Who is in, who is out?
Members of the FCAS 25 are reevaluated each month and must be ranked within the top 25 for at least 40 days to qualify. Today, a new set of members was released with LBRY Credits (LBC) and Holo (HOT) dropping out, and Zilliqa (ZIL) and Aave (LEND) joining the top echelon.
Overall industry health can be assessed by taking the average FCAS of these 25 top projects, which has gone up 10-points in the past month.
Real Usage is Driving Aave (LEND) Value
Aave is a DeFi money market that allows users to earn interest on cryptocurrency and borrow against it. The platform was one of the first to include the novel decentralized finance (DeFi) product flash loans this past spring. These financial products allow users to make outsized positions on trades without any downside.
With the growing yield farming craze, Aave has proven to be a key financial backbone of some projects. Indeed, the total value locked in Aave went from half a million dollars to $1.4B this past month. At the same time, the price of its LEND token increased over 3,000% since the beginning of the year.
It would be easy to write off such outsized gains as just another example of the speculative hype of cryptocurrency markets, where big price swings are common. But in the case of Aave’s LEND token, our data shows an increase in actual usage.
Indeed, since launching its mainnet in January, LEND FCAS increased 147-points (20.2%), driven by a 413-point climb (68.5%) in User Activity. Developer Behavior and Market Maturity also went up 50-points (8.9%) and 119-point (15%) respectively.
Zilliqa’s Startup Accelerator is Driving Major Growth
Since Zilliqa staking went live on Testnet in April, ZIL FCAS has skyrocketed 106-points (15.7%), driven by a 167-point (27.9%) continuous climb in User Activity. Staking is now live on Mainnet since mid June.
An important contributing factor to this growth has been the ZILHive Accelerator program, a 6-month blockchain startup accelerator designed to support early and late-stage startups to use the Zilliqa protocol to build blockchain solutions. According to the team, this year’s cohort has been selected to promote blockchain development within “Open Finance” (or OpFi).
On September 7th, Zilliqa announced the 8 companies that will join the program for the next 6 months, including Propine, a Singaporean end-to-end digital securities services firm, Moonlet, a Romanian cryptocurrency wallet, and Moonlight, a U.S. decentralized self-sovereign identity solution.
Han Wen Chua, Senior Vice President of Ecosystem Development at Zilliqa, commented on the program: “The need for digital finance has accelerated with the ongoing pandemic, coupled with ASEAN’s large underbanked population, the time is now for FinTech to take on a greater role in adopting a more open financial ecosystem. With the success of our first cohort of ZILHive startups, we are pleased to announce our next batch of promising projects as we propel the use of blockchain in OpFi.”