The term “smart contract” was first proposed by American computer scientist Nick Szabo. It refers to “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises”. Prior to the existence of blockchain technology, vending machines are mentioned as the oldest piece of technology that resembles the implementation of smart contracts.
In 2014 smart contracts re-emerged in Ethereum white paper. Vitalik and his team had a bold idea to bring programmability to blockchain. This opened the door to endless imaginability to a truly decentralized internet, and caught the attention of developers worldwide. Since Ethereum mainnet launched in 2015, this year marks the 5th year of smart contract functionality in the blockchain industry. Today smart contract development has never been more active as projects from all over the world are trying to solve real world problems with this young technology.
As the end of 2020 approaches, we revisited projects that are pushing today’s boundaries with the possibilities of smart contracts. While they are on long term missions to revolutionize various industries, let’s hear what their biggest achievements this year are.
Vigor / Peter Chen
“After a year of development, Vigor Protocol finally launched our application this year. While there are other borrow and lend DeFi projects, Vigor tightly integrates financial engineering innovations in our core code. This makes Vigor more similar to mainstream financial products than different, and our platform can better withstand market volatility and maintain solvency.
On the product strategy side, Vigor Protocol is not a for-profit organization. We offer the lowest borrow and lend interest rate differentials. This puts Vigor in the optimal position to service the entire crypto community. We also decided to not get into the DeFi craze this year. By not offering insanely high farming yields, we instead focus on the long term sustainability of our platform. Vigor is a client-first and long-term oriented DeFi platform.”
Vigor Protocol deploys financial engineering innovations to enhance DeFi lending platform security and usability.
Greymass / Aaron Cox
“The most significant piece of 2020 for our team has been establishing the EOSIO Signing Request (ESR) protocol and the technologies associated with it. Anchor Wallet, as an end-user product, has been the primary vehicle for developing and showcasing this method of wallet and external application communication. It’s our belief that this technology stack will help drive adoption in the space by simplifying what most users consider a “wallet” by making it as easy as a modern 2-factor authentication device. We are reading the 3rd revision of the protocol now and over the course of the year have developed a significant amount of tooling to allow any developer, whether building a wallet or application, to easily build modern blockchain-enabled applications.”
Greymass is a team of researchers, developers, and blockchain experts, passionate about the positive impact decentralized technologies will have on our society.
Consortium / Vladislav Hramtsov
“Most significant milestone has been the completion of the proof of concept for Consortium. Proof of concept from technical and usability perspective. From a technical perspective we have shown that it is possible to use oracles in order to validate various token holdings of our users. Which after validation can be used to provide signals to the stakeholders of organizations (dApps) the tokens belong to. From a usability perspective, the concept was proven when we started hearing custodians of one of the communities (Vigor Protocol), during their weekly governance calls, refer to results of the polls on Consortium to back up their arguments and convey the communities sentiment. ”
Consortium is a decentralized, on-chain, incentive based governance layer for any social organization.
Chintai / Ryan Bethem
“Chintai has built an on-chain compliance engine that is capable of executing regulatory requirements in real time for issuance and secondary trading of digital assets. It’s geo-graphically sensitive. This means smart contracts determine the compliance requirements for a given user based on the jurisdiction they reside and apply controls accordingly.
The technology can be used in a variety of ways. Securities, bonds, stablecoins, utility tokens, etc. Our primary goal is to revolutionize capital markets. The amount of overhead just from regulatory requirements alone is exorbitantly expensive when compared to the efficiency of DLT. By bringing down these barriers we believe the doors can open for SME’s that otherwise wouldn’t be able to raise capital and existing institutions can increase their margins substantially.
We’re currently in the process of applying for the Monetary Authority of Singapore FinTech sandbox express and actively recruiting institutions to participate. 2021 should be a very exciting year for us.”
Chintai offers institutional grade digital asset technology for global capital markets.
EarnBet / Jason
“Though EarnBet has seen dramatic player growth and hit new records over the course of the year, the most significant milestone, in my opinion, was initiating the first community vote in a huge step towards governance of the BET token and EarnBet platform by players and BET token holders.
This milestone comes in preparation for an expansion of the BET Gaming Network that will be happening around the end of this year. The planning and development has been underway for almost a year now, so we are excited to be so close to launch!”
EarnBet is the leading blockchain casino, having distributed over $8 million in profits to platform token holders to date.
WAX / William Quigley
“In 2020, WAX became the King of NFTs, with millions of dollars in primary sales and secondary sales taking place on WAX. Primary sales from partners, such as Topps, William Shatner and Atari, have immediately sold out, and many other brands will be launching on WAX soon. This was all made possible by the launch of WAX’s full suite of blockchain-based tools, such as the easy-to-use WAX Cloud Wallet, that make buying, selling and trading NFTs as simple as making any purchase on Amazon.com.”
WAX is the leader in the NFT space, having forged partnerships with household brands and created over 1 million NFT assets.
Emanate / Sean Gardner
“Approaching 5000 users, passing 1000 artists. We also launched our distribution offering which gets music out onto platforms like Spotify, collecting revenue from them and directing it back onchain.”
Emanate is a blockchain music streaming platform where smart contracts distribute streaming revenue to artists in real-time.
Bloks.io / Syed Jafri
“Bloks.io was acquired by Metal Pay in 2020, which has been a great experience for our team. We are now working at the forefront of enabling users to seamlessly onboard fiat into crypto, transfer crypto and use cryptocurrency inside applications.”
Bloks.io is the leading EOSIO blockchain explorer, offering unparalleled user experience.
FIO / Luke Stokes
“Though 2020 isn’t over yet, the thing I’m most excited about so far is the integration of the FIO Protocol into exchanges so users can buy and sell various cryptocurrencies without ever having to see a confusing, complicated public address. Bitmax allows for deposits using an address like luke@bitmaxfio and withdrawals to your personal address like luke@stokes. ChangeNOW let’s you swap currencies by providing you FIO address to send the funds to and initiates the transaction with a FIO Request right to your wallet so you send the exactly correct token on the right chain for the right amount to complete the swap. This works for all coins they support. I think that’s very exciting as we can now onboard users to cryptocurrency with a much more joyful experience.”
FIO Protocol simplifies blockchain experience so anyone can use crypto products.
Prospectors / Nazar Chervinskyy
“I have in mind two major milestones in the Prospectors development, and I just can’t decide which one is more important. So I’ll tell you about both of them.
We launched the Railway, the migration system between two blockchains — WAX and EOS, which provided a possibility of game assets transportation from one Prospectors land to another.
We launched the first Prospectors Boomtown. The temporary, limited in time (two months) game world in which players are working together to reach the joint goal. Only if they leave their own interest aside, working together, they will win a precious prize. If not, they’ll lose everything.
Those two are the most significant developments as for me, the most massive, for sure. Though in 2020 we’ve done much more!”
Prospectors is a MMORTS mining game, deployed on multiple blockchains. Players can transfer game world assets through IBC technology.
Ultra / David Hanson
“We’ve completed our blockchain protocol and are currently battle testing it with independent block producers.”
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing a variety of games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login.
Eva / Raphael Gaudreault
“We scaled to many cities and launched our direct delivery services that now 100+ businesses use. We now operate in 3 cities and reached many important milestones as a decentralized movement. The biggest challenge was the COVID-19 pandemic but we pursued growth even with it.”
Eva is a driver-owned ride sharing cooperative powered by blockchain technology.
pixEOS / Fred Nogueira
“The launch of its gallery with proprietary NFT technology, image and artist verification protocol and wireless solution for physical assets. ”
pixEOS provides the art experience of the future.
Unbiased / Sukesh Telda
“Unbiased has finished the alpha version and is now launching the commercial app.”
Unbiased fights ethical challenges in AI and big data using blockchain technology.
