This is the type of financial system that has been used over the years which you and I grew up knowing and using. It includes standard commercial and investment institutions where you can walk up to a physical structure (bank) to create an account, get loans, request overdrafts etc. However there are some limitations to this system that makes it unfair to the majority while beneficial to a selected group (government and elites). Some of these limitations are briefly stated below

*The system is governed by a centralized authority that makes the rules and regulations and also enforces them. Decisions made by this selected group are final and whether it is favorable or not everybody else has little choice but to adapt.

*Implementing innovations can be very difficult due to numerous barriers to get licenses and approval from the government (central authority).

*Getting entry into this system is quite tasking as you have to follow some protocols, like verifying identity and residential address, submitting documents upon documents to get loans, waiting for hours or even days to get approval on some of these services they render. This is a lot of stress in the 21st century.

*Transactions in this system can be slow due to intermediaries that carry out transactions which need to verify the authenticity before validating it.

The aim of DeFi is to create a new financial system that is independent of TradFi. It is a system that makes it possible for you to be your own bank, by making and changing the rules that govern your investment as you wish. DeFi can also be defined as ways of providing solutions to real life financial problems and building it on a blockchain. Some of the advantages of DeFi over TradFi are listed below

*Easy means of entry: It takes less than 5 mins to create a wallet address that is needed to perform transactions on a DeFi protocol.

* Accessibility: All you need to have to carry out transactions on a DeFi protocol is just an internet connection and your wallet where your funds are. There are no limitations as anyone from any part of the world can easily interact with DeFi protocols once these two criteria are in place.

*Transparency: Transactions are traceable and can be verified by anyone because no one can attempt to manipulate, modify, or delete any of the data which has been stored once the network has validated it.

Bhenji7

Explaining DeFi to newbies (Episode 2)

Cryptocurrency has been one of the biggest technological innovation in recent times, with a specific focus on decentralization. It has invented the possibility of executing financial transactions between two parties without the need for intermediaries to witness the exchange of assets in a trustless approach. Even though the growth of centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance has been admirable, we have also witnessed the growth of decentralized exchanges. 

The concept of a market maker basically focuses on matching a buyer with a seller. Market makers, in the case of traditional markets such as the ones for gold or stocks, offer liquidity for enabling investors to sell or purchase assets that are close to a publicly listed price. They provide the market with liquidity and depth while profiting from the difference in the bid-ask spread.

CENTRALIZED EXCHANGE (CEX) AND ORDER BOOK

Centralized crypto exchanges have come a long way since they first emerged in 2010. Users have been able to trade cryptocurrency safely and securely using them. CEXes function as trusted intermediaries in trades, and often act as custodians by storing and protecting your funds. They facilitate every aspect of the digital asset trading experience: from security, to fair market pricing, to regulatory compliance, consumer protection, and access to various digital assets. However before you can start trading on a centralized exchange, most CEXs will verify your identity and complete Know Your Customer (KYC).

 can be found on exchanges (CEX and DEX), what it does is to keep a record of all of the ongoing trading activity, offering more advanced functionalities that are not present on AMMs. It also allow for users to place limit orders, where you can preset the price at which you want to buy or sell an asset. 

Once the asset hits your inputted price, the order book will automatically execute the trade for you. This method is especially convenient for those who aren’t frequent traders or don’t have the time to monitor price action. It helps to improve market transparency as it provides information like who initiates trades, the availability and depth of a market.

; Market depth is the market's ability to comfortably process large market orders without causing a significant impact on the price..

Decentralized exchanges focus on the removal of all intermediary processes associated with crypto trading. As a result, DEX users can enjoy considerable levels of autonomy for initiating trades directly through their non-custodial wallets. However, the most interesting aspect of decentralized exchanges is the replacement of order matching systems and the order book model with autonomous protocols known as Autonomous Market Makers or AMMs.

An AMM or automated market maker can simply be defined as a protocol or an algorithm that helps in the pricing of assets. Rather than employing an order book model like traditional exchanges, the automated market maker algorithm helps in pricing the assets. 

The most unique aspect of Automated Market Makers or AMMs is the fact that buyers and sellers don’t have to wait for counterparties to sell or buy crypto on DEXs. However, some people (Liquidity providers) have to shoulder the responsibility of creating the market. Enough liquidity must be deposited in the smart contract to enable trade on AMMs to go through seamlessly.

The liquidity pools are basically a massive pile of funds that traders could trade against. Liquidity providers can then earn a certain share of fees from the trades occurring in their pool for providing liquidity in the automated market maker algorithm.

The primary goal of a DEX using AMMs is the need to attract lots of liquidity. Higher levels of liquidity in the pool could ensure limited possibilities of slippage for large orders. As a result, improved liquidity could play a crucial role in driving more volume to the platform. In as much as there is more volume, the Liquidity providers (LPers) gets more fees as incentives which makes it a WIN-WIN for both parties (DEX and LPers).

I believe you have been able to learn something new today.

Understanding how Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and Decentralized Exchange (DEXs) works

DeFi refers to financial applications built on blockchain technologies, typically using smart contracts. Smart contracts are automated enforceable agreements that do not need intermediaries to execute. Anyone with an internet connection can access them to perform financial transactions and many other activities.

It is a playground for innovative financial models and one of such models is Curve finance which has literally changed the game for various DeFi projects. It has attracted billions of dollars in liquidity to its native token pools.

Curve finance is a decentralized exchange that has devised a way to efficiently swap stable coins while avoiding slippage costs. This has attracted a lot of users to swap between stable coins DAI USDC USDT (the famous 3 pool). Curve focuses on stable coin which means liquidity providers are at lower risk since volatility is lower. It was founded by 

 and while Curve may seem rather outdated, it actually stands as the backbone for much of DeFi.

For example, swapping 1000 ETH to USDC on Curve finance at the time of writing pays $1,661,659 while on sushiswap a leading DEX, the swap pays $1,543,660- a massive difference of $117,999. This brings in a lot of traffic, especially from whales, which at the same time also bring a lot of rewards for liquidity providers.

While most DEXes only reward liquidity providers (LPers) with extremely inflationary tokens which have no use case apart from governance, Curve finance on the other side step up the game by not only paying LPers with CRV token emissions which increases reward for certain pools as "yield farming rewards" they also provide additional utility in the form of boost. 

Currently, you can lock your CRV tokens for up to 4 years to receive boosts to your farms. Your time locked CRV tokens are converted to veCRV which can be used in governance, boosting rewards, earning trading fees & receiving airdrops. Governance in Curve finance is extremely impactful because you can vote for which liquidity pools get additional incentives in the form of $CRV.

The more veCRV you have, the more you can boost the CRV rewards from your liquidity pool. You can boost your CRV rewards as high as 2.5x if you apply the maximum amount of veCRV required for your deposited liquidity. This simply means, the more tokens you LP in the pool, the more veCRV required to boost up to 2.5x. 

Now you might be wondering or asking yourself "why would a user stake CRV on CONVEX  FINANCE" rather than CURVE for veCRV, or "why would you deposit Curve LP tokens in YEARN FINANCE"- well, its all about the boosted rewards.

This is the battle between DeFi protocols for profit maximization with the Curve boost function. Each DeFi protocol locks up their CRV to obtain as much veCRV as possible. These DeFi protocols has not only incentivized the CRV deposits to obtain governance voting power in Curve Finance to raise the returns, but has also begun to incentivize the governance voting rewards such as Bribe.crv and the 

As various DeFi protocols, including Convex Finance and Yearn Finance, competed against each other to secure the governance right of Curve Finance, the protocol which secured the most veCRV, referring to the governance voting power of Curve Finance, is Convex Finance, which holds approximately 54% of the total amount in circulation.

This means that Convex Finance has the most voting power in the governance of Curve Finance,

which ultimately means that Convex Finance will be able to decide which liquidity pool to apply to the Curve Finance’s gauge weights (reward boost).

On Curve Finance, you can lock $CRV to boost your rewards and earn trading fees, but the veCRV amount required for locking, and the locking period of 4 years is incredibly prohibitive to smaller investors. This is the gap Convex fills, aggregating CRV from all liquidity providers to deliver the maximum yield.

Convex Finance (CVX) is an inventive DeFi protocol built on top of Curve Finance. This is a protocol for CRV token holders & Curve LPers, it makes it possible for them to earn additional interest rewards & Curve trading fees on their tokens, simply put-the platform offers boosted curve staking. Convex is the go-to choice for people that couldn’t buy a lot of CRV for maximum yield, or bear the lost opportunity cost of locking up tokens for 4 years.

a) If you hold CRV tokens, Convex lets you stake them for cvxCRV.

b) If you hold Curve LP tokens, Convex lets you stake + boost them.

So basically Convex provides a platform where users can pool their assets together so that Convex can acquire more CRV, convert this CRV into veCRV (remember, the more veCRV you have, the more you can boost the CRV rewards from your liquidity pool), then they maximize boost to all curve LP token holders. 

Upon staking CRV on Convex, cvxCRV is issued, which can be staked for all the benefits that a liquidity provider gets on the Curve platform while also receiving CVX tokens as a reward.

If you provide liquidity to one of the Convex-supported Curve liquidity pools, you get the following income streams:

--No matter how large or small your stake in a curve pool is- as long as you have Curve LP tokens, Convex will let you get the maximum reward boost out of them.

--You will get part of Curve platform trading fees

--You will also get CVX tokens via Convex liquidity mining.

So even if you aren't providing huge sums of liquidity to Curve, setting and forgetting your tokens in a Curve pool, then depositing the LP tokens to Convex long term can be handsomely rewarding.

This kind of war(veTokenomics) has changed the game in driving liquidity to DeFi protocols and platforms have largely adopted this model since then. Some of the common DeFi wars are Balancer wars, StakeDAO wars, Spirit wars etc.

Kindly share to educate your Crypto friends.  

Understanding the "CURVE WARS" and the powerful model of veTokenomics to attract liquidity for DeFi.

 is a tool built by open source developers for open-source developers. It's a package manager that leverages distributed ledger technology (DLT) to pay developers for their contributions to OSS. It also incentivizes developers to maintain dependencies in their projects. It was founded by Max Howell, the creator of Homebrew and Timothy Lewis, famous web3 evangelist.

 is the home to a DAO that will ensure the open source maintainers that keep the Internet running are rewarded as they deserve. 

 is the revolution against a failing system and a delightful product suite that you will adore.

The Internet is predominantly composed of open-source projects and has been
since its inception. Over time, many of these projects have become the bedrock layer
upon which subsequent innovations are built. And while wealth have
been made from it, open-source is mainly developed and maintained without
compensation whatsoever. Open-source is a labor of love often limited by a lack of significant economic incentives resulting in good projects never reaching their potential while others suffer from security issues due to the lack of incentives to maintain software throughout its lifecycle. 

For the past two decades, big tech has made trillions off the generosity of visionary developers and web pioneers… never thanking, never mentioning, never rewarding nor compensating these developers in anyway. tea is building something to change the game by enabling developers (you) to continue what you love, while earning what you deserve. Although solutions like sponsorship and bounties exist, both unfortunately reward only the top of the tower, the visible packages. Beneath them lie tens of thousands of vital packages that most people don’t even know exist.

 with a zero day that impacted most of the Internet. They fixed the bug and endured abuse while pointing out that they receive no funding from the myriad of unicorns that use them. They probably still don’t. Most of these hyper profitable corporations didn’t even know that Log4J was a vital brick in their tower of open source built by people they don’t even know and have never even paid.

CoreJS is another famous example, downloaded 30 million times a week. Their

 for funding to help them keep every Node.js application that exists afloat.

tea is the base of the developer stack–seated beneath the tools that build the internet. It leverages blockchain and web3 technology to eliminate anonymity and deliver compensation. tea’s mission is to empower open-source communities and ensure their contributors are supported as they create the tools that build the Internet. 

tea intend to create a trustless distribution platform for applications secured by reputation and financial incentives, as they believe adequate rewards for opensource contributions cannot succeed without both a reputation system and the ability for members of the community to communicate their findings and support the work of a developer. 

However participants are distinguished through their contributions, they are;

Package maintainers must make sure their software continues to deliver increasing
value as the industry evolves. They are the pillars of open-source communities who need to be empowered and rewarded for their ongoing contributions. Package maintainers receive a non-fungible token (NFT) when they complete a package submission.

The holder of this NFT will automatically receive all rewards associated with the package. Package maintainers may transfer maintenance ownership over a package to another package maintainer by simply transferring the package’s NFT. Successful transfer of the NFT will lead to the new owner automatically receiving future package rewards. However, to prevent attack vectors, such as community members buying their reputation, the transfer of the maintainer NFT will not result in a transfer of reputation. Reputation must remain directly associated with a specific developer’s work and must not be transferable.

Package users are software developers focused on solving a specific problem. They
often look in the open-source community for the tools they need to experiment quickly and iterate at very little to no cost, directly benefiting from the work of package creators and maintainers. Sponsorship can be an effective system to support open-source development; however, remuneration does not typically extend to all dependencies. This limitation benefits favorites and gets in the way of innovation and software building. tea’s purpose is to maintain the core values of open-source software while providing a decentralized system to remunerate package maintainers for their work. To deliver on this mission, tea intends to develop — and incentivize others to develop — mechanisms for package users to support package maintainers through unique use cases of the tea token, as described in the tea token and future work and potential community effort sections.

They are organizations or package users who use open-source software to build
their commercial products, philanthropists looking to support the ecosystem, or
entrepreneurs looking to fund teams to develop components of a larger system. Package
supporters and sponsors are free to decide which packages or package maintainers
they want to support based on their work, beliefs, or any criteria and metric that
would influence their decision. The support provided by package supporters and sponsors will flow to each package’s dependencies, thus implicitly trusting the package maintainer to make good choices about their stack and using this information to contribute to their reputation.

As new packages or new versions of existing packages are released, the validity
of the work needs to be provably demonstrated. This information is critical for package users to decide whether or not to trust both the package and its maintainers. With the tea protocol, this function is provided by the tea tasters. tea tasters are critical members of the open-source communities in that their reviews and associated claims can steer package users towards or away from packages. To ensure that reviews can be trusted on an ongoing basis, a proposed mechanism is in place whereby outdated or corrupted packages may see a portion of their steeped tokens sent to the tea tasters who were first to recognize the lack of maintenance of any package.

Thankless tech giants profit from the generosity of open‐source developers.

For more than twenty years the Internet has been built upon the fruits of freely available open‐source. Whenever a project enabled new functionality it was (whether desired or not) added as a new brick in the tower of infrastructure; giving the Internet new powers and capabilities; becoming a new foundation for all the innovations that followed. The maintainers of these new bricks became thanklessly unpaid volunteers.

Developers contribute innovations (bricks) to the tower of infrastructure that serves as a feeding ground for big tech. Their efforts are capitalized on, yet they see none of that profit.

Entire stacks are left at the mercy of single, proprietary vendors who control their composition and deployment. This turns the “tower of bricks” into a game of Jenga.

Open‐source authors are pressured by their peers and the community at large to continuously maintain and update their contributions... again, without pay or gratitude.

//Blockchain empowers developers to contribute to open‐source while reaping overdue benefits.

The problem has always existed, but the technology to solve it hasn’t. tea facilitates the graph of open source that underpins all modern digital infrastructure. tea is putting it on-chain to create a map that will be used to guide value redistribution to the open source that makes the Internet possible. tea is not changing how open source works—it’s still free. web3 has introduced powerful new paradigms that allow value to be compensated without direct payment. Creator economy, meet open source.

Through tea, open‐source contributors are rewarded with their native flagship token relative to aggregate usage and sweat equity. Now, developers are able to monetize their generosity.

web3 turns the “Jenga” game back into a tower of stable bricks. By putting everything on-chain, tea is ensuring that entire stacks will no longer sit at the mercy of sole developers.

Developers are not obligated to dedicate years to maintaining a single project. Instead, they can transfer ownership to another interested party and move on to creating something else.

Wherever you develop, wherever your CI/CD runs, however you deploy your app, tea is there.

Much like its predecessor, brew, tea is full of delightful touches. You’ll have to try it and see.

Of course delightful also means fast. You’ve got plenty to do and need tools that respect your time.

tea’s decentralization offers tangible benefits to ecosystem security. Every layer of your apps and dapps is signed and verified on‐chain. Users can rest assured that the software they are using is what all its creators intended.

Good developers create. Great developers collaborate.

You don’t work alone and neither should the tool that sits at the root of your stack. We’re designing tea to be super great for teams.

We believe the open source community needs to direct and control the ecosystem we will help launch. The DAO will be an open, transparent and evolving governance structure where the depth of your contributions will matter more than the depth of your pocket.

This is an outstanding innovation for rewarding open source developers which I believe will stand the test of time. Building this kind of innovation on web3 is already a game changer in my opinion and I hope every developer reading this would do more research on what "tea" is building and make their decision on whether to join the train.

PLEASE SHARE TO ANY DEVELOPER YOU KNOW!!!

"tea" a web3 reward system for open source developers.

Across is an optimistic cross-chain bridge protocol that allows users to execute transactions between chains nearly instantaneously. This is accomplished by using an optimistic oracle, bonded relayers, and single-sided liquidity pools. They recently announced an airdrop but eligibility is still unknown neither do we know maybe snapshot has even been taken (Please DYOR)

But in order to position yourself, you can just try out some bridging between 2 chains.

Across bridge airdrop confirmed.

Blokdrops is the part of BlokHash. BlokHash is a community venture, NFT DAO and Crypto airdrop hunter at early stage.

What Is Blokhash ?
BlokHash is a community driven venture which believes in helping potential startups to bloom in several ways. 
They have invested in 20+ projects including Defiyield, Quoth, xHashtag and many top tiers.


1/ Signup On Quest3
Quest3 is still in the Beta version, an invite code is required to unlock the adventure. 

Use any of these invite codes VUEYPX or GYCIKP or any of the 2 links below


You can also join the BlokHash telegram group


In this quest you have complete tasks and you will receive instant NFT

Do the simple tasks and claim the NFT free on Polygon network. (Make sure you have some MATIC tokens for gas fees) 

So make sure to claim the NFT and become Blokhasian OG.

This NFT gives you access to join Exclusive Private Group Of Blokdrops. (Coming very soon)

Claim BlokDrops NFT for free!!!

Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger that focuses on powering decentralized transaction management. With decentralized transaction management, any node can independently initiate a transaction as per the terms set by a smart contract with no third-party interference. Thus, with an increase in the number of users adopting blockchain, there is a subsequent rise in scalability issues, resulting in transaction latency. To address these issues, there are various blockchain scalability solutions.

Scalability refers to the measure of a system’s capability to adapt to unexpected changes or increased workload. Higher scalability means competitive advantage and an increased level of performance even in a high-stress environment.

While blockchain engineers and developers have tried several ways to address the issue, such as sharding (a system of splitting a blockchain into multiple pieces, or shards, and storing them in different places), increasing block size, or hiking network fees, multiple experts believe that it will be difficult to see tangible results unless there is a massive shift in the fundamental monolithic architecture of a blockchain.

This kind of blockchain aims to do everything from consensus, data availability, execution  and settlement from within a single system. It simply means that all the nodes and validators of the network are required to execute the same transactions and do consensus on the chain. 

This is how the sequence works: Consensus-(an algorithm procedure through which all the peers of the network reach a common agreement about the present state of the distributed ledger) is reached and the data is made available. Data availability layer is responsible to publish the ordered messages so that users and App would not know what the current state of the chain is per time.

Execution layer takes messages that have been agreed on, ordered and made available by consensus and data availability, then it does computation and processing on those messages to output a “state”. Settlement is now a special case of execution layer. It’s an execution layer that bridges all the execution layers together. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana (Layer 1s) are some of the current blockchain networks that have a monolithic architecture. 

Most of the blockchains today are monolithic. The core functions of a blockchain, execution and consensus, happen simultaneously and are enforced by the same set of validators. A monolithic architecture is hard to scale because every transaction has to be executed by the full node, causing a bottleneck. 

A monolithic blockchain scales to a few thousand or tens of thousands of TPS (transaction per sec) at most despite crippling centralization and security compromises. A modular architecture will scale to millions of TPS, while still remaining highly secure and decentralized. It’s better on scalability, security, 

A Modular blockchain is a blockchain that fully outsources at least one of the 4 components (Consensus, Data Availability, Execution, Settlement) to an external chain. This kind of blockchain ensures that a network remains highly scalable without sacrificing the optimum levels of security and decentralization.

Celestia is a minimal blockchain that only orders and publishes transactions and does not execute them. They achieve this by decoupling the consensus and execution layers, Celestia modularizes the blockchain technology stack and unlocks new possibilities for decentralized application builders. It was co-founded by 

This is how it works; Celestia applies modular architecture, the core functions-consensus and execution, are separated into different layers. The execution layer exists on its own blockchain, allowing for optimization and specialization for specific use cases. These 3 advantages makes Celestia stand out.

Developers can effortlessly define their own virtual execution environments; similar to virtual machines--

 Since Celestia does not impose any execution logic, developers are free to define their own execution environments. Celestia will support all flavors of rollups, but they are initially focused on the EVM and Cosmos SDK.

Each application gets its own sovereign execution space, while inheriting the security of Celestia's consensus; 

Blockchains built on top of Celestia do not rely on honest majority assumptions for state validity, meaning that they can interoperate with the highest security standards.

Applications can be updated without main chain hard forks;

 Because Celestia does not validate transactions, its throughput is not bottlenecked by state execution like traditional blockchains. 

Thank you for reading and please kindly share.

Modular or Monolithic Blockchain? Introducing you to "CELESTIA", the first modular blockchain.

One of the core problems with the Ethereum network, which can process up to 30 transactions per second, is scalability. As more and more decentralized apps (Dapps) are built on the network and the number of transactions increases, so do the gas.  For context, the network processes trillions in transactions annually and has over $43 billion in total value locked (TVL). 

However, since the Ethereum network is limited to 30 transactions per second, transaction times and fees end up rising at times of network congestion. Although Ethereum scalability issue would be partly fixed with an upgrade to Eth 2.0, which would theoretically be capable of handling up to 1,000 of transactions per second, this would still be low in comparison with what zK roll ups can do when gas fees come into play.

There are basically two types of rollups: Optimistic rollups, and Zero Knowledge rollups (ZK rollups). Both aim to scale Ethereum by processing transactions on layer 2 before submitting the results back to Ethereum.

What Optimistic rollups do is to decrease "latency" — (the amount of time it takes to confirm a transaction) and increase transaction "throughput" — (the number of transactions that can be processed each second) — thereby reducing gas fees. Optimistic rollups assume that transactions are valid — hence an optimistic outlook.

However, it also allows what are called “watchers” to call out fraudulent transactions since blockchain is transparent and public. If a watcher proves instances of fraud, the transaction is reverted, the bad actor penalized, and the watcher rewarded to incentivize them. Off-chain Labs Arbitrum and Optimistic Ethereum are the top two projects using Optimistic rollups.

ZK rollups, unlike Optimistic roll ups, attempt to prove that transactions are valid. They do so by submitting validity proof

to an Ethereum smart contract along with the bundled transactions. Transactions are only accepted on Ethereum after the cryptographic proof is validated. The basic approach to scaling Ethereum with zK proofs is to build a zK roll up, a layer 2 protocol which "rolls up" a large batch of transactions and proves all of them to the Ethereum network with a single zK validity proof. (That is, one transaction replaces many, saving on fees, reducing latency and also increasing throughput).

1/ It has been proven to be slow and expensive to generate.

2/ Compatibility; Most zK roll ups available are just "EVM Compatible" i.e extra tools are needed by the developers to build/develop codes. Some of the software that developers use to create decentralized apps {Dapps} are incompatible making it difficult for applications to migrate.

3/ Security issues; Users are concerned with potential security incidents that may rise with roll up transactions.  

Polygon zkEVM was built by Polygon, but it’s for everyone who wants a cheaper, faster way to use Ethereum without sacrificing security or decentralization. Polygon zkEVM is permissionless–anyone can use it. It’s also open-source, meaning you can trust the code, rather than trusting the Polygon team behind it. It has often been described as the holy grail of scaling.  

If you can build on Ethereum, you can build on zkEVM and you don't have to worry about messing with your code when moving to polygon. Polygon zkEVM is a game changer because it doesn't sacrifice speed or raise cost to be equivalent to EVM.

There is still a lot of work to be done before going mainnet, but the solution is there already- completely open source. It is currently being tested internally and should be available on mainnet before the end of the year.

; Unlike the previous kinds of roll ups which are "only compatible" with EVM, the Polygon zkEVM is equivalent to Ethereum. Any EVM tool or smart contract that you can use on Ethereum can be used on Polygon zkEVM. It is just like using Ethereum network but with scaling power of zk Tech.

; Ethereum is the most secured blockchain in the world and any scaling solution would want to leverage on such strong network. Polygon’s ZK teams have made major breakthroughs in performance. They've significantly improved proof-generation times. This makes Polygon zkEVM ready for primetime. Users will see dramatically reduced costs and improved speed.

: Some estimates suggest zkEVM can process above ~ 2000 transactions per second without incurring Ethereum’s high fees. Even though the crypto space thought it would take many years to develop Layer 2 solutions that could give us both the scalability benefits of ZK proofs and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the Polygon team has done an outstanding job with the launch of their zkEVM.

Polygon zkEVM- the "Holy grail" of scaling?

One of the leading crypto hubs in the Middle East, the emirate of Dubai, launches the Dubai Metaverse Strategy that aims to turn it into one of the world’s top 10 metaverse economies. The strategy promotes Dubai’s ambitions to support more than 40,000 virtual jobs by 2030. 

"This would further boost Dubai’s economy and support the UAE government’s vision of increasing the number of blockchain companies by five times the present number," the announcement said. The metaverse is expected to drive the UAE’s efforts to "provide innovative solutions, positively impact people’s lives, and transform the city into one of the smartest hubs worldwide offering new economic opportunities," according to Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, UAE minister of state for artificial intelligence and digital economy.

The Dubai Metaverse Strategy will include research and development (R&D) collaborations to enhance the metaverse’s economic contributions, utilizing accelerators and incubators to attract companies and projects from abroad, and providing support in metaverse education aimed at developers, content creators and users of digital platforms in the metaverse community.

New governmental work models in tourism, education, retail, remote work, healthcare and the legal sector are promised to be created within the Strategy’s framework. Its key pillars are said to be extended reality, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality and digital twins — a virtual representation of an object or system.

UAE is the latest jurisdiction to make a big metaverse play. In July, Chinese city Shanghai laid out its own strategy to build a metaverse economy worth 350 billion yuan (US$52 billion) by the end of 2025.

Dubai to create up to 40,000 virtual jobs due to the new Metaverse strategy.

Traditional borderless payments can be very complicated due to the network of numerous intermediaries involved in processing and confirming transactions which are banks and financial institutions. This is simply the reason why borderless transactions take between 1 to 5 days to complete. High fees are involved as well because every intermediary has to take a cut in order to process every transaction.

In contrast Crypto payments remove intermediaries from the payment process. Users can directly transfer crypto funds with one another without any restrictions due to the fact that all cryptocurrency transactions are recorded on blockchains and the geographic distance between the sender and recipient is completely irrelevant.

These are some of the advantages of Crypto payments.

1\ Low transaction fees are involved because the network of intermediaries involved in the traditional borderless payments have been totally eliminated from the payment process. The transaction is simply between the sender and the blockchain which processes and confirms the transaction in few secs.

2\ The recipient can get exactly what is sent. For example, a sender can send 50 BTC and the recipient will get exactly 50 BTC unlike International transactions that have currency restrictions and most recipients must receive the transfer in their local currency equivalent. The recipient must also have a bank account in order to receive payments, however it is not the same with Crypto payments.

While traditional borderless transactions take days to complete—and even weeks if there are delays, crypto payments are near-instant. You can even send borderless crypto payments roughly the same time it takes for you to send an email, regardless of the size of the transaction.

Cryptocurrency transactions are unchangeable. Once a client has completed a payment for a product or service, the money goes straight to the account. Unlike payments by credit card, charges cannot be reversed.

If for one reason or the other (lets say public donations) you don't want your payments to be tracked or linked to you- Crypto payments is the safest option because traditional payments would never allow such.  

I hope with this you would convince your boss to use Crypto payments for your company's next borderless payment.

Why you should consider using Crypto for  borderless payments.

Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph, ready for you to build on so you can focus on creating a great experience, not scaling your users.

It is a user-owned, open social graph that any application can plug into. In simpler terms they are helping developers to build web3 native social media, without creating the user base from the scratch. It is built on Polygon blockchain. The team behind it is led by Aave's founder Stani Kulechov and CEO Alexander Svanevik of Nansen

With Lens Protocol, you are in control. You own your profile where you use it, how you use it, and even how you monetize it. That means you have the power over your content, and it's all right there, as an NFT, in your wallet.

The ecosystem is growing fast and some apps are already being powered by Lens, 

This is a platform where you can discover and follow other Lens profiles based on similar Web3 footprint. The Lens Team created this one in particular. 

This is a decentralized, and permissionless social media app. The community is engaging and its fun vibing with web3 anons.

This is a share-to-earn decentralized social platform. You help curate the most interesting stuff online and offline and get rewarded. Phaver DAO will share a majority of the platform ownership with the users who are actually creating the value. It is just 10k+ downloads on PlayStore which to me is ridiculously small. 

This could be big, and early users might be rewarded, and who knows maybe the Phaver points could be valuable later in the future as well... (All these are merely speculations and you may as well fade it) 

This is a Social DeFi investing platform for DeFi investors to build their own investing community and reputation easily for long term monetization. 

This is a crypto-friendly link board, where you can discover new projects, highlight interesting articles, and share new ideas. Curated by the community. 

This is like the google of Lens Protocol, the search engine to discover the magic of Lens. Find content, users, bios, social graphs and many more. 

 This is a social platform for web3 creators. You can share your content, grow a community, and own your identity.

This platform makes it possible for you to own personalized content from your favorite creators in just three steps

--Find your favorite creators and crypto stars

--Request a personalized video from them on CLIPTO

--Your personalized video will be minted as a NFT and sent to your wallet.

This is a Web3 profile explorer that connects people and communities. You can build your network, show your value and leverage your connections as well. The platform empowers and coordinate community members into becoming contributors.

This is an engage to earn protocol. Its goal is to disintermediate advertising by creating a market between businesses or creators that want to promote contents and users of Lens, Twitter or other platforms. 

Getting a Lens Profile is not open to the general public yet, but you have a chance by engaging new apps being built on the ecosystem frequently (twitter and discord) as the Lens protocol usually give out some WL access to their early users. 

 if you are cool with owning a random profile name.

I was able to claim my Lens profile by minting an NFT for 20 MATIC 

Please share to your friends so as to benefit as well.