Chainlink in DeFi: Use Cases

Karolina

12 Feb 2024
Chainlink in DeFi: Use Cases

DeFi is transforming the financial sector by making it accessible to everyone, bypassing traditional institutions. It leverages blockchain to offer financial products widely, improving transparency and security through smart contracts.

At the heart of DeFi's functionality and its promise of creating more trustworthy financial applications lies Chainlink's oracle technology. Chainlink oracles are pivotal in bridging the gap between blockchain smart contracts and the external world, enabling these contracts to interact with real-world data in a secure and reliable manner. This critical integration allows for the execution of complex financial products and services within the DeFi ecosystem.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Overview

DeFi represents a paradigm shift in the financial industry, aiming to remove the barriers and inefficiencies associated with traditional finance. By utilizing blockchain technology and smart contracts, DeFi platforms offer a plethora of financial services. This not only makes financial products more accessible to a global audience but also significantly reduces the costs and complexities involved in financial transactions.

One of the most compelling promises of DeFi is its potential to provide universal financial accessibility. In traditional finance, services are often restricted to those with a bank account or sufficient capital. DeFi opens the doors to anyone with an internet connection. However, this revolutionary approach does not come without its challenges. Traditional finance systems are plagued by issues like gatekeeping, where powerful entities control access to financial services, and counterparty risk. The trustworthiness of one party can jeopardize the execution of financial agreements. DeFi seeks to address these problems by offering a transparent, permissionless, and trustless financial ecosystem.

MUST READ: "DeFi and the Future of Finance"

Chainlink's Impact Across DeFi Protocols

Money Markets

In the realm of DeFi, money markets offer platforms where users can lend and borrow cryptocurrencies, earning interest on assets or paying interest for loans. The accuracy of asset valuation is paramount in these platforms to maintain solvency and ensure fair and secure transactions.

  • Chainlink's Role. Money market protocols like Aave, Compound, and Liquity can access real-time data by integrating Chainlink Price Feeds. This data is crucial for calculating the value of collateral and debt. It determines interest rates, and triggering liquidations for undercollateralized loans, thereby safeguarding the protocol and its users' assets.

Decentralized Stablecoins

Stablecoins are a cornerstone of the DeFi ecosystem, providing a stable medium of exchange and store of value. Decentralized stablecoins, in particular, rely heavily on accurate and timely price information to maintain their peg to fiat currencies.

  • Chainlink's Contribution. For decentralized stablecoin platforms like DeFiDollar, Chainlink Price Feeds are indispensable for monitoring the value of underlying assets (such as sUSD, USDT, DAI, and USDC). This enables these platforms to execute rebalancing actions efficiently and maintain their stable value, even amidst volatile market conditions.

Algorithmic Stablecoins

Algorithmic stablecoins use a combination of incentives and monetary policy mechanisms to maintain their peg to other currencies without relying solely on collateral. The success of these mechanisms hinges on accurate and reliable market data.

  • Implementation by Chainlink. Projects like Fei Protocol utilize Chainlink Price Feeds to adjust their algorithms in response to real-time market conditions, ensuring their stablecoins remain close to their target peg, thus maintaining stability and user confidence.

Futures and Perpetual Contracts

Futures and perpetual contracts allow users to speculate on the future prices of assets or hedge against price movements, requiring precise and up-to-date asset pricing for fair contract settlement and liquidation.

  • Chainlink's Utility. Protocols such as Lyra and MCDEX leverage Chainlink Price Feeds for determining the settlement prices of futures contracts and the real-time valuation of assets for perpetual contracts. This ensures that these financial instruments operate transparently and fairly, with all parties confident in the integrity of their trades.

Synthetic Assets

Synthetic assets enable users to gain exposure to a variety of real-world assets, indices, and commodities within the blockchain space. The creation and trading of these assets depend on accurate price information to mirror the real-world market values.

  • Chainlink's Role. Synthetix is a prime example of a protocol that uses Chainlink Price Feeds to mint and trade synthetic assets. By providing reliable access to real-time price data, Chainlink enables Synthetix users to create and exchange synthetic assets that accurately reflect the value of their real-world counterparts.

MUST READ: "What is Chainlink"

Enhancing DeFi with Accurate Data (Chainlink)

Chainlink's integration across the DeFi ecosystem is transforming how financial protocols operate, providing them with the critical infrastructure for secure and efficient interaction with real-world data. From money markets to synthetic assets, Chainlink ensures accuracy, fairness, and transparency, underpinning the trust and reliability essential for DeFi's operation and growth.

Key Takeaways - Chainlink

Chainlink Decentralized Finance

Conclusion DeFi

Chainlink is instrumental in DeFi's evolution, offering a bridge to real-world data that's essential for the ecosystem's functionality and trust. By enabling complex financial instruments on the blockchain, Chainlink not only fosters innovation within DeFi but also ensures that these advancements are built on a foundation of accuracy and transparency. As DeFi grows, Chainlink's role as a trusted data provider will continue to be central to its success and expansion, ensuring a more inclusive and fair financial system.

If you are interested in utilizing Chainlink or other blockchain-based solutions for your project, please reach out to contact@nextrope.com

DeFi Staking Revolution by Nextrope

FAQ

What role does Chainlink play in the operation of decentralized stablecoins?

  • Chainlink Price Feeds offer essential price information for platforms like DeFiDollar, enabling them to maintain stable values even in volatile markets.

How do algorithmic stablecoins benefit from Chainlink's technology?

  • Chainlink Price Feeds help projects like Fei Protocol adjust their algorithms according to market conditions, ensuring stablecoin pegs are maintained.

How does Chainlink ensure the reliability and security of its data feeds?

  • An exploration of the mechanisms Chainlink employs to protect against manipulation and ensure the accuracy and timeliness of its data feeds could be of interest.

More about this Topic on Nextrope Blog

  1. What is Chainlink?
  2. Chainlink vs Polkadot
  3. NFT and Gaming: Chainlink Use Cases
  4. Chainlink vs. Avalanche: Exploring the Blockchain Frontier
  5. Authorization and Identity: Chainlink Use Cases
  6. Chainlink and On-Chain Finance Use Cases

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Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Kajetan Olas

22 Nov 2024
Aethir Tokenomics – Case Study

Authors of the contents are not affiliated to the reviewed project in any way and none of the information presented should be taken as financial advice.

In this article we analyze tokenomics of Aethir - a project providing on-demand cloud compute resources for the AI, Gaming, and virtualized compute sectors.
Aethir aims to aggregate enterprise-grade GPUs from multiple providers into a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network). Its competitive edge comes from utlizing the GPUs for very specific use-cases, such as low-latency rendering for online games.
Due to decentralized nature of its infrastructure Aethir can meet the demands of online-gaming in any region. This is especially important for some gamer-abundant regions in Asia with underdeveloped cloud infrastructure that causes high latency ("lags").
We will analyze Aethir's tokenomics, give our opinion on what was done well, and provide specific recommendations on how to improve it.

Evaluation Summary

Aethir Tokenomics Structure

The total supply of ATH tokens is capped at 42 billion ATH. This fixed cap provides a predictable supply environment, and the complete emissions schedule is listed here. As of November 2024 there are approximately 5.2 Billion ATH in circulation. In a year from now (November 2025), the circulating supply will almost triple, and will amount to approximately 15 Billion ATH. By November 2028, today's circulating supply will be diluted by around 86%.

From an investor standpoint the rational decision would be to stake their tokens and hope for rewards that will balance the inflation. Currently the estimated APR for 3-year staking is 195% and for 4-year staking APR is 261%. The rewards are paid out weekly. Furthermore, stakers can expect to get additional rewards from partnered AI projects.

Staking Incentives

Rewards are calculated based on the staking duration and staked amount. These factors are equally important and they linearly influence weekly rewards. This means that someone who stakes 100 ATH for 2 weeks will have the same weekly rewards as someone who stakes 200 ATH for 1 week. This mechanism greatly emphasizes long-term holding. That's because holding a token makes sense only if you go for long-term staking. E.g. a whale staking $200k with 1 week lockup. will have the same weekly rewards as person staking $1k with 4 year lockup. Furthermore the ATH staking rewards are fixed and divided among stakers. Therefore Increase of user base is likely to come with decrease in rewards.
We believe the main weak-point of Aethirs staking is the lack of equivalency between rewards paid out to the users and value generated for the protocol as a result of staking.

Token Distribution

The token distribution of $ATH is well designed and comes with long vesting time-frames. 18-month cliff and 36-moths subsequent linear vesting is applied to team's allocation. This is higher than industry standard and is a sign of long-term commitment.

  • Checkers and Compute Providers: 50%
  • Ecosystem: 15%
  • Team: 12.5%
  • Investors: 11.5%
  • Airdrop: 6%
  • Advisors: 5%

Aethir's airdrop is divided into 3 phases to ensure that only loyal users get rewarded. This mechanism is very-well thought and we rate it highly. It fosters high community engagement within the first months of the project and sets the ground for potentially giving more-control to the DAO.

Governance and Community-Led Development

Aethir’s governance model promotes community-led decision-making in a very practical way. Instead of rushing with creation of a DAO for PR and marketing purposes Aethir is trying to make it the right way. They support projects building on their infrastructure and regularly share updates with their community in the most professional manner.

We believe Aethir would benefit from implementing reputation boosted voting. An example of such system is described here. The core assumption is to abandon the simplistic: 1 token = 1 vote and go towards: Votes = tokens * reputation_based_multiplication_factor.

In the attached example, reputation_based_multiplication_factor rises exponentially with the number of standard deviations above norm, with regard to user's rating. For compute compute providers at Aethir, user's rating could be replaced by provider's uptime.

Perspectives for the future

While it's important to analyze aspects such as supply-side tokenomics, or governance, we must keep in mind that 95% of project's success depends on demand-side. In this regard the outlook for Aethir may be very bright. The project declares $36M annual reccuring revenue. Revenue like this is very rare in the web3 space. Many projects are not able to generate any revenue after succesfull ICO event, due to lack fo product-market-fit.

If you're looking to create a robust tokenomics model and go through institutional-grade testing please reach out to contact@nextrope.com. Our team is ready to help you with the token engineering process and ensure your project’s resilience in the long term.

Nextrope Partners with Hacken to Enhance Blockchain Security

Miłosz

21 Nov 2024
Nextrope Partners with Hacken to Enhance Blockchain Security

Nextrope announces a strategic partnership with Hacken, a renowned blockchain security auditor. It marks a significant step in delivering reliable decentralized solutions. After several successful collaborations resulting in flawless smart contract audits, the alliance solidifies the synergy between Nextrope's innovative blockchain development and Hacken's top-tier security auditing services. Together, we aim to set new benchmarks, ensuring that security is an integral part of blockchain technology.

Strengthening Blockchain Security

The partnership aims to fortify the security protocols within blockchain ecosystems. By integrating Hacken's comprehensive security audits with Nextrope's cutting-edge blockchain solutions, we are poised to offer unparalleled security features in our projects.

"Blockchain security should never be an afterthought"

"Our partnership with Hacken underscores our dedication to embedding security at the core of our blockchain solutions. Together, we're building a safer future for the industry."

said Mateusz Mach, CEO of Nextrope

About Nextrope

Nextrope is a forward-thinking blockchain development house specializing in creating innovative solutions for businesses worldwide. With a team of experienced developers and blockchain experts, Nextrope delivers high-quality, scalable, and secure blockchain applications tailored to meet the unique needs of each client.

About Hacken

Hacken is a leading blockchain security auditor known for its rigorous smart contract audits and security assessments. With a mission to make the industry safer, Hacken provides complex security services that help companies identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in their applications.

Looking Ahead

As a joint mission, both Nextrope and Hacken are committed to continuous innovation. We look forward to the exciting opportunities this partnership will bring and are eager to implement a more secure blockchain environment for all.

For more information, please contact:

Nextrope

Hacken

Join us on our journey to deliver top-notch blockchain tech and a safer future for the industry!