Leading Europe-based Blockchain Startups
Europe is witnessing an unprecedented scale and pace of development in the blockchain space currently, evident from the fact that it is now the world’s largest crypto market, which has received over $1 trillion worth of cryptocurrency over the last year (July 2020 – June 2021), as per a report by Chainalysis. With more and more funds pouring into the European blockchain market, the number of prominent and promising projects is increasing as well. Whether it’s in Gaming or NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), DeFi (Decentralized Finance) or CeFi (Centralized Finance), these projects are on a mission to conquer it all. While we have already introduced you to several leading global players in the blockchain space, today we will introduce you to some of the most exciting upcoming Europe-based blockchain startups / projects.
Liquity
The first project to grace this list is a decentralized borrowing and lending protocol built on Ethereum. As the name suggests, well, kind of suggests, Liquity aims to provide interest-free “Liquidity” at fingertips. The borrowing mechanism differs from other DeFi services in a manner that users can draw loans at 0% interest rates by only paying a one-time small borrowing fee upfront, hence avoiding getting burdened by floating interest rates throughout the borrowing period. The loans are drawn against ETH (used as collateral) and paid out in LUSD, Liquity’s fully backed stablecoin pegged to US dollar. The platform also hosts various kinds of high-yield staking programs rewarding stakers in ETH and LQTY tokens.
Fantom
It won’t be wrong to say that Fantom, along with Solana, Avalanche and Terra (LUNA), is one of the most promising layer-1 projects. With Fantom’s native coin reaching new all-time highs, the question arises what exactly is fueling the massive growth of the ecosystem? The answer lies in the unparalleled scalability and speed offered by Fantom. Scalability and speed are big issues in the crypto industry, with even the most prominent players struggling to keep up with the volume and pace of transactions resulting in network congestion and ultimately soaring transaction fees. Fantom, with its aBFT Consensus Protocol, Lachesis, not only addresses both these issues with ease by expediting thousands of transactions at extremely low cost in a matter of seconds, but it does it without sacrificing the core principles of blockchain technology, decentralization, and security. Therefore, many see Fantom as a possible solution to the “Blockchain trilemma”.
Concordium
Concordium can be termed as the first permissionless public blockchain solution for businesses. It is a product aimed at penetrating the market of centralized entities and institutions that are willing to deploy blockchain but are wary of anonymity, which is an inherent part of distributed ledger technology. Concordium aims to tackle this issue of privacy and security with its built-in ID protocol where users can fully trust the identity of the people using the network. This provides the corporations with much-needed transparency while allowing them to adhere to the regulatory requirements. Concordium also addresses the need for privacy for enterprises by deploying a zero-knowledge proof mechanism. Concordium’s whole project aims at building an adaptive ecosystem catering to entities interested in using blockchain within the boundaries set by the state regulatory and compliance guidelines.
Sorare
‘Play-To-Earn’ NFT models are currently the talk of the town within the crypto world. Sorare is a Fantasy Football Digital Card game merging the experiences of club football and NFTs. What exactly is Sorare’s gaming model that has a valuation of a whopping $4.3 billion? Let’s find out. Sorare lets users purchase valuable tokenized digital cards (NFTs) of their favorite professional football players for building their fantasy teams, which are then evaluated weekly, based on real-life performances of the respective players. Online players with a maximum number of points are entitled to win rewards in the form of crypto as well as rare NFTs. All the cards and rewards (NFTs) are freely tradable, presenting an investment and trading opportunity alongside the experience of managing your very own fantasy teams. Sorare currently has over 200 clubs officially listed on its website.
COTI
COTI is a decentralized payment network solution with the native digital currency of the same name “COTI”, an acronym for “Currency of the Internet”. COTI believes that even though cryptocurrencies have penetrated the investment markets efficiently, they are yet to enjoy mass-scale adoption in the retail payments sector due to several issues pertaining to the complexity and lack of scalability of blockchains. COTI, with its unique Consensus model, Trustchain, a DAG (directed acyclic graph) protocol, aims to enable enterprises to build their own payment networks and digitize any currency. COTI can process over 100k transactions per second (TPS) which is way faster compared to the average TPS of other Blockchain networks.
Limechain
Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Limechain is a leading blockchain and DLT consulting and development firm advising startups and corporates to adopt blockchain solutions. From assisting entities in identifying how blockchain can transform their businesses to formulating plans for implementing these solutions, from building public/private blockchains to developing smart contracts and Dapps (Decentralized Applications), and from creating DeFi products to assisting with ICOs, the firm hosts a diverse range of services. Limechain has already helped over 100 clients with blockchain-related projects, which makes them one of the biggest and fastest-growing consulting companies in the DLT space.
Paraswap
Paraswap is a DEX (Decentralized Exchange) aggregator, pooling and sourcing liquidity from multiple DEXs and DeFi services based on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and Avalanche under one comprehensive interface. Its unique market-making algorithm sources the best available swapping rates from multiple decentralized liquidity platforms and provides users with the same for their trade pairs. Paraswap even provides the advantage of splitting the trade among various routes to facilitate the most optimal and cost-efficient transactions. The USP of Paraswap lies in making it convenient for the users to discover all trade rates on one single platform instead of sourcing the same through numerous DEXs supporting different networks. This mechanism allows the traders to save both time and effort. Users can directly interact with the platform via connecting their crypto wallets on the Paraswap web interface.
Polkastarter
One of the gems of the Polkadot ecosystem, Polkastarter is among the biggest launchpads in the crypto space. It is a decentralized exchange built for cross-chain and fixed-swap token pools and auctions, helping promising early-stage crypto projects in raising funds for initial development via IDOs (Initial DEX offerings). It helps in connecting the community by assisting the promising projects accessing funds through established crypto fraternity while providing an early-adoption advantage to the crypto investors. By the time of writing this article, Polkastarter has helped some 80 projects in raising a total of approximately $16.5 million while accounting for over 20,000 participants. POLS, which is the native token of Polkastarter, is required for participating in IDOs on the platform.
Conclusion
The blockchain market, particularly in Europe, has been witnessing the emergence of a plethora of inspiring and promising projects. These startups and companies are focused on reshaping countless sectors and industries to ensure that the benefit and power of the new internet, often called the “Web 3”, is shared with the masses. The European blockchain scene has something to offer to everyone, and what we have witnessed so far or are witnessing currently, is just the tip of the iceberg.