Polytrade Base Expansion: What You Need to Know
9 New Project Integrations, Marketplace Volume Stats, & More
RWAs are one of the most important sectors in crypto, especially the Ethereum mainnet and rollup ecosystems. The BlackRock tokenization fund brought some newfound excitement to ETH at a time when the ecosystem was looking for some new, more ‘real’ use cases as opposed to points and incentives farming. Today, Russia announced it would be allowing crypto to be used in place of fiat currency in international transfers, and an Avalanche announcement came to light involving the blockchain being used by California’s DMV to tokenize 42M car titles. These aren’t obvious ‘RWA’ use cases per se, but they’re significant and definitely adjacent, forcing crypto-natives to cast more attention on the RWA providers in the industry. This past year or so has seen some ups and downs when it comes to RWAs, with institutional adoption now becoming a prime objective for builders. Throughout this cycle, we’ve been in the thick of RWAs, covering a variety of protocols.
Earlier this month, we discussed Polytrade, a general-purpose RWA marketplace that aims to be the Amazon equivalent of the Web3 asset class. We discussed everything from the protocol’s unique architecture to the native TRADE token. In today’s edition, we’ll be discussing some recent and ongoing announcements pertaining to the protocol entering the Base ecosystem and all the interesting initiatives this brings forward.
Polytrade brings together a host of protocols whose RWA offerings come in all shapes and sizes, from institutional credit to physical luxury goods, and everything in between. Overall, the RWA sector, like most areas in crypto, remains very fragmented, without the proper means to view what these protocols bring to the table collectively. This is where Polytrade comes in, aggregating different assets under the protocol’s ERC-6960 token standard, laying the groundwork for fractional ownership onchain. Now, these features are coming to Base, which has an existing ecosystem of RWA protocols that is only growing…
Stay informed, stay alert ⬇
Background on Polytrade: Base Expansion
While still in its beta phase, Polytrade has established itself as a key player in the RWA space, both in social capital as well as actual user metrics. The latest expansion to Base definitely is not Polytrade’s first rodeo, as the team has presences all around the industry. The current lineups of chains that Polytrade has integrated with include Polygon, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Plume, Kinto, Horizon EON, Manta, Redbelly, and now Base. This latest expansion comes with specific partnerships with ecosystem players, including:
-Centrifuge provides RWA lending pools, consisting of treasuries, real estate, and private credit, for its prime users. The protocol also offers fund management services, to help hybrid traditional + Web3 institutions keep track of their diverse portfolios.
-Clearpool provides RWA lending and DeFi credit, primarily. Clearpool Prime provides a compliant marketplace to match institutional borrowers and lenders of digital assets.
-Maple Finance has been around for a while, a staple of institutional credit in DeFi. Lenders can access up to 23% APY on stablecoins and majors. The team has also rolled out a platform catering to every-day users, dubbed Syrup, as opposed to their, traditionally institutional clientele.
-Mountain Protocol consists of the USDM stablecoin, which pays out 5% APY via daily rebases, as well as the Mountain platform which facilitates purchases and redemptions between USDM and stablecoins, or fiat. The team emphasizes permissionless integration, adherence to regulations, enterprise-level infrastructure, and a smooth UX.
-Nayms provides investment opportunities in digital insurance pools, making the insurance industry a liquid asset accessible onchain. The team looks to tokenize more of the $2.7T insurance market.
-Teller provides time-based DeFi loans. We’ve discussed the pros of P2P lending in this newsletter before. Teller capitalizes on this, helping to provide flexible lending for any ERC-20 or NFT asset.
-Dinari is quite an interesting protocol; it issues dShares ($TSLA.d, $QQQ.d, etc), tokens mimicking stocks and ETFs, with dividends and API functionality as well. Onchain stocks saw some traction last cycle with Mirror protocol, but the Terra meltdown derailed these efforts.
-Anzen perates in the fixed-income space, providing stable yields for users backed by institutional lenders. This is done via the native USDz stablecoin, with the project’s points program ongoing to attract more users.
-Toucan operates in the carbon credits space, building a liquid market for carbon credits to help combat climate change. This is rolled out by Toucan’s CHAR infrastructure, creating open-market carbon pools.
Some of these partnerships include Base deployments of protocols with which Polytrade has already integrated, for example, Centrifuge and Dinari. The existing Polytrade network is massive as is, spanning 4,000+ assets from 90+ protocols, as seen below:
When it comes to chain expansions, the eventual plan is to take the native ERC-6960 token standard crosschain via Wormhole or LayerZero, providing more transferable liquidity between all of these underlying chains. This is an important initiative, as RWA or even RWA adjacent use cases, like election-centric prediction markets as seen with Polymarket, involve users that potentially have little bearing when it comes to chain selection. But for the time being, Base has a significant and growing share of RWA activity and users, and deploying where all the users are should take precedence.
This expansion coincides with user incentives and other partnerships to promote platform activity. Recently, the team launched a $6 raffle, to win a left boot signed and worn by Messi. Things like this help to attract a less-penetrated group of consumers who may go through Polytrade as their gate into crypto.
We’ve touched on some recent announcements and what to expect from Polytrade in the immediate future. But how is the protocol faring now? Earlier today, the team released stats on how Polytrade is performing in its beta, with total volume climbing up toward nearly $1M. 100% of fees, at this moment, ~$10K, are also being directed toward buybacks of the native TRADE token.
This is in addition to the token’s standalone performance, with TRADE up nearly 2x (~$0.51 -> ~$0.95) since we last covered it a couple of weeks ago. 50% of tokens are locked until December, 2027, an important consideration as the effect that large unlocks have had on crypto assets this cycle has forced many speculators to adjust their standards accordingly. ~37% of the total token supply is circulating, with ~15% of this being staked. Considering the fact that Polytrade is an RWA marketplace, as opposed to a protocol tokenizing specific assets themselves, this allows TRADE to potentially capture a wider scope of value. Other options in the RWA space might be seen as being too specific, for example, being tied to onchain treasuries, or institutional credit. So TRADE can perhaps be a more catch-all asset representing the RWA space as a whole. From a platform perspective, the new Base protocol integrations can help to sustainably raise trading volumes on the platform by virtue of having more assets available to be listed, as well as bring new eyes to the platform, comprising both speculators and protocol users.
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