Decentralized Business (Part I)
What is It and Why Should You Care?
It’s no secret that the world has changed dramatically in the past few years, with a large emphasis placed on remote work and more efficient workflow. Enter the blockchain industry, still very much in its infancy and experiencing growing pains.
You don’t need a degree in rocket science to realize that most of the so-called “businesses” that populate the blockchain industry are mere science fair projects with VC backers.
What did you expect would happen? Hand over millions of dollars of cash to a bunch of mostly young, unproven developers and dreamers, and you are bound to receive mixed results.
We have seen countless examples of good ideas that have come along, raised a ton of capital, and then proceeded to rug and dump on their retail investors. VCs have been an extreme roadblock to realizing practical business valuations, and have led to bloated, unsustainable token models that bleed value and extract it all for the benefit of the insiders and early investors.
Decentralized Business: It’s NOT Rocket Science!
Take all the components of traditional business that are excess drains on capital, and now apply blockchain solutions to those problems. There are visible efficiencies to be had from adopting certain blockchain technologies for enterprise solutions.
In the Cosmos ecosystem, there are a handful of viable projects with real business models and revenue. To name a pair of strong contenders (so far, but not exhaustive): Astrovault, and Jackal Protocol.
While there are other L1 blockchains with viable products or services to sell to consumers, it remains to be seen if a sustainable business can be built solely from the solutions offered.
Building a sustainable business also involves decentralizing components of your business that would normally be drags on your bottom line. One particular problem that enterprises run into is their storage expenses.
Introducing the Jackal Protocol: Hot Cloud Storage for the 21st Century!
Jackal has achieved what no one else could: Offer E2EE hot cloud storage with 3x global redundancy, all while offering better value than the legacy providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dropbox, and iCloud).
Jackal operates an L1 Cosmos SDK-based blockchain that sells cloud storage space, and sells a lot of it! Jackal has been absolutely on fire this year, with a recent rework of the JKL token being implemented in Version 4 (ongoing).
Version 4 not only positively affected the JKL token’s usage within the ecosystem, but also reconfigured the pricing model of Jackal storage, so that the storage is more competitive when compared side-by-side to its legacy predecessors.
While the cost per TB was $8 per month earlier this year, that rate has now been raised to $15/month, with rates all-but-guaranteed to increase as storage costs increase globally.
Due to the combined retail and enterprise demand for cloud storage, and the data centers that host the data, Jackal is on a path to a sustainable business with recurring monthly revenue to support scaling globally.
The latest rumors suggest that Jackal is nearing completion of testing their EVM deployment. Once this goes live, Jackal will truly be THE storage layer for both the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems!
Astrovault: L1 Liquidity Hub Without the L1 Headaches!
If you’ve been a Cosmos ecosystem participant in the past four years, you know all about the issues DEXs have faced trying to scale and produce real revenue to sustain their model(s). OsmosisDEX has been known as the L1 gas token trading hub for the Cosmos, but does not efficiently use its blockspace, and the user experience can be extremely tedious, sifting through the overwhelming number of liquidity pools and tokens to swap.
Astrovault seeks to simplify the UI and improve the UX with a cross-chain liquidity hub, utilizing its own Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), referenced with an “x” before the regular ticker, to earn perpetual yield on liquidity, thereby eliminating the concept of dead capital.
It doesn’t take much time to realize that Osmosis (and other DEXs) are hosting a lot of dead, static capital, which cannot move and/or has no retail demand (and thereby very low trading volume in the associated Liquidity Pools (LPs).
Astrovault has begun its DEX deployment journey with the Archway Network, where the DEX has accumulated approximately $4.2 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) and $3.5 million in liquidity.
Where Astrovault sets itself apart from Osmosis, is in the utilization of Protocol-Owned-Liquidity, wherein the Protocol earns liquidity from the staked derivatives in the liquidity pools.
As of September 15, 2024, the top 10 components of the Astrovault DAO POL includes:
5.56M AXV ($236.98K)
624.92K JKL ($96.03K)
2.82M ARCH ($91.82K)
5.89K ATOM ($23.83K)
2.08M PLQ ($19.55K)
0.31 WBTC.axl ($18.24K)
106.45K FLIX ($14.07K)
31.17K OSMO ($13.66K)
11.27K USDC.nobl ($11.26K)
2.76K AKT ($6.69K)
With the exceptions of AXV, WBTC.axl, and USDC.nobl, the other seven components of the PoL are earning revenue from the underlying staked x-Assets.
Astrovault also offers yield farms for AXV, ARCH, ATOM, FLIX, PLQ, OSMO, and JKL, with yields ranging from 7% to 24%. These relatively moderate rates are much more sustainable on Astrovault than they could be on Osmosis, since the PoL is earning PEL every day to support the yields.
This also offers Astrovault additional flexibility with increasing incentives on any of the farms, should the DAO choose to do so. This also extends to the LP incentives, which can be adjusted in either direction to meet DAO-chosen rates.
I know, Outbid isn’t technically a separate business from Astrovault, however, its unique design warranted its own section!
Outbid is the gamified launchpad that was built on Astrovault by the High Vault team. Instead of VCs getting the best prices for a newly-launched token, Outbid puts the retail users into the seat of power.
Be Your Own VC is the Outbid motto, and it so far has proven this to be a successful approach, with 2 token launches so far in 2024, with the AXV token and the LSE token for Lunarspace.
The AXV Outbid raised over $310,000 for Astrovault DAO with zero VC investors involved! That is an unheard of raise for a grassroots fundraising round!
That $310,496.62 represents what Outbid could do with no prior track record nor close competitors to measure up against. Just imagine what Outbid is going to do once its Solana franchise launches on mainnet!
Much like Astrovault and Jackal, Outbid is a Decentralized Business (DeBiz) with its own source of revenue. With further franchises planned for the EVMs and other Cosmos L1s, Outbid looks extremely promising as a platform and as a tool in the toolkit of a financially-sovereign individual.
Concluding Thoughts
Decentralized Business is not just a passing fad: it is the way we reach mass adoption for blockchain technology. A limited userbase in the Cosmos ecosystem demonstrates a need for more cross-chain connections between Ethereum and Solana with Cosmos: that more users can gain access to the underlying Cosmos technology that is so useful.
If you enjoyed reading this and would like to learn more:
👉 Check out the Maestro Consulting Official Website
👉 Subscribe to my Telegram Channel & Join the Conversation
👉 Join the Maestro Community Chat on Matrix
👉 Keep up with the Latest News on Warpcast & X
👉 Check out my Podcast and Radio Show