Another Two Polkadot Crowdloan Contenders!

In what was a pretty much predictable outcome, Efinity (EFI) snagged the first of the next batch of 5 parachain slots auctions. However, from this point onwards... I'm a little less certain as to who will win the coveted parachain slots. That said, I don't really back the projects that I think will win... I back the projects that I am interested in! I'm not really sure if that is a great way to play the game... but it is the way that I play it.

The race is on for the next four slots in the second round, with 13 projects hoping to win a spot. Since I last wrote, I noticed that there were a new pair of projects that have launched their crowdloan campaigns, HydraDX and Phala. I guess it will come as no surprise to anyone that only one of these projects are of interest to me!

HydraDX is a cross chain liquidity project. If this sounds familiar, there are quite a few projects that are doing the same thing (just like Thorchain) and some of them won spots in the first round of parachain auctions already. So, there needs to be something really really groundbreaking and revolutionary to set HydraDX apart from the wealth of similar seeming Cross Chain DeFi protocols.

Sadly, it appears that the most interesting thing about it is the art and UI style. Yes, they have gone the retro and colour-blind route and designed a website that is both terrifying and mesmerising to look at. The dApp itself riffs on the earlier Cream and Yearn styles of horrifically retro digital fonts and icons. They weren't that good in the 90s and they are even worse when you have lo-res icons/fonts on a modern screen. Please please please, stop doing this... or hire some decent UI designers.

I'm afraid that DeFi protocols aren't really that interesting to me... there was a time that I had enjoyed playing around with them... but those were the days of Bancor, Uniswap v1 and Compound. These days, they are just a little too slick and shallow for me to be too interested. I'm not going to back this project...

Now, Phala is a project that I have been following and collecting PHA tokens for a while. When everyone was going nuts about DeFi and NFTs, I was hunting around for privacy protocols amongst other things. Blockchains have their strength and weaknesses in public transparency... however, this extreme transparency isn't always a good thing. There will come a time when users will demand a degree more privacy whilst still being able to publicly verify transactions/data.

Phala promises privacy preserving computation that other protocols can hook into to add that degree of privacy and secrecy into their transactions. That sort of modular service is something that I think will be of great interest to many other projects (DeFi ones included!). In this way, Phala can concentrate on creating the best privacy focussed computation engine... and other projects can concentrate on what they do best without dividing their attention and development teams into areas where they might not be comfortable.

No surprises here.. I am definitely backing the Phala crowdloan!

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Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
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