From the 20 projects most supported by Gitcoin, we see the overlooked areas of DeFi and NFTs

This article is an original piece by Chain Catcher, authored by Loners Liu.

The 15-day Gitcoin Round 9 donation event is just two days away from concluding. Looking back at the previous eight rounds of donation events, Gitcoin has already delivered a total of $7 million in donations to over 1,400 important projects in the Web3 ecosystem.

Gitcoin's products are also continuously iterating. In Round 6, some user interface improvements were made to reduce the difficulty of contributing to projects, and a mobile verification mechanism was introduced to make it harder to create fake accounts. In the seventh round experiment, second-layer protocol payments were added, using "Zk-Rollup" to reduce transaction fees and facilitate decentralized identity verification.

In terms of fundraising methods, Gitcoin adopts a "quadratic" funding model, where the more people participate in donations, the better the matching effect; at the same time, small donations are well matched. This fundraising method means that projects with the most community support (in terms of the number of contributors) will receive the largest portion of the matching pool, fully reflecting the significance of community decision-making and allowing Grant-funded projects to meet the original intention of adding value to the community.

Therefore, Chain Catcher has ranked these projects based on the number of contributors (according to the statistics at the time of publication), from which we can see the unmet needs in the DeFi world and the imaginative NFT ideas.

If you still don't know how to donate to projects on Gitcoin, you can read our previous tutorial: Super Detailed Gitcoin Donation Guide, ZkSync Interaction Done in One Go, which we believe will be helpful to you.

1. Ethereum Swarm

Supported by 2,340 contributors

Website: https://swarm.ethereum.org/

Introduction: Swarm is a decentralized content storage and distribution service, which can be viewed as a CDN that distributes content over the internet. You can run a Swarm node and connect to the Swarm network just like running an Ethereum node.

It is similar to BitTorrent and can be compared to IPFS, using ETH as a reward incentive. Files are broken down into chunks, distributed, and stored by participating volunteers. Nodes that store and serve chunks receive ETH as compensation from those needing storage and retrieval services. The team aims to create a peer-to-peer storage and service solution that is always on, fault-tolerant, and censorship-resistant. Creating an economic incentive system within Swarm will facilitate the payment and transfer of resource exchange value.

2. POAP

Supported by 2,294 contributors

Website: http://poap.xyz

Introduction: POAP is a proof of attendance protocol that serves as a participation proof NFT, allowing badges to be distributed to conference participants, which can incentivize more people to attend the event.

Since 2019, POAP has started issuing badges. They initially launched during the ETHDenver 2019 hackathon to build a protocol for creating non-fungible crypto badges. These badges can be commemorative, collectible, and tradable. Holding a POAP in your wallet for more than 15 days, once verified, can increase your credibility by 5%.

3. APY Vision

Supported by 1,673 contributors

Website: https://apy.vision

Introduction: APY.vision is a liquidity mining data analysis tool that can calculate liquidity mining yields and impermanent loss across multiple DEXs such as Uniswap, Balancer, 1inch, and Sushiswap. It aims to help liquidity providers track their holdings in liquidity pools, maximizing LP yields and minimizing losses.

To calculate the highest yield pool each week, APY.vision uses the average annual percentage yield (APY) over the last 7 days and the impermanent loss from the past week to compute the total average return. It is important to note that the pools being compared must have a minimum size of $5 million.

4. NFTE

Supported by 1,616 contributors

Website: https://nfte.app

Introduction: NFTE allows you to introduce any ERC-721 protocol NFT into your website and software, dedicated to bringing the Metaverse into Web 2.0.

5. Swivel Finance

Supported by 1,578 contributors

Website: https://swivel.finance

Introduction: Swivel Finance, formerly known as DeFiHedge, is a new decentralized protocol that supports fixed-rate loans and interest rate derivatives. Interest rate derivatives are among the most liquid financial products globally, and Swivel Finance brings this concept into the crypto world. It simplifies the entire trading process, fundamentally reduces smart contract risks, enhances capital efficiency, and leverages a large and growing liquidity pool. It does not rely on oracle services and cannot liquidate users while utilizing the liquidity of Compound and Aave.

6. ZeroPool

Supported by 1,532 contributors

Website: https://github.com/zeropoolnetwork

Introduction: Zero Pool is a platform for completely anonymous and untraceable transactions on Ethereum, using ZK's Ethereum anonymous pool, low transaction fees, atomic swaps, and universal anonymous integration.

The team states that ZeroPool is an advanced privacy solution, better than other mixing tools, allowing users to hide amounts, sources of funds, and target addresses from any external observer while storing or executing exchanges of ETH and any ERC-20 tokens. ZeroPool will consist of two parts: smart contracts that combine zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and unspent transaction outputs (UTXO), along with a Chrome browser plugin wallet using public-private key pairs generated by the BabyJubJub elliptic curve. The project originated from a hackathon at ETH Boston and received a $25,000 grant from ConsenSys.

7. EtherDrops

Supported by 1,520 contributors

Website: https://t.me/EtherDROPS_bot

Introduction: EtherDrops is a tracking bot that supports both Ethereum and Binance Chain, capable of tracking any wallet address you want, as well as changes in liquidity pools like Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Balancer. It can also track token trading volumes and prices on platforms like Uniswap or Sushiswap, along with gas fee alerts, making it very practical for investors and traders.

8. Umbra

Supported by 1,497 contributors

Website: https://github.com/ScopeLift/umbra-protocol

Introduction: The Umbra protocol is a protocol that supports invisible payments on Ethereum, enabling privacy-protected transactions where only the sender and receiver know the identity of the recipient. It is used for payments between two entities and comes with a set of different privacy trade-offs (i.e., different considerations). Umbra does not break the link between the sender and receiver addresses but makes that link meaningless. Everyone can know which address funds are sent to, but they cannot know who controls that address.

In addition to these features, the Umbra protocol has some very interesting characteristics, such as significantly lower gas costs because it does not require verification of any advanced cryptographic techniques on-chain; all transactions are simple transfers. Furthermore, it allows ETH and any ERC20 tokens to be transferred privately without relying on a large anonymous pool.

9. Circles UBI

Supported by 1,354 contributors

Website: https://joincircles.net/

Introduction: UBI stands for Universal Basic Income, which refers to a regular, unconditional allowance that all citizens receive to help them cover living expenses. Practice has shown that UBI programs can indeed reduce hospitalization rates, crime rates, and poverty rates. UBI programs are generally understood as government subsidies. The development of cryptocurrency allows us to implement this in a global, trustless, and democratized way, without needing government involvement.

In Circles, each new participant issues UBI payments in their personal currency form. This token starts off worthless, and project participants need to trust the tokens issued by others and be willing to exchange them, establishing trust relationships similar to those in real life.

The value of a specific personal token can be measured by how many other accounts trust it. Compared to those who have already established trusted relationships in the network, new users have tokens of lower value. Over time, as new users create more trust relationships, their tokens become more valuable. Additionally, Circles plans to increase the token supply at a rate of 5% per year.

10. clr.fund

Supported by 1,294 contributors

Website: https://clr.fund

Introduction: clr.fund is a quadratic funding application for Ethereum public goods that requires no permission or trust. Quadratic financing is a mechanism design specifically discussed in a 2018 paper by Vitalik Buterin, Harvard's Zoë Hitzig, and Microsoft's Glen Weyl titled "Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds," aimed at addressing inefficiencies in funding public goods. clr.fund aims to maintain the anonymity of donations, free from regulatory constraints.

11. Green NFTs

Supported by 1,291 contributors

Website: https://www.artnome.com/greennfts

Introduction: Green NFTs is dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of NFT minting, as Ethereum's PoW consensus mechanism leads to significant energy consumption during mining. Green NFTs promotes and incentivizes the development of community-driven open-source solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of NFTs in the short and medium term while developing long-term solutions through private organizations.

12. Shenanigan

Supported by 1,203 contributors

Website: http://www.she.energy/

Introduction: Shenanigan is a social token platform issued by athletes, redefining what it means to be an athlete on the internet. Shenanigan (also known as SHE) is a decentralized NFT and ERC20 platform aimed at allowing athletes to tokenize their achievements in a performance-driven collectible economy. Fans will be able to directly invest in and empower their favorite athletes and their achievements.

13. DAppNode

Supported by 1,168 contributors

Website: https://dappnode.io

Introduction: DAppNode empowers people by creating simple, transparent systems for hosting DApps, crypto assets, IPFS, etc., on P2P clients. Running a node on one's own machine requires significant time to stay synchronized and updated. DAppNode, developed by WHG members, helps everyone enter the world of decentralized internet.

14. BeyondNFT

Supported by 1,162 contributors

Website: https://beyondnft.io

Introduction: BeyondNFT is a real-time network interactive media NFT that supports dynamic content such as interactive art and games, built on the ERC721 or ERC1155 standards, allowing users to create NFTs defined using HTML/CSS and JavaScript code.

15. rekt.news

Supported by 1,128 contributors

Website: https://rekt.eth.link/

Introduction: rekt.news is an anti-censorship content platform built on IPFS for DeFi news practitioners, founded by Julien Bouteloup. An increasing number of anonymous contributors upload information there, and the platform has accumulated over 20,000 subscribers. In addition to providing AI-generated data sources for the community, rekt also features independent analysis and investigative journalism, as well as the rekt leaderboard, where you can find many reviews of attack incidents.

16. Tonic Swirl

Supported by 1,123 contributors

Website: https://tonic.finance

Introduction: Implementing decentralized DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) on Ethereum can lead to high gas fees, especially when the order size is small. Finding a balance between optimal execution and transaction gas fees is challenging. To address this issue, Tonic Swirl has created a peer-to-peer DCA running on Ethereum L1.

Swirl works by allowing users to create an order where they can specify the timing of trades, the amount to buy or sell each time, and the number of occurrences. After approving the contract and depositing the desired amount into the Swirl treasury, the protocol will execute purchases on behalf of the user at the appropriate times. Swirl integrates and tracks all users' balances and allows incentivized holders to plan single swaps based on predefined times and amounts. Any user can edit or close their account at any time. The purchased tokens can also be withdrawn at any time or automatically withdrawn when closing an active account. Currently, only DAI, Badger, and WBTC transactions are supported.

17. BrightID

Supported by 1,116 contributors

Website: https://www.brightid.org/

Introduction: BrightID is an anonymous social identity network, with a beta version app available on Android and iOS platforms. BrightID addresses the issue of identity uniqueness by creating and analyzing social graphs, allowing users to prove their unique identity to applications without using multiple accounts, and applications do not need to collect personally identifiable information or collaborate with centralized organizations, thus preserving user privacy.

BrightID serves as an identity gateway for global citizens, similar to a social security number or other government identifiers, helping you qualify for benefits. Unlike government identifiers, it provides online security, privacy, and protection of personal data.

18. DAOSquare

Supported by 1,032 contributors

Website: https://www.daosquare.io

Introduction: DAOSquare was born in the Ethereum community MetaCartel, dedicated to building an incubator for the Web3 era, aiming to become the Y Combinator of the Web3 era. DAOSquare plans to launch the core components of the incubator in April this year, based on a DAO-based incubation system, and initiate the first global incubation program.

19. Nethermind

Supported by 1,000 contributors

Website: https://nethermind.io/

Introduction: Nethermind is the fastest Ethereum .NET client and a decentralized data market analysis tool, serving as a powerful tool for DeFi data streams and reports.

The project was launched in 2017 by Tomasz Kajetan Stanczak and received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation in August 2018. All of its products run directly on the Ethereum mainnet and use native ETH + DAI, aiming to build Ethereum solutions for developers and enterprises, providing the highest quality software.

Nethermind's flagship product is a complete implementation of the Ethereum client in .NET core language, which is an open-source project. The Nethermind team has also created the Nethermind data market, API market, and an API management mechanism based on blockchain solutions (an excellent tool for accessing DeFi data streams and reports). Additionally, for those looking to build Ethereum blockchain solutions, Nethermind offers consulting services.

20. OpenEthereum

Supported by 968 contributors

Website: https://openethereum.github.io/

Introduction: OpenEthereum is an Ethereum client written in Rust, fast, lightweight, and powerful. The former Ethereum client Parity officially released its first version 3.0 after renaming to "OpenEthereum," with Gnosis becoming one of the project's maintainers and developers.

For OpenEthereum version 3.0, the code license has been updated to GPLv3, a significant amount of account data has been removed to reduce database size, and code cleanup and dependency updates have been made. Parity has been developing and maintaining the Ethereum client Parity Ethereum since 2015, implemented in Rust.

Summary

Looking at these 20 projects, they cover almost all the latest hot directions, from DeFi, NFT, UBI, privacy, trading to digital identity, infrastructure, etc. Another trend is that more and more projects are focusing on product implementation, such as the decentralized content storage and distribution service Swarm, the proof of attendance POAP, the liquidity mining data analysis tool APY Vision, EtherDrops which operates bots on Ethereum and Binance Chain, and BrightID as an anonymous social identity network.

These projects are often based on actual needs, many of which have passed the validation stage, and most have their own users, increasingly resembling early internet startup products. Of course, there are also some looking to the future, such as projects focusing on the carbon emissions generated by UBI and NFTs.

Regardless, Ethereum has been running for 6 years, while quadratic funding has only been around for 2 years. Discussions about public goods funding will certainly continue, and there is still a lot of software to be developed and improved in the crypto world. Let's look forward to platforms like Gitcoin sparking more innovation and ideas.