A Quick Analysis of Shortlisted Chains

Dear Trolls,

If you have been keeping up with our updates, you would know that we are having an ongoing governance poll deciding on which chain OpenSwap would be deployed on next. If you haven’t staked by the time this article is released, then you’ve missed this voting window, but you can still voice your opinion in the OpenSwap Official Community to sway other fellow trolls.

This piece is targeted to help those who staked but are still unsure on which chain to vote for and those who simply want to know more about these chains. Here, we would compare and contrast the basics, the TVL, adoptions, future plans, as well as the potential competition on these chains.

Our hope is that after reading this piece you trolls would be able to make a more informed choice.

The Basics

These 3 are leading smart-contract capable blockchains, with Avax (C-chain) and Fantom being their own chain while Polygon is a side chain/layer 2 solution for Ethereum. The common benefits of these chains are very cheap gas fees and fast transactions. Therefore, they are gaining traction very quickly with them being 4th, 6th, and 7th in terms of TVL.

TVL

Last week, Avalanche’s TVL is almost the sum of the other 2 chains. However, things are changing rapidly. Fantom picked up 1.2b, increasing its lead over Polygon, which used to have a TVL on par with FTM. As it stands at the time of this post, Avalanche has a TVL of 11.32b while Fantom has 7.07b and Polygon has 5.44b.

For the movement of the TVL, the patterns of the 3 chains are rather different. Avalanche saw its growth gradually coming up since September last year. Polygon saw its spike in May and has been rather stable ever since. Fantom, on the other hand, has 2 spikes, once in October, from 1.6b to 5.75b, and once just now, from 5.24b to 7.78b. As for daily user count, Avalanche has 350k — 800k, Polygon has 400k — 600k, and Fantom has 60k but growing.

Adoption

Generally speaking, all 3 chains have pretty good adoption in the DeFi front. All 3 chains have some DeFi big names on them like Curve is on all 3 of them, AAVE is on Avalanche and Polyon, Yearn on Fantom, etc. However, there are relatively less successful native Polygon protocols in terms of TVL. Among the top 20, only 6 are native whereas on Avalanche it’s 10, and Fantom, 12. However, it made up for this by leading in the NFT front. Among the 3 chains, Polygon arguably has the thriving NFT scene.

More and more GameFi projects like Ember Sword Land and Sunflower Farmers are developing on Polygon. It also has additional adoption given that OpenSeas allows offers and listings on Polygon. Avalanche has a sprouting NFT scene with projects such as Penguin Fam, Party Animal, Firat, etc. Fantom is not doing that well in the NFT department compared to the other 2 chains.

Future Plans

Since the year is still young, they have yet to announce their road map for 2022. Therefore, here we would cover the biggest upcoming releases of these chains.

Avalanche seems to have the biggest catalyst with their launch of the subnet which allows users to essentially make their own chain by staking a certain amount of AVAX. They are expected to have some corporate clients.

Polygon has similar plans too. Last year, they acquired some scaling solutions and plan to integrate them in the future. Polygon also partnered up with Ernst & Young (EY) to develop enterprise sidechains and has plans for application-specific side chains.

Fantom has a planned but delayed development where they are partnering up with Binance, using their cloud to develop a ‘native cryptocurrencies exchange for FTM tokens. It is expected to list tokens such as Boo, Spirit, TOMB, MIM, etc. Since they claim it would support high-frequency trading (HFT) and have a deep liquidity, we suspect it would be an off-chain exchange.

Potential Competition

OpenSwap provides a broad spectrum of services. To rate potential competition, we will be separating them into zero-slippage trade, DEX Aggregator + Smart Hybrid Router, our upcoming single-asset crosschain bridge — Open Interchain Protocol, and Liquidity as a service (LaaS).

• Zero-Slippage Queues: We have yet to see any protocol to offer such innovative services. It is expected that there will be no competitors in this regard.
• DEX Aggregator + Smart Hybrid Router: There are existing established competitors on Polygon for this service. However, there seems to be less supply for such services on Avalanche and Fantom.
• Open Interchain Protocol: With chains this size, it is almost certain that there will be bridging services connecting them to other chains. Therefore, competition is almost inevitable. Even though there will be similar services, we have yet to see any bridge that uses our single-asset mechanism so it can differentiate from our potential competitors’ offerings. Still, competition is competition. We expect the toughest competition on Fantom where Multichain, a cross-chain router protocol, has over 46.7% of Dominance in TVL.
• Liquidity as a Service: Since the concept is so new and most experiments are taking place on Ethereum by the likes of OHM, Toke, Ondo, etc., there are relatively fewer competitors in this regard on these all 3 chains.

That’s it for now, Trolls. We hope after reading this article you will know a bit more about all these chains. Please remember to vote in our governance portal and voice your opinion in our community chats.

About OpenSwap

OpenSwap is the world’s first DEX providing on-chain swaps at zero slippage and multi-chain arbitrage opportunities. As the DeFi universe continues to expand, liquidity becomes increasingly scattered across multiple chains and the situation is poised to get worse as new chains emerge with individual DEXs on each chain. The OpenSwap team has been working for the past several months on building up a vision of a comprehensive one-stop DeFi hub that offers the best on-chain pricing, multi-chain arbitrage, and zero slippage, allowing users to experience revolutionary benefits through optimizing their trades through unique features such as Liquidity Queues, Hybrid Smart Router, and Open Interchain Protocol.

Medium | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | News | CoinMarketCap | CoinGecko | Youtube