Blockchain technology has been around for more than a decade, but it’s only now that we are beginning to see the real-world use cases of this emerging tech, as it begins to get the much-deserved recognition. Blockchain networks offer features like decentralization, permissionless entry, transparency & programmability. It has paved the way for a newer model of Decentralized Finance. More popularly known as DeFi — it has begun to change the financial landscape for the world. The Defi revolution is breaking through the traditional barriers of entry into the wealth-building sphere.
DeFi basically refers to the use of Blockchain networks, Cryptocurrencies, and Smart Contracts to provide financial accessibility & inclusiveness to those who have been kept out of the current system by geographic, economic & financial barriers. DeFi platforms fall into the category of decentralized applications (dApps) built on top of smart contract-enriched blockchains — primarily the Ethereum network.
2020 has seen staggering growth in Decentralized finance. For comparison purposes, the total USD value locked in DeFi which stood at $690.9 million on Jan. 1, 2020 has now ballooned to a staggering to $13.4 billion at the time of publishing — the month of September alone saw the value tripled on a month-over-month basis. The question arises then, why is DeFi so important and why has it suddenly taken off?
For decades, traditional brick & mortar banks have been the central point of access to all sorts of financial services — bill payments, wealth management, investing, retirement planning, etc. With a burgeoning middle class in the developing world and a rapidly growing population in Africa, these legacy financial institutions have been unable to keep up with this growth and provide access to these basic financial services to all.
According to the Global Findex database, 1.7 billion people around the World still remain unbanked & therefore cut off from the mainstream financial system. A majority of these people cited lack of money, trust in the centralized institutions, high fees & accessibility as the biggest reasons for not having a bank account. This is where the blockchain-based DeFi systems come in. All you need is a smartphone and internet access — both available to a large segment of the global population.
There are currently 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world with almost 4.1 billion people having access to the Internet. As these numbers continue to grow, building wealth shouldn’t be a pipe dream anymore. DeFi services can bring inclusiveness for these billions by bringing wider global access to financial services. It doesn’t matter if you are a hedge fund manager of a top firm in the U.S, a small business owner in India, or a farmer somewhere in Africa — all of them will have equal access to these financial services. Removal of intermediaries, Improved privacy & security, Immutability and simplicity of this model make it more than enticing.
W?th that in mind, let us introduce you to Spherium — a novel DeFi project that aims to provide a circular consensus economy for decentralized finance. Spherium is a decentralized platform for some of the most advanced Defi products and assets protocols. Users can manage and trade assets on large liquidity pools cost-effectively & efficiently.
The platform envisions, bringing real-world assets into digital finance circuits through the dynamics of decentralized automation. It changes the status quo via the facilitation of asset circulation from the virtual space to the real world. Basically, we are an all-in-one platform, that offers a universally usable wallet, token swap platform, money markets & inter-blockchain liquidity transfer.
Here are some of the features of our platform:
Investment Opportunity
Spherium is set to provide a solution whereby a person can store their money and make a good return on investment. Interestingly, since the investment is within the DeFi space, an investor’s financial outlay does not have to be large to gain a stable return. We will take out the complexity of investing in DeFi by enabling users with little to zero exposure to the DeFi ecosystem to find the best available products in the space to maximize the returns.
Spherium Wallet
The in-house product would provide a non-custodial and secure mobile wallet for ERC20 tokens, which will facilitate our customers to use all the services provided by the Spherium ecosystem anytime and anywhere from their mobile device. Cutting-edge features like post-quantum cryptography powered security will be added to the wallet in the future.
SPH Token
Spherium offers a native currency called the SPH token, that drives inclusivity on the platform. The token will be used to carry out transactions on the platform and incentivize platform members and shareholders through dividends. It is important to note that the token is an Ethereum-based one. It will facilitate future scaling with its use case of creating a circular economy.
HyperSwap
Spherium offers a token swap platform called HyperSwap. A unique platform will implement ZK Rollups for the on-chain verification of transactions using the ZK Sync reference implementation architecture followed by Matterlabs to increase the number of transactions per second (TPS) and reduce cost per transaction. Apart from this, HyperSwap will incentivize traders/users by rewarding SPH tokens from the liquidity pool allocated for users and also allow multi-chain asset swap by integrating interoperable bridge (such as REN Multichain).
Supervisory Board
This is a unique governing body within the Spherium organizational structure, incorporating leaders from the CeFi and DeFi spaces. Having this board of thought leaders will ensure transparency and accountability of the organization, the stability of the financial product in the market, integration of DeFi into the traditional business space, and much more.
Spherium Amanah
Spherium is also at the forefront of Shariyah-compliance and Islamic-banking innovation within the DeFi space. The platform is creating its products with a team of thought-leaders from Islamic banking and DeFi space. One of its team members is a Mufti who is deeply involved in creating the best quality product possible for the Islamic population. Amanah will serve as a niche DeFi platform for more than 1.8 billion Muslims around the World.
AML & KYC
DeFi networks are permissionless by design, which means they often lack clear regulatory compliance, anyone is able to access them with little to no customer-verification hurdles involved. Spherium team recognizes the importance of protection against illegal access/use of financial services and aims to be an absolutely responsible DeFi company in this respect. Spherium will be collecting KYC information from all of the potential customers who want to use our platform.
This new approach is currently undertaken by very few DeFi platforms for customers/users that make larger transactions. In addition to this, since Spherium services will be built on the Ethereum network (and later extended to other networks), the Ethereum block data and transaction history will be monitored by Spherium using Artificial Intelligent (AI) algorithms, that will provide useful insights and information about the nature and purpose of transactions made by Spherium users, to track any illegal transactions.
The first phase of the project which is expected to focus on all these foundational services will be launched in early 2021. We will, however, continue to improve and streamline the Spherium ecosystem as we add other useful services for our customers in the months ahead.
Stay tuned and follow our social media channels for further updates.
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NOTE: The article was originally published on Medium and the author is the Senior Content Writer for the Project.
