a decentralized finance hub and stablecoin platform powering cross blockchain liquidity and applications. There have no tokens been released for Acala yet and is currently in testnet phase to provide a one-stop shop for all DeFi activities. It uses Polkadot’s shared security model to ensure high resilience and enable forkless upgrades.
Moonbeam: Decentralized and permissionless, Moonbeam provides an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. The platform is quite easy to use to create multichain applications with minimal configuration changes. Moonbeam is another well funded project which plans to issue its token Glimmer(GLMR) soon.
What’s in the pipeline?
Subsocial: Open platform for decentralized social networks and marketplaces.
Built with Substrate and IPFS. A highly anticipated application which is currently in test phase. I personally like the ease of usage of the platform and am planning to be an avid user.
Reef: It is a decentralized aggregator on polkadot with first cross-chain DeFi operating system powered by Trade at best price with the liquidity of the entire crypto market. It envisions to provide best return on staking, lending and yield farming — automatically. It raised its seed round recently with the utility token coming out soon.
Potential use cases cover the following categories
Other potential categories in which I would love seeing development using the Polkadot chain are as follows:
- Healthcare: Security of medical record access, interoperability in different systems and provenance of data access can be very helpful in medical record management.
- Gaming and eSports: A lucrative industry with a high community engagement (in the digital space) would open an avenue into a rich reserve for Polkadot. And interestingly, Polkadot has all the capabilities to support the large number of transactions that online gaming requires.
- Oracles: As we move more towards decentralization in finances and data management, Oracles will have a major role to play to provide updated information.
Concluding thoughts
There are currently more than 300 projects being built on Polkadot with some being showcased at the Decoded event in December 2020, but here I have only mentioned a handful. Most of the applications have utilized the Polkadot community support, developed great teams and have raised funds to move ahead in their journey. Very optimistic about the future of applications being built on Polkadot and hoping to build a couple of applications myself on Polkadot with my team very soon.