With the growing number of Unicorns in crypto industry, the best times are yet to come
by Rushali 
Unicorn is a term that is very commonly used in the crypto world. This term is used to describe a privately held startup valued at more than $1 billion.
These startups are very strong fundamentally and they often have the first-mover advantage that helps them to become a prized investment opportunity for yield-seeking funds.
The most famous unicorn is Elon Musk’s SpaceX which is a private rocket and spacecraft manufacturer with a valuation of $46 billion.
BTC’s recent bullish rally is backed by people like Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, and Mark Cuban and it is shinning in the crypto industry.
But the institutional investors are looking beyond bitcoins in the industry for investment opportunities.
They are investing in projects like smart contract platforms, decentralized finance (Defi) protocols, privacy tokens, oracles providers, and even humor-oriented meme coins.
Bitcoin with a market cap of $843 billion, and is likely to be the first choice for the longest-running chain possessing the strongest mining network of all proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.
Ether with a market cap of $196 billion, is the second choice as it is the most-utilized smart contract platform and home to a majority of the top Defi protocols in recent months.
Other coins include Litecoin which has proved a reliable value transfer option as compared to bitcoins. Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC), which paved the way in bringing anonymity to blockchain transactions.
Last year, the main development in the crypto industry is the emergence of decentralized finance.
Decentralized exchanges (DEX) like Uniswap have grown from a simple app to a trading platform that now averages a 7-day trading volume of $6.72 billion.
Sushiwap the main competitor of Uniswap has now got the status of a unicorn with a current valuation of $1.8 billion. While DEXs helped facilitate the growth of Defi, lending protocols have emerged as the top draw for total value locked (TVL) and higher token values.
Maker (MKR), AAVE, and Compound (COMP) are the leading platforms when measured by the total value locked (TVL) in the protocol.
ETH has dominance in the Defi sector, but that leads to network congestion and which increased the gas fees.
This led to the development of oracle providers that can communicate data securely across platforms.
Promising smart contract platforms that have emerged include Polkadot (DOT) and its sister chain Kusama (KSM), which introduce interoperability with Ethereum and other top blockchains as the solution to the current siloed nature of separate networks.
With the new entrants in the crypto industry, it increases the need for more oracle providers.
Among all the oracle providers Chainlink (LINK) is the top oracle project in terms of protocol integrations and its valuation. LINK currently has a $10.37 billion market cap and the project’s recent integration with Kraken exchange is expected to add further value to the project.
With the new development happening in the last 12 years, unicorns are the future of the crypto industry, and many other startups will enter into this clan in recent times.
