TERRA Ecosystem — Promising Upcoming Projects
There can’t be a better statement towards achieving that financial freedom that we all are striving for. Bitcoin was meant to do exactly that and even after so many years, we are far from realising that dream of mainstream adoption. We are taking small steps in different directions but the end goal is still long miles away. With that in mind, Terra blockchain brings with it an entire support system where each protocol is a piece of a larger puzzle. The seamless integration and partnerships between all is a primary driver for this ecosystem. It has a strong community that provides support and a framework that helps ideas shape into execution. It is no wonder why it has done so well in such a short span of time. Most of the projects have been community driven having evolved from an idea and shaped into execution by the active participation of all. If you find yourself lost in this new universe with so many projects evolving at a rapid pace, don’t worry. I will try explaining some of the upcoming projects on Terra while keeping it simple for easy understanding. For detailed information, I will also link the required articles on Medium and official websites.
With so many projects to cover, this article is going to be a long read.
Loop Finance
For Trybers, a switch to Loopers felt like a bright sunny afternoon after months of rain.
An end goal to bring the power of blockchain and crypto to the end-user through user-friendly apps, stablecoins, and DeFi, Loop Finance successfully managed to raise over US$1.5M from leading VCs and investors such as Woodstock, Accomplice, Collider Labs, and Iconium. Loop is building an Automated Market Maker Decentralized Exchange on Terra that will be integrated into a beta-stage, non-custodial crypto wallet primarily built for using crypto for daily use transactions through shopping in a way advantageous to small businesses and mainstream consumers. Blockchain is far from mainstream adoption and Loop aims to reduce that gap by bringing the power of blockchain to the hands of the user for easy seamless execution without the technical know-how. With a team of diverse backgrounds from business handling to software and blockchain development, the goal is two-fold: One to bring cryptocurrencies to the masses and second, help small businesses survive in today’s oligarchic world where platforms such as Ubereats, Amazon, and Facebook are rapidly eating up their profit margins. For this two-fold goal, the solution is a two-fold product. The first an AMM DEX and the other a non-custodial crypto wallet.
Loop Markets is an AMM DEX similar to TerraSwap’s AMM design that will list ERC-20 and Solana tokens alongside Terra’s native assets. It will enable a passive income for liquidity providers and also provide rapid swaps across Terra assets. LOOP will be the governance token will help in accruing shared trading fees, pools for tokens that currently do not exist on Terra will be incentivized with POOL token rewards to help bootstrap liquidity.
Loop Wallet is a mobile, non-custodial wallet for shopping and merchant payments that will integrate Loop AMM, sourcing liquidity for payments via native swaps of Terra assets and stablecoins from the Loop DEX. It is currently in beta testing and will onboard new merchants with the launch.
The primary reasoning for building the AMM DEX, apart from bringing more value to the Terra ecosystem, is so that an instant swap mechanism is created inside the Loop Wallet app that will allow users to pay with any Terra currency and have it swapped automatically for the merchant’s preferred stablecoin before being deposited into the merchant’s wallet. How cool is that!
This removes the price-volatility risk for accepting crypto payments. Additionally, LOOP rewards are given to customers as a part of a cash-back incentive program. It intends to reduce fees for both customers and merchants than existing current on-ramp solutions where sourcing liquidity from third-party venues is expensive and additional costs are passed onto the users as higher fees. With the integration of other DeFi tools like Anchor, it will allow users to earn a high-interest rate on their funds stored in the wallet.
For cryptocurrency enthusiasts, having a way to directly spend cryptocurrencies with local or international businesses in a non-custodial manner will bring the dream of financial freedom one step closer to reality. After all, we all long for that financial freedom.
For more info, check out the medium article or the official website.
Angel Protocol
Give once, Give Forever.
Communities when they come together can achieve great milestones and this is just one example of that.
Angel Protocol is Terra’s charity protocol which aims to challenge some of the existing paradigms of the charity world. One of the major challenges of the charity world is sustainability. The market plays a decisive role in affecting the seasonality of the charities. And when it comes to making a difference, charity has to be perpetual. The existing problem with most non-profit organisations is the operating revenue and Angel Protocol aims to provide a solution by turning charity contributions into perpetual charity endowments. The amount pledged ends up earning yields and those yields become a perpetual source of charity. Simple enough!
The beauty of Terra ecosystem is the seamless integration of different protocols with one another. Angel Protocol allows donors to make a pledge through UST, which is an algorithmic stable coin pegged to the dollar’s value. It is created by buying and burning an equivalent amount of LUNA in the market. Angel Protocol uses Anchor Protocol to earn a high yield fixed interest of nearly 20 percent. Anchor Protocol is Terra’s high-yield fixed interest savings protocol; the yield earned is periodically given to the charity as per the donor’s choice. Angel Protocol not only provides a benefit to charities, donors and donees but to the entire Terra ecosystem. With the increased adoption of UST by charities, more LUNA will have to be bought and burned for the minting of UST. This will lead to less supply pushing the prices up and thus benefit the LUNA holders.
Angel Protocol wasn’t born too long ago with the founder, Chauncey St. John announcing an idea on Twitter on 20 April 2021 asking for help from the community and it came just in time to make it to the Delphi Digital Hackathon. Since then, it has found incredible support within the Terra community with the Terra Charity Alliance and other partnerships. The Alliance is a pact of pledge between Terra protocols to commit 1 percent of the revenue towards Angel’s charitable indexes. As of now, it has the support of 23 Terra protocols with the likelihood of more protocols joining this endeavour. In order to provide a streamlined experience to the charities and causes the protocol intends to remove the complexities of DeFi through on/off ramps. Amongst other partnerships, It has teamed with Pylon Protocol for No-loss Giving, Apollo for additional yield opportunities, Talis for Angel contributors NFT badges and Loop for accepting donations in any currency.
Integration with Loop will help in cross-chain conversion to UST proving valuable for donors helping them avoid any conversion event and capital gains tax.
For more info, check out the official website.
Levana Protocol
Levana Protocol is a censorship-resistant, open-source leverage platform built on Terra blockchain. It aims to provide leveraged trading services for assets on Terra by building a decentralized exchange.
Levana will provide users uncollateralized loan services through integration with Mars Protocol in its initial stage and subsequently implement a perpetual swap model. The vision of providing leveraged access to assets on Terra is a feature that will attract other apps to build on it. An economic model design which supports that will be crucial and that’s why Delphi is helping Levana with the design, whitepaper, and also financing the first round of the project.
There is limited information available about Levana Protocol.
For other info, check out the Twitter handle.
Harpoon Protocol
Harpoon is a creation of Anchor Protocol and to understand it, we will need a basic understanding of the liquidations mechanism on Anchor.
Before we get there, it is important to point out that the entire project came together through various social groups including the official telegram. It was a need-based solution that brought the community members together to build a prototype of a user-based interface for user-executed liquidations of at-risk collateral loans. Confused already? Don’t fret. Follow along! Subsequently, through community feedback and then through the first formal governance proposal on Anchor’s grant system, 20,800 ANC tokens were allocated to launch the V1 and to develop further iterations of the project.
Harpoon is an application-specific project built on top of Anchor. In the Anchor ecosystem, there are four types of users — depositors, borrowers, liquidators and ANC liquidity providers. Liquidators are used for monitoring the existence of risky loans and in turn request the liquidation of loan collateral if necessary.
In order to prevent borrowers from defaulting on their loans issued in UST and collateralized in bLUNA, Anchor incentivises liquidators to observe and liquidate loans with an LTV (Loan-to-Value) above the maximum threshold (currently 50%). The liquidation contract is used to convert collaterals of a liquidating loan to Terra stablecoins, which are then used to repay the loan. The execution of liquidations is performed via a bidding framework where bids are submitted directly to the Anchor Liquidation Contract. Thus bidders profit from executing liquidations by purchasing at-risk collateral at a discount to the current Oracle price via a competitive market of other bidders. This whole process is bid intensive zero-sum game and naturally, liquidation bots dominate the current market for liquidations on Anchor. The absence of a tool allowing users to easily participate in Anchor’s liquidations market was the reason for Harpoon.
Harpoon aims to alleviate the technical barrier for users to profit from under-collateralized bLUNA positions by creating an intuitive UI for users to execute liquidations manually. The purpose is to level the playing field for liquidating at-risk positions dominated by a small minority of users with coding knowledge or user-deployed bots.
Harpoon’s V1 enables users to configure and submit their bids via a dashboard presenting available liquidations contracts sourced from Anchor Liquidation Contract. It is yet to be seen whether the user-executed liquidations can keep pace with liquidation bots interacting with the liquidation contract. Harpoons future V2 will come with an integrated analytics dashboard showcasing outstanding loans, collateral and ongoing liquidations with the latter most important for remaining competitive with bots. V3 will be a smart contract driven by an intelligent back-end that will be able to execute liquidations based on market conditions automatically with other additional features.
For more info, check out the medium account.
Pylon Protocol
Let’s understand the conventional banking of fixed deposits or bonds. You deposit a certain amount of money for a certain duration at the end of which, you receive both the principal amount and the interest. In the interim, neither the principal nor the interest is yours to use. Breaking the conventions of that premise, Pylon Protocol allows you to deposit a certain amount and use the potential interest amount of that to avail services which means you are pretty much using the services for free. Maybe not really free but closer to it as your principal amount is not affected.
Built on Terra, Pylon Protocol is a yield based savings, payments, and launchpad platform. Rightly referred to as a convenient principal-protected payments product, it is designed as a user-friendly platform with a goal of wide-scale adoption beyond the world of crypto natives. Enabling sustainable transactions between users and creators through customizable deposit contracts and yield redirection, Pylon’s offering builds on low-volatile yield-bearing protocols (Terra’s Anchor Protocol) unlocking a suite of options for payments and savings in DeFi. Pylon provides you with the ability to take the interest you’ve earned on your deposited funds to use in a number of different ways like investing in new projects. Think of it as making a lossless investment. It enables you to redirect your interest while ensuring your initial deposit is safe and yours at all times.
Pylon Gateway, a token launchpad and crowdfunding-via-yield platform and also Pylon Protocol’s first product, enables users to make investments at no loss by depositing Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin $UST to a pool in return for project tokens, governance rights and other perks. What sets Pylon apart is that it enables users to withdraw their full principal after the pledged vesting period to claim project tokens and other corresponding rewards. $MINE is the native governance token with the name inspired by Starcraft’s minerals as with Pylon’s namesake, built with a high yield capturing mechanism for all forthcoming integrations on Pylon Protocol and Pylon Gateway.
For more info, check out the medium account or the official website.
In essence, the user deposits Terra stablecoins via Pylon to access any recurring service (exclusive content, no-fee subscriptions, perpetual arts patronage, charitable donations, or lossless investments) powered by the platform and withdraws the principal in full upon the expiry of the subscription.
Spar Protocol
Spar Protocol is being built on a narrative that aims to provide improved accessibility and adoption of DeFi applications. Blockchain is growing at a tremendous pace, whether some people or governments like it or not, it is becoming an unstoppable force. The only barrier however for a non-crypto user is the lack of products and solutions that help to tone it down to the user’s understanding.
Spar team has its focus centered on that premise where it aims to abstract away the complexities of the crypto products so that it can work for a broader user set — crypto and non-crypto. It targets several demographics, including passive investors and active pool managers, in a unique pooled asset management model designed to level the investing playing field. The vision of the project is to build a user-friendly decentralized asset management platform on Terra that also presents a pathway for other developers to build on top of the Spar SDK. Through this, it intends to remove the technical difficulties and barriers to bear the fruits of the DeFi to all.
Spar is a decentralized pool management application on Terra that enables passive management of investor liquidity at promising rates of return and favourable fee models for active pool managers. Think of Spar as a decentralized hedge fund pool, similar to DHedge on Ethereum, where isolated liquidity pools of depositor assets rebalance and adjust based on the pool manager’s specific investment strategy or long-term thesis. There are primarily two participants — Investors & Pool Managers. Spar mainly caters to investors looking for passive investment opportunities with more control or who want exposure to higher rates of return but are unable to trade. Investors are presented with an easy interface that allows them to view their overall investment performance, track the pool manager leaderboard, and select a pool to deposit funds. Investor assets receive the returns generated by the pool’s performance, with their return proportional to the amount invested relative to the overall pool size. There are no restrictions on deposits or withdrawals. Once a user deposits capital into a pool, the manager deploys the capital to generate returns based on their strategy — the overall risk/reward for users transparent upfront. Since Terra and Mirror power Spar, investors can gain exposure to various asset classes within specific pools, including equities, commodities, ETFs, and more. Pool managers can even deploy the investor capital as an LP in DeFi protocols — generating passive returns from yield farming strategies.
V1 of Spar will offer mAssets available on Mirror within pools, and future versions will expand to include other assets. For investors, Spar provides a premier, accessible, and passive vehicle for tailored risk/return profiles of individuals looking to gain exposure to DeFi or a blend of uncorrelated TradFi and DeFi strategies. The end-goal is to make the platform as retail-friendly as possible by integrating sufficient on/off-ramps. Users won’t need to interact with multiple applications and can do everything from one application. It intends to add more features in future versions.
For more info, check out the medium article or the official website.
Orion Protocol
The growth and adoption of the DeFi industry is imminent and with hundreds and thousands of exchanges and liquidity pools emerging, the myriad of choices available, have contributed to the complexity in users making investment decisions. Orion Money is the winner of Delphi Digital’s hackathon.
The protocol is meant to be simple, elegant, accessible, and tailored to mass adoption — congruent with the Terra ecosystem’s broader vision.
Instead of competing with existing exchanges, Orion simply combines them into one decentralized platform. Thus, it simplifies the lives and decisions of users by offering them the best prices, lowest fees and access to assets across multiple centralized and decentralized exchanges. Essentially it can be referred to as an exchange aggregator (CEXes and DEXes).
With a vision of creating a cross-chain stablecoin bank, Orion protocol solves one of the largest issues in DeFi by aggregating the liquidity of the entire crypto market. It aims to be your one-stop destination for stablecoin saving, lending, and spending. It intends to include a suite of DeFi applications, each with a unique use case. Orion Saver is the first dApp within Orion’s cross chain stablecoin bank which functions as a cross-chain stablecoin savings protocol projected to convert sizeable volumes of stablecoins from other blockchains like USDT, USDC,DAI into $UST. It acts as a cross-chain savings protocol that allows users to access Anchor Protocol’s deposit yield rates without the need to leave other blockchain networks or performing anyswaps. How it happens is that Orion Saver’s smart contract places user’s stablecoin deposit into EthAnchor which then is exchanged into Wrapped UST and then bridged onto Terra depositing UST into Anchor.
Orion Money is currently managing and optimizing the EthAnchor gateway.
It thus solves the problem bringing diverse ERC-20 stablecoin market on Anchor and offering the high interest rate of 20% so far unheard of in the Eth world. It removes the complexities and the barriers of understanding a new ecosystem, saves on expensive gas and swap fee or the associated slippage.
It sets to provide an interoperable solution between Terra and other blockchains to bridge the different silos of the blockchain world.
For more info, check out the official website.
ApolloDAO
With Crypto and Defi being pegged as the future of finance, Terra has witnessed tremendous growth in the recent past. Several developers and entrepreneurs have commenced building on the Terra blockchain which is testimony to its exponential growth. The rapid growth of Terra ecosystem with protocols like Anchor, Mirror, and other upcoming projects has created a whole lot of space and opportunities.
Apollo DAO fills exactly that space by introducing a DeFi yield optimization solution aimed to simplify, automate and maximize yield earning opportunities. Apollo DAO made it to the second position at The Delphi Digital Hackathon, emerging as one of the most innovative projects. Like so many other Terra protocols, Apollo DAO is built for DeFi users, by DeFi users and it aligns itself with the broader mission of making DeFi more accessible. It is a community-driven project aimed to increase the yield farming experience of both crypto and non-crypto users alike.
Apollo DAO’s first product will be its auto-compounding vaults.The end game is to create a holistic cross-chain Yield Optimization and Automated Treasury Management Platform. Towards recognizing the need for cross-chain interoperability, it has its eyes set on multi-chain feature. In the long run each blockchain will build towards specialized solutions and as such seamless integration and communication between all will be ever needed. Apollo DAO will be looking to build tools and products aimed at value transfers across these different chains. In order to meet its long term vision Apollo DAO will create a Treasury managed by the Apollo DAO team in order to fund sufficient runway for the continuous development of the platform and various other products. It also aims to build Apollo DAO Warchest which will receive 99% of the total revenue while the remaining 1% will be donated to Angel Protocol. The team will keep looking out for newer opportunities with the growing Warchest through seed funding to capital deployment on other chains like Solana and Polkadot.
Apollo DAO will be launching a 3 year bootstrapping campaign for the Warchest by distributing 50% of all Apollo tokens to the community in return for staking assets and generating yield. A percentage of that yield will go towards the Warchest. Users will earn a yield on underlying LP assets as well as additional yield through Apollo tokens. As per the latest information, Auto-compounding vaults will be the first products, currently being audited and will be launched shortly.
For more info, check out their medium account.
StarTerra
In a sea of launchpads, StarTerra is aiming for the sky by changing the way launchpads operate in the Defi ecosystem.
For any project finding support and funds are always critical which means a careful selection of the IDO platform. StarTerra aims to be the first gamified launchpad that will support projects in raising capital with a unique combination of guaranteed & lottery based prize pools. It is the second launchpad on the Terra Network to Pylon and gamification is what sets them apart. It is based on the lines of Polkastarter or Duckstarter.
The founder of StarTerra introduced the gamification aspect to combat the struggle associated with creating buying pressure and to increase social media engagement with the projects. StarTerra makes the process of fundraising exciting and engaging by using a special tier-based system creating different factions. There are two forms of participation — lottery & guaranteed winning, depending on the number of STT tokens held by the users. Each one of these factions has a portion of the allocated amount that is guaranteed to them and a portion that is lottery based except for the first tier which is entirely lottery based and the last tier which is guaranteed.
STT is the deflationary utility and governance token. The project also aims to provide farming function through Anchor Protocol like most other Terra projects. On July 26, StarTerra announced to distribute 33 percent of $STT Genesis to Anchor Protocol borrowers.
For more info, check out the official website.
This would have exposed you all to these amazing projects that are trying to do so many different things on Terra providing innovative solutions to so many existing problems trying to bridge the gaps.
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