ENVELOP’s competitors. Who are they, and what are they doing?

This is the translated version of the original article written by Владимир Попов

Many people think that a competitive market is an anxious place to be. In fact, I think you need to feel anxious when there are no competitors.

Apple didn’t come up with the iMac or iPhone themselves. In reality, they “took” the interface from Xerox, put some issued parts together only then, implemented what many others have attempted previously. The only distinguishing difference is that Apple did it well, better than the rest.

Qiwi did the same in the era of electronic currencies in Russia. Qiwi was a lot more convenient than other giants like Yandex.Money & WebMoney and were much more user-friendly than the niche Z-Payment or PerfectMoney. Yes, Qiwi also had a gray development but let’s be honest, this “feature” remains with the giants.

A similar thing happened with Branson’s companies. Richard always gave the market the best products, but that happened solely because the giants failed to do so; they did it poorly. From what’s closer to us, we can recall Nginx. Apache simply lost in many respects, and this is one side of the coin.

Another thing worth mentioning is that ENVELOP does not believe in direct competition between open, decentralized projects that can work with any anonymous entities, including entities in an autonomous mode of value transfer.

In this article, I will tell you about the projects close to us in spirit, functionality, and implementation. ENVELOP refuses to call them competitors in the direct sense. We believe that this would deprive us of the synergistic effect that is possible in p2p systems.

Emblem vault

What the project shows on the first page:

1. It can be used to combine various tokens into one
2. Create tradable pools (DeFi segment)
3. Make any token private
4. You can collect portfolios from tokens

Another exciting feature is token hedging through the creation of value stores.

If we follow the logic of the LP of the project, it turns out that: “The Emblem Vault allows anyone to create” ownership of wallets, “including any number of types of tokens.” At the same time, Emblem V. “plans to support all blockchains within reason.”

Perhaps the most exciting feature is hidden in the main functionality, where it says that “assets locked inside the Emblem Vault NFT can be traded without the need for wrapping.” Yes, what you heard, without the wrapping operation!

In this sense, it is worth paying attention to the name of the token — the Circuits of Value, or Value Chains, which explains the primary approach of the project. In fact, this is the ERC-1155 standard but deployed to a full service.

Don’t believe me? Let’s compare.

Example from EV:

“One collector has hundreds of NFT pieces of art that they acquired from Ethereum through Opensea. Another user has self-collected NFTs. Both can create storage on Polygon at a meager cost and send their NFTs to the created storage. [That being said] both users can go to the Matic marketplace and sell their NFTs inexpensively, or they can use the Emblem Vault NFT2NFT feature and exchange one NFT for another one directly. Both users save on extremely high Ethereum gas fees and have significantly lower NFT trading costs. ”

Let me quote the part regarding the ERC-1155.

“ERC-1155 is a new token standard that was created on17/06/2018 by the Enjin Coin team. Thanks to ERC-1155, you can send any number of items to one or more recipients IN ONE TRANSACTION! ”. More precisely: “[ERC-1155] allows you to issue multiple tokens in one contract:

• tokens in one contract can be fungible and non-fungible at the same time;
• supports atomic swaps;
• supports batch transactions;
• not all transactions need to wait for the end of the block.

At the same time, EV’s cross-chain approach is the same as ENVELOP’s:

• User 1 has bitcoins (BTC) but wants to receive ETH;
• User 2 has ETH but needs bitcoins;
• User 1 places bitcoins in the vault;
• User 2 puts ETH into storage;

Both users “exchange” their repositories, claim rights to them and retrieve their contents. Users have exchanged BTC for ETH.

You can test the project application by following the link https://emblem.finance/featured.

For now, let’s move on to the next “competitor.”

Summary:

Blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum.

Features: Anonymous, encrypted transmission via NFT.

Genesis: 2020–2021 (main product outside NFT — 2016).

Github: https://github.com/EmblemCompany.

Wrap Protocol

The first and the main distinguishing feature of the project is that it is being developed on Tezos. However, it is positioned as a decentralized bridge between this blockchain and Ethereum.

The offsite tells us the following:

“Wrap [Protocol] users issue wTokens (wrapped tokens), which are representations of ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens on the Tezos blockchain. After that, wTokens can be used on the Tezos blockchain, and their value is tied to the original tokens. Wrap is a decentralized protocol… ”. The cross-chain mechanics here are the same as the ones presented by ENVELOP. The operation is described even more precisely in the WP: “Wrap allows anyone to wrap ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain into FA2 tokens on Tezos, and then use them in the Tezos-native DeFi protocols”.

Actually, the support of tokens speaks for itself:

Cross-chain mechanics are not unique but described quite accurately in WP:

“The bigger problem: decentralized interoperability of different blockchains. The liquidity problem we are trying to solve on Tezos is just a special case of a broader problem — how to achieve decentralized interoperability between two different blockchains. In simple terms, a wrap is a way to turn any blockchain A into a pegged sidechain of block B. Thus, the consensus mechanism and specific infrastructure of blockchain A can be used to use assets or information stored in both A and B. ”

At the same time, an interesting term included “a linked sidechain is a sidechain, the assets of which can be imported from other chains and returned to them.” The main emphasis should be on “returned to them” because reverse transactions are the most difficult multi / cross-chain technologies.

In the WP, the project described several approaches that ENVELOP advocates for, challenging such as cross- and multi-chain mechanics:

1. Complexity;
2. Security;
3. Transaction costs;
4. Speed;
5. Dependencies.

Actually, it’s hard to disagree here. Thus, this project copies only the part of the ENVELOP-as-protocol functionality.

Blockchains: Tezos, Ethereum.

Features: work through the Oracle with the votes of untrusted participants.

Genesis: first quarter of 2021.

Github: https://github.com/bender-labs.

Shall we move on?

Charge Particles

Perhaps the most obvious of our “competitors,” therefore … we have already described it in a separate article: https://teletype.in/@menaskop/Charged_Particles.

Here I will note some general key points:

Blockchain: Ethereum.

Features: the ability to create “charge” (analog of ENVELOP — Collateral).

Genesis: first quarter of 2021.

Github: https://docs.charged.fi.

Other projects

Of course, we are aware of NFT20, NIFTEX, NFTX, Unicly, and other startups. We conducted complete market research of NFT projects related to those positions that ENVELOP (NIFTSY) implements. These abstracts are presented in a separate article: https://hub.forklog.com/meta-analiz-rynka-nft-proekty-problemy-perspektivy/.

In the meantime, let’s go to the last section:

Conclusions

1. It became evident to many that cross-chain mechanics, on the one hand securing NFTs and other assets and on the other hand, are understandable steps in the evolution of crypto-finance. In this regard, the ENVELOP team is glad that they are not alone and that our ideas have ALREADY been tested in practice.
2. However, there are also significant differences between our project and its counterparts.

I will list the main differences:

1. ENVELOP is built on a product-based micro-DAO architecture, which assumes the approach I called Farming 2.0. Farming 2.0 is when you share not only the income (“profit”) but also expenses. Without this approach, the implementation of cases in the b2b segment becomes very expensive and not very promising.
2. ENVELOP itself is a super-DAO, each element of which (Protocol, Oracle, Index, and Token) can be supplemented with the functionality that “competitors” implement. Yes, we initially relied on aggregation, and, as you can see, for a good reason.
3. ENVELOP contains not just an Oracle but a decentralized Oracle (due to the implementation of item 1 above): this approach allows you to eliminate many difficulties both at the architecture level (say, when tokenizing payment channels and/or roll-ups) and specific implementations.
4. ENVELOP also assumes the presence of the Index. We create a closed cycle of the insurance (or, more correctly, hedging) the user’s risks at each step.
5. Don’t have any money, but you want to take NFT in rent for the game? The product part of the micro-DAO allows you to do this.
6. Have money? Then there are several situations:

• Working with an asset — Protocol level;
• Working with an asset and a project — Oracle level;
• Working with the market and/or its segments and / niches — Index level.

7. From a technical point of view, ENVELOP cannot go beyond what is allowed by DRS (decentralized and/or distributed systems), so several mechanics intersect:

• Cross-chain due to the turnover/deployment of assets in different DRS;
• Accumulation of value in collateral storage;
• etc

And yet, I see the power of ENVELOP (NIFTSY) in a non-trivial architecture — technical and product. We will talk about her next time, but for now -

Until the next time!