Top 12 Crypto Projects That Make Us Believe in the Future of Web3 Despite the FTX Collapse

Almost every headline that's come out over the past few weeks has centered around the collapse of FTX and the shadow that it has thrown over the entire cryptocurrency industry. Within the span of a few days, it was revealed that FTX had been moving user funds off the platform, essentially stealing from thousands of crypto wallets.

Alongside further realizations about the extent of duplicity that was going on, FTX's collapse further accelerated the panic around crypto's current pricing. The current period has been named the crypto winter due to the sudden (and repeated) downturn in total value. As of most recently, the total market cap of cryptocurrency sank to 800 billion for the first time since December 2020.

In this period of doubt, investors are looking for projects that have both longevity and merit to them. Even with the current downturns, that doesn't take away from the projects currently underway, especially those which are actively forging the Web 3 systems of tomorrow.

While some skeptics assume that this is the end of crypto as we know it, others believe that this downturn is nothing more than the perfect entry point for new investments. In light of this, we've rounded up 12 crypto projects that represent the very best of what the industry has to offer.

We'll cover the following projects:

• Klaytn
• Aura Finance
• Pooky
• Deby Stars
• Walken
• Decentral Games
• Boba Network
• Sweat Economy
• Ankr
• Radix
• YARD Hub
• DefiChain

These projects span across the very best of what the blockchain industry has to offer. We'll be covering everything from industry-changing infrastructural creations to the systems' favorite Web 3 gaming experience providers.

Let's get right into it.

Klaytn

Starting off the list with an L1 chain, Klaytn is a public blockchain ecosystem that's empowering the Metaverse, the creator economy, and the GameFi industry. Since the widespread popularization of Ethereum, it has been the go-to chain for building DeFi infrastructure.

However, as its popularity increased, its low transactions-per-seconds throughput has led to high gas fees and an unstable network for scaling applications on. Klaytn acts as a direct equivalent to Ethereum, providing the same world-class building infrastructure while also solving the central issues that Ethereum faces.

Klaytn has stood out from its competitors due to its high throughput and low latency, allowing developers to give their users a near-perfect blockchain experience. Their system also uses 1-second deterministic finality, creating a new block every section. Due to this, developers don't have to worry about a larger transaction queue forming.

This system allows Klaytn to construct an environment that is perfect for constructing DeFi applications. Another notable benefit for developers is the gas fee delegation feature, further driving forward everything that developers can achieve on this system.

Without a doubt, Klaytn is one of the most exciting projects that you should currently be following.

Aura Finance

Built on the Balancer system, Aura Finance affords users an easy way of providing liquidity on Balancer. Via liquidity pools or staking, Aura Finance users are able to get more rewards for participating in Balancer. Aura uses a COnvex style of tokenomics, further pushing the incentive to place liquidity into projects run on Balancer.

One of the major advantages of Aura Finance for BAL stakers is its easy onboarding process. Instead of moving through complicated protocols, Aura has created a tokenized wrapped token, known as auraBAL. By staking this, users are able to instantly receive rewards in BAL and bbaUSD from balanced.

Beyond just being rewarded within Balancer, users are also able to claim Aura's rewards, in the form of AURA and BAL. Once a user has decided to finish staking via Aura's tokenized wrapped, they only need to swap auraBAL back to BAL.

While users are the main group that benefits from Aura Finance's intelligent protocol, liquidity providers are also set to profit. Any LPs that want to get involved only need to participate in the Balancer gauge system, which is created and monitored by Aura. This allows anyone that deposits to boost their token, while also accumulating the previously mentioned rewards.

AURA tokens are also used by the community as a governance token, helping to place community ideals at the center of this project. For those interested in a transparent blockchain project with great fundamental utility, Aura Finance is the one to look at.

Pooky

Pooky is one of the most unique projects on this list, arriving at the intersection of the Web 3 Play & Earn and gambling industries. Within Pooky, users are able to make predictions about football matches. All of the world's biggest tournaments and leagues are included, giving users access to all of their favorite teams.

Constructed on the Polygon blockchain, Pooky directly awards football fans for their prediction skills. The more you know about football, the more likely you are to make correct predictions. As your predictions come through, users earn experience points (PXP), moving up internal rankings systems and leaderboards.

The more experience a player has, the higher level they'll be, unlocking rewards as they move through the ranks. Some of the rewards that players will earn come in the form of digital collectibles. Using NFT technology, players have ownership of these collectibles, helping to further incentivize playing.

Making predictions is completely free on Pooky, meaning that it's a free experience that users can profit from. At its core, the mission of Pooky is to further the entertainment that football provides, creating a Web 3 hub for sports betting to occur and for football fans to have fun.

Derby Stars

Derby Stars is an NFT game that allows users to raise world-class raising horses within the Metaverse. Every horse within the game is an NFT collectible, with each new horse that users breed becoming a further digital asset. By raising them correctly and breeding the best together, users can create the next fastest racehorse.

Within Derby Stars, users can race their horses against others around the world. Based on Polygon, the results of each match are stored permanently on the blockchain, allowing users from around the world to dive into the leaderboards and see who is currently reigning supreme.

Beyond just horse assets, the community in Derby Stars can also own land. Each piece of land becomes integral to your ranch, allowing you to further customize your experience. Users will play as a jockey character, which will also come with fully-customizable attire.

The game's recent migration to Polygon has only served to further increase the community's interest in the digital world, with lower gas prices and more stability being the shining achievements of the transition. If you're looking for a unique NFT gaming experience with exciting horses to breed, raise, and race, this is the game for you.

Walken

Walken set out to connect the physical and digital world, creating a system where users were rewarded for keeping fit and active. On the platform, every user is able to design their CAThlete avatar. By walking in real life, you're able to start to train and upgrade your CAThlete, each step helping you to update your stamina, strength, and speed in-game.

For every step that a user takes and every exercise session that they clock, they're rewarded with WLKN tokens. Users that engage in healthy habits are able to earn more tokens, which can be used to further upgrade their characters.

As your NFT character becomes stronger, you're able to match against competitors, competing to see who can win the battle. The more battles you win, the more WLKN tokens you'll be able to collect every day.

For every 1,000 steps in the game, users are able to earn gems which can then be used to further upgrade their character and style them however they'd like. As an NFT asset, you can then sell your character on the market, earning real-world currency. Alternatively, you could cash out your WLKN as you earn it to create a form of income just from walking.

Walken has built an impressive community around their project, with over 50 million all-time downloads on their mobile application. This community has a thriving marketplace, where users can buy, sell, and trade CAThlete or items that they've accumulated across the game.

Getting users active and onboarding them into the world of cryptocurrency, this is a fantastic project to keep on your radar.

Decentral Games

Decentral Games is the provider of the world's top free Metaverse poker game. Within this system, users are able to compete against one another, rise through the global leaderboards, and complete daily poker challenges. Users can earn ICE tokens, mint new NFT collectibles, and collect rewards for moving up the monthly leaderboards.

This Metaverse uses ICE as an in-game currency, incentivizing players to engage with the game as they can earn crypto. Beyond just cryptocurrency, users can kit out their Metaverse avatars with ICE Wearables. By buying DG utility tokens, users can then trade them for exclusive wearables.

Users can even delegate their NFTs out to other players, creating a passive revenue share system that rewards them over time. Across earning crypto for playing and being able to create, buy, share, and sell ICE NFT collectibles, this system has a range of ways to play and earn.

Acting as an Open Metaverse, this play-to-earn ecosystem helps onboard new users into the world of cryptocurrency via a familiar system: poker. Instead of being complicated to understand or use, this Metaverse version of poker lets communities familiarize themselves with this digital world via a well-known game.

For those looking for an exciting spin on an old classic, Decentral Games' poker is one to look out for.

Boba Network

The Boba Network is one of the most advanced layer-2 rollup solutions for Ethereum. Ethereum has long struggled with its lack of scalability, stopping the ecosystem from further taking hold of a larger market share. Acting as an Ethereum rollup, Boba integrates into the L1 system and affords it a range of additional features.

Boba allows Ethereum to achieve reduced gas fees by increasing the total number of transactions per second that it can handle. Beyond that, its EVM compatibility makes NFT usage a breeze, maintaining all the same security practices as the L1 system itself.

Boba also offers a service known as Hybrid Compute. This allows developers to pull information from Web 2 systems, creating an instant transfer of data. Connecting to off-chain APIs, this essentially bridges the gap between Web 2 and Web 3, allowing developers to pull information instantly across these systems.

With Boba's array of useful features and its innovative Hybrid Compute, developers can build and run dApps at a fraction of the cost as with other L1 systems. Most recently, Boba has been focusing on blockchain gaming, the Metaverse, and NFTs, acting as the go-to solution for L1 chains.

Currently boasting partnerships with Ethereum, Binance, Moonbeam, and Avalanche, Boba is a strong contender to be one of the most pivotal blockchain projects in recent history.

Sweat Economy

Sweat Economy takes the very best of Web 3 and integrates it into physical health. By moving and taking steps throughout their day, users are able to generate SWEAT tokens. Each of these tokens can then be used to buy gift cards or other real-world rewards. As a cryptocurrency, users can also exchange their SWEAT tokens for fiat currency, providing a direct incentive for absolutely everyone to get walking.

There is no risk or upfront investment when downloading Sweat Economy. Due to this, users can download it onto their phones and start earning SWEAT without even thinking about it. No matter whether you're a crypto-whiz or someone that's new to the world of blockchain, this is an easy way to earn.

Sweat Economy's goal is to provide a further incentive to exercise, using gamification to get people up and moving. The financial incentive to move, without any adverse side, ensures that every step brings true value to movement. Sweat Economy acts from the intersection between the digital and physical worlds, connecting Web 3 with real-world movement.

Sweat Economy has already proved itself, with a total of over 120,000,000 users clocking in to get their steps in. The app was 2022's number one Health & Fitness app, demonstrating how well-received this project has been.

Ankr

Ankr is the world's leading Web 3 infrastructure provider, currently tasked with powering some of the biggest names in blockchain. It enables developers to build safe, scalable, and upgradable dApps on dozens supported chains. Think of it as a messenger that relays on-chain information between dApps, nodes, and users.

World leaders like Polygon, Binance, and Optimism have all sung the praise of Ankr, citing this infrastructure provider as a first-class example of strengthening the entire Web 3 ecosystem.

Earlier this year, Ankr transformed itself from a centralized infrastructure provider to a fully decentralized protocol, called Ankr Network 2.0, governed by a DAO. Other infrastructure providers can also join the Ankr Network to provide nodes and earn rewards.

Ankr currently handles around 8 billion API requests on a daily basis, covering nearly 40,000 developers as they power the Web 3 technology of tomorrow. If you're looking for a company that represents the very best of what blockchain infrastructure has to offer, you can't overlook Ankr.

Radix

Radix envisions the future of finance as completely decentralized. However, if the community is to arrive there, there are several integral problems that DeFi has to first overcome. Radix sets out to create a secure and stable solution, building the decentralized network of the future.

Radix is currently the only full stack for DeFi, providing an L1 ecosystem that could well be the foundation for the future of decentralized finance. Their system is highly scalable, uses advanced developer tools for rapid building, and is incredibly secure. Radix is actively constructing an interconnected DeFi system, a place where developers can build DeFi applications quickly, safely, and securely.

One of the central offerings of Radix is the system of tools that they offer to developers. Instead of creating things only from scratch, the Radix Public Network allows developers to use other developers' blueprints. From there, leveraging functionality is easy, as you can see how specific deployments are currently active on the network.

To inspire further development, developers that submit to the blueprint catalog are rewarded with on-ledger royalties. Not only does this blueprint system encourage development, but it also superchargers public interest, allowing for developers to rapidly create much-needed DeFi applications for users.

For those interested in this project, Radix is planning on unveiling its solution to fix the current state of crypto. Spanning across the deception that centralized chains have become all the way to delivering on the early promises of cryptocurrency as a whole, this event on December 8th, 2022, is not one to be missed.

YARD Hub

YARD Hub is a web3 venture studio which creates and launches startups with a help of a designated Spec Ops team that focuses on an iterative approach to building web3 projects.

YARD Hub offers its financial and expert assistance to the portoflio projects to help them grow into full-scale web3 businesses. It is part of YARD Hub's vision that startups guided by highly experienced in-house teams have a better chance to find a proper product/market fit and succeed. From business analytics and product management all the way to marketing and business development, YARD Hub helps avoid the most common mistakes leading to startup failures.

If you're looking to follow the rise of new world-class web3 businesses, then YARD Hub's portfolio projects are definitely worth checking out.

DeFiChain

While Bitcoin has been the leading crypto in terms of market cap, it has always lagged behind in terms of DeFi deployments. With a low throughput and an inflexible system to develop with, Web3 developers almost always choose Ethereum. DeFiChain has set out to change that, providing a Proof-of-Stake blockchain as a hard fork of Bitcoin.

It gives DeFi users the best of both worlds – the water-tight security of Bitcoin combined with incredibly low fees and high transaction throughput that you'd expect from a modern chain. DeFiChain pushes the TPS possible on Bitcoin even further, converting the network into one that is viable for the development of dApps.

Beyond just infrastructure, DeFiChain also allows users to get involved with Decentralized Assets. Instead of having a mixture of on-chain and off-chain investments, those interested in blockchain can buy dToken reflections of their favorite stocks. For example, instead of buying TSLA on the stock exchange, a user can hold dTSLA, which uses oracles to reflect a similar price to the centralized stock.

While not exact replicas of these stocks, the dAssets allow users to participate in traditional investing in a truly decentralized way from anywhere in the world - all from the comfort of DeFiChain's platform.

DeFiChain is one of the most promising blockchains out there. If you're looking for innovation, here's the place to start.

Final Thoughts

The world of cryptocurrency has definitely taken a sharp step back over the last few months. From the LUNA crash to the recent collapse of the world's third-largest centralized crypto exchange, FTX, things have gone south quickly.

Instead of selling in fear, now is the perfect time to re-examine the market as we know it. While prices are currently low, that doesn't subtract from the hard work that blockchain companies on this list are carrying out. From ingenious platforms that have innovated the Web 3 space to new entries into this world that have already received impressive community participation, the world of blockchain is still only just getting started.

And, with these projects at the head of the ecosystem's growth, we're extremely optimistic about the future of crypto.