Emerging Tokens - 8th March

BTC is under $39k and DeFi and NFT activities on Ethereum cooled down. Most of the projects selected this week outperformed BTC and ETH in the past 7 days. 

Last updated: 12pm GMT March 8 2022

Universal Market Access (UMA)

UMA provides an open-source framework for creating self-executing financial contracts. UMA’s optimistic oracle and contract templates enable developers to design flexible contracts. The optimistic oracle is “optimistic” because prices proposed by the oracle will be sent to the Data Verification Mechanism(DVM) only if there’s a dispute. Disputes are resolved 48  hours after UMA holders vote on the price of the asset at a specific time. UMA’s oracle design requires minimal on-chain transactions while ensuring the security. One of UMA’s most used templates is KPI Options. The options’ values depend on key performance indicators (KPIs) thus KPI Options incentivize stakeholders desired behaviors. KPI option holders redeem the underlying tokens only if set KPIs are met. Projects that use UMA’s oracle and contract templates include well-known protocols such as Sushiswap, PieDAO, Polymarket, Perpetual Protocol and more. One of the recent projects to leverage UMA’s KPI Options is Boba Network, an optimistic rollup solution for Ethereum. 

Following the increasing protocol adoption, UMA logged gains over 100% in the first week of March. UMA reached a 2022 high of $12.08 in early March recovering losses in recent months. The price has corrected since and is now trading at $8.25. The recent rally pushed the RSI up to 74 and is now at 57. 100 million tokens were created at launch and currently 65% of them are circulating. The UMA token is used to govern, request prices and vote on disputes. To incentivize honest actions of stakeholders, UMA implements an inflationary reward which is currently set at 0.05% of the total supply.

THORChain (RUNE)

THORChain is a cross-chain liquidity protocol that allows native swaps (not wrapped) across multiple blockchains. THORChain is also an independent blockchain based on Tendermint and Cosmos-SDK like Terra. THORChain is launching a synthetic feature to improve trading experiences - users will be able to swap between synthetic assets and redeem to native assets within 5 seconds with a cost of 0.02 $RUNE only. THORChain synths are 100% collateralized by liquidity pool - 50% backed by RUNE, 50% backed by the underlying asset.

THORChain supports blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum among others and has recently added support to Terra. This announcement drove up the price of RUNE by more than 70% on March 1st, showing an uptrend after an eventful year of hacks and the general crypto bear market. THORChain’s native token RUNE - used for governance, incentives and liquidity that supports the protocol - is currently trading at $4.34, almost 80% below its ATH hit in May 2021. The total supply of RUNE is 500 million and 44% of the supply is allocated to the protocol reserve to pay out to nodes and liquidity providers. RUNE’s RVI is currently at 26, yet to show a positive trading signal, but as THORChain is nearing its long-awaited mainnet launch, investors should keep an eye on THORChain’s growing ecosystem.

Harmony (ONE)

Harmony is a layer 1 blockchain protocol that has a high focus on cross-chain interoperability. Built by a strong team led by Dr. Stephen Tse, former employee of Google and Apple, Harmony has been steadily working on its fundamentals. Harmony can run Ethereum applications with 2 second transaction finality. Harmony achieves scalability by random state sharding. Harmony shards not only nodes but also the blockchain states. Harmony achieves network security via the Effective Proof of Stake (EPOS) mechanism. The EPOS mechanism avoids stake centralization as the design economically punishes higher ranked validators. The detailed formula that calculates the effective stake, on which block rewards are based, can be found here. 

Harmony has launched several cross-chain bridges that support Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. More than $420 million assets are on those bridges. Harmony’s Bitcoin bridge also went live in February this year (mainnet beta). Bluechip DeFi applications such as SushiSwap and Curve launched on Harmony. To develop its own DeFi ecosystem, Harmony has launched a $300 million grant programme in September. Harmony has $767 million in TVL and about 40% of the TVL belongs to DeFi Kingdoms, a Harmony native Play-to-Earn game. Harmony launched Bored Ape Yacht Club(BAYC) Passport to allow Ape holders to display their assets in DeFi Kingdoms.

Harmony’s native token ONE has a circulating supply of 11.8 billion and a total supply of 13.3 billion. Harmony’s annual reward rate is set at 441 million ONE and the transaction fees paid in ONE are burnt. As Harmony achieves a wider adoption, the transaction fees burnt will offset the 441M annual reward. ONE reached its ATH of $0.38 in October 2021 and corrected, then in January 2022 it went back up to $0.36, super close to its ATH. Since then, the price dipped by more than 60 and is now trading at $0.13. The RSI and RVI are low at 37 and 40 respectively. 

ICHI (ICHI)

Ichi helps any crypto project or community to mint their branded dollars as USD pegged stablecoins (oneToken) that are redeemable 1 for 1 for USDC. With branded dollars, users no longer need to sit with project tokens that have limited usability in the DeFi space. Projects can also grow their protocol value by locking away the project tokens. More than $45 million worth of oneToken has been minted so far and the crypto projects that have deployed ICHI stablecoins (oneTokens) include Uniswap, 1Inch, Fuse, Dodo, Filecoin, ShapeShift FOX and more. If you want to learn more about how to mint branded dollars, read our previous coverage on ICHI here. 

ICHI took an extra step into project-owned liquidity with its Angle Vaults. Angle Vaults are a Uniswap V3 liquidity management protocol that enables users to deposit single-sided assets to Uniswap V3. An Angel Vault creates a pool paired with project’s oneToken and the project token (or ICHI). ICHI’s Angel Vault only receives the oneToken from the pool, and uses that to provide buy-side liquidity on the ICHI platform. As the price of the project token (or ICHI) changes, the Angle Vault rebalances. This process makes sure - 1) the users are incentivized to contribute to the long term growth by minting oneToken (locking the project token) 2) LPs earn more Uni V3 fees and thus keep providing liquidity to the project pool. 

ICHI is the governance token of the Ichi protocol. ICHI governance should not be confused with each oneToken treasury governance. ICHI is hard capped at 5 million and more than 4.26 million ICHI tokens are currently circulating. ICH has a market cap of $82.8 million and is currently trading at $19.42. Compared to two months ago when we first introduced ICHI as an emerging token, the price of ICHI more than doubled! 

Biconomy (BICO)

Biconomy is a transaction relayer aimed at simplifying transactions on web3. Compared to web2, making transactions on web3 is not intuitive. There are gas fees involved and the fees are volatile. New user onboarding is complicated - from having to KYC, buy ETH on an exchange, download a wallet, to connect the wallet to DeFi applications. Biconomy helps developers create a more seamless user experience when interacting with web3. Biconomy’s infrastructure will take care of monitoring gas prices, transaction queues, and enable Dapps to pay gas fees for the users. 

Biconomy’s infrastructure has been used by notable projects and developers including Aavegotchi, Perpetual Protocol, Idle Finance, Andre Cronje and many others. Biconomy has also made it possible for Fantom dApps to integrate its infrastructure. A bluechip metaverse project The Sandbox tapped into Biconomy’s gasless transactions to help its users migrate their LAND tokens without paying for gas. 

Biconomy’s native ERC-20 token BICO acts as network fees, governance token and stakeholder incentives. The total supply of BICO is 1 billion and 38.12% is allocated to the community as incentives. BICO has a market capitalization of $147 million. BICO’s RSI and RVI of 38 and 43 respectively, not necessarily showing positive trading signals. However, github activities are busy and the project has more than 800k users.

Written by Jessica Kang for Novum Insights.

The Emerging Tokens Alert and the Novum Blog are based on entirely estimated historical returns which provide no guarantee, promise or calculation of potential future returns or losses. In addition, all of the assets displayed and shown on the website are highly volatile and risky.