With sub-second finality and parallel execution, the Aptos blockchain unlocks unique opportunities for developers to innovate and build products that the DeFi sector has yet to be exposed to. Hence our excitement for the upcoming Aptos Hack Holland hackathon taking place June 5–7th, set to engender the next wave of DeFi products and services on Aptos.
Econia Labs, developer of the settlement layer for Aptos DeFi, is proud to be sponsoring the DeFi and payments prize track for the upcoming hackathon — $60,000 in prize money will be rewarded to the most creative projects building for this sector of the ecosystem.
To further assist builders interested in participating, leading Aptos DeFi ecosystem players provided project concept suggestions during a recent Aptos Move Monday, dedicated to the promotion of the hackathon event. If you are interested in building a hackathon project, apply to participate here!
Project Inspirations From the Leading Aptos DeFi Protocols
On a recent Aptos Move Monday Twitter Space (you can listen to the full recording here), leading DeFi projects discussed what they believed would push the ecosystem forward, aiming to provide inspiration to new builders wishing to enter the Aptos ecosystem — below are the ideas they shared.
Econia Labs
Alex, CEO & Cofounder of Econia Labs, shared, “We are excited for projects that leverage a holistic view of the ecosystem, ones that assemble different ‘financial legos’ to build exotic products that DeFi users currently need. We are also excited for exotic use cases that people haven’t even imagined yet!”. With a focus on composability, the Econia protocol supports margining and derivatives, expanding the potential design space for DeFi protocols.
Econia Labs’ decision to sponsor the DeFi track at the hackathon is driven by its interest in a perpetual futures protocol built on top of Econia. Perpetual futures protocols allow traders to trade with greater capital efficiency, and command a growing market share of on-chain trading volume. A necessary component of such a project is a permissionless price oracle, used to power funding rate mechanics, as was discussed in detail on Econia’s recent Twitter Space with Pyth, an Aptos integrated oracle provider.
Specific Project Ideas:
- On-Chain CLOB-Based Perpetual Futures Protocol
- On-chain order book AMM CLOB hybrid
- On-Chain Options Trading Venue
About Econia Labs: Econia is the high-performance on-chain order book for the Aptos blockchain. Built for equitable, global market access and engineered for composability, Econia is the settlement layer for Aptos DeFi.
Kana Labs
“We’re committed to riding the wave of the next generation of users,” said Surbhi Singh, Head of Business Development at Kana Labs. Surbhi and her team wish for greater integration between DeFi and gaming, one which offers an engaging path for the global public into the world of crypto.
Surbhi made a project suggestion for an in-game structured product, also known as a DeFi Option Vault (DOV). She hopes to see projects akin to a Web3 version of Candy Crush, where users can earn rewards while enjoying the game, leveling the playing field for players of all economic backgrounds and geographies.
About Kana Labs: Kana is a cross-chain bridge aggregator that caters to all key DeFi needs across multiple networks. Users can swap, stake, farm, lend, borrow, and more in a single multi-chain platform.
Merkle Finance
Ye, Cofounder of Merkle Finance, advised participants to leverage the unique strengths of the Aptos blockchain, like its low latency, subsecond time to finality, and industry-leading low gas fees. He’d like to see projects that draw more people into the ecosystem, especially those that make onboarding more seamless.
About Merkle Finance: Merkle Trade is a decentralized trading platform that offers trading of crypto and synthetic forex assets with leverage up to 1,000x, along with access to advanced and user-centric trading features.
Tsunami Finance
Tsunami Finance’s Core Contributor, Bones, expressed excitement about the possibility of arbitrage funding rates between their platform and other ecosystem projects. “We also think it would be great to see a team implement features like Blur’s ‘buy now pay later’ in their lending market.”
About Tsunami Finance: Tsunami Finance is a derivatives and spot exchange on the Aptos blockchain, providing a way to trade with 0% price impact, known exit liquidity, low funding fees, a low spread, and collateral that grows in value over time.
Aries Markets
Josh Lester, Head of Growth at Aries Markets, shared his excitement for composability in the Aptos ecosystem — his team especially looks forward to those wishing to build yield optimizers between lending protocols, as well as those merging money markets with AMM liquidity provisioning, crafting leveraged yield farming protocols.
He also noted further development of arbitrage bots and liquidators as a valuable improvement for the lending ecosystem.
About Aries Markets: Aries Market is a decentralized margin trading protocol for the Aptos Ecosystem. Lend, borrow, and trade with margin via a lightning-fast and fully on-chain order book.
Pancake Swap
Chef Maroon, from Pancake Swap’s Business Development team, shared that many of Pancake Swap’s users are retail, therefore valuable feedback is always necessary for providing a better experience for them — whether regarding Pancake Swap’s UI and UX or the protocol documentation. All kinds of feedback are necessary to make the product as easy and seamless to use as possible.
The Pancake Swap team encouraged the Aptos developer community to share their thoughts on how to improve the protocol.
About Pancake Swap: Pancake Swap is a decentralized exchange platform native to Aptos, BNB Chain, and Ethereum.
An Aptos DeFi Summer on the Horizon
The Aptos community is buzzing with anticipation as Aptos Hack Holland approaches. Each of these concepts and recommendations presents a new opportunity for innovation in the ecosystem, and we are excited to see who is up for the challenge.
Intrigued developers have a wealth of resources at their disposal, including but not limited to official Aptos tutorials and Econia documentation. See you June 5th in Amsterdam!
Developer Resources:
- Official Aptos tutorials: https://aptos.dev/tutorials
- Aptos Coin standard: https://aptos.dev/standards/aptos-coin
- Econia documentation: https://econia.dev/
- Econia rest and WebSocket APIs: https://docs.econia.exchange/#introduction
- Econia X Pyth documentation: https://econia.dev/integrators/oracles/pyth
Econia is a hyper-parallelized order book protocol that runs on the Aptos blockchain. Engineered for web-scale performance and built to provide equal global access to markets, Econia leverages Aptos’ optimistic concurrency to scale up trading across trading pairs.
