Incubated by EMURGO & ADAVERSE: How Does Astarter Become Cardano’s Core DeFi Infrastructure?

Astarter is a DeFi protocol deployed on Cardano. It is supported by EMURGO & ADAVERSE– the official commercial incubation companies of Cardano. In addition to regular DEX, Launchpad, and money market services, Astarter aims to support any DeFi project on Cardano to establish corresponding product services and complete fundraising according to their needs.

Astarter will release the ADEX V2.0 public testnet mid-July and plans to launch a 3.0 version in the new quarter. This article provides a brief overview of Astarter’s positioning, basic information, mechanism design, and its unique advantages.

Astarter: the DeFi Infrastructure Hub on Cardano

Astarter is one of the first DeFi protocols and decentralized applications built and launched on Cardano. It is dedicated to building DeFi and its associated derivative services on Cardano, further driving the development of DeFi applications in the Cardano ecosystem and ultimately becoming the core infrastructure of DeFi on Cardano.

Currently, Astarter has four core applications: Launchpad (Launchpool), DEX, money market, and technical service platform. It is endorsed by EMURGO & ADAVERSE– the official commercial incubation companies of Cardano.

As a decentralized protocol with DeFi services at its core, Astarter not only provides diversified DeFi services such as DEX, lending and Launchpad, directly to ordinary users but also offers technical development support to any DeFi project, including oracles (various on-chain data) and modular microservice architecture.

Benefiting from Cardano’s scalability, usability, EUTXO, and other innovative designs, both business users and individual users of Astarter can conduct on-chain transactions and use various on-chain data at a very low cost.

Since Cardano entered the era of smart contracts in September last year, it has finally realized its ambitious goal of building a smart contract platform. The key to whether Cardano can attract market attention and the influx of funds in the future lies in the improvement of its infrastructure.

According to the official plan, Astarter is expected to complete a comprehensive product layout within this year. The money market and technical service support platform will also be launched before 2024 to provide multi-dimensional support services for Cardano’s DeFi protocols with a wide range of use scenarios.

In summary, Astarter aims to bring broader possibilities to the Cardano ecosystem by providing fair, secure, and accessible open financial services to accelerate the application of DeFi and meet the needs of the existing and future projects deployed on Cardano.

The Four Product Matrices Surrounding DeFi Services

Astarter’s four product matrices include Launchpad (Launchpool), DEX, money market, and technical service platform. They aim to leverage a comprehensive service scenario encompassing DEX trading, project fundraising, and technical support to harness their respective resources and advantages.

Based on these services, Astarter can empower early-stage DeFi projects on Cardano through its product matrices, which will strengthen its role as the “DeFi Infrastructure Hub on Cardano” while assisting in the development of Cardano’s startup projects.

Launchpad

Astarter Launchpad supports Cardano projects in conducting IDO and ISPO fundraising.

“Launchpads” are often the project financing hubs within a public chain ecosystem. On one end, they connect with “project teams,” and on the other end, they connect with “investors.” Although the intentions of both parties using “Launchpads” are entirely different, their needs can be perfectly aligned:

• For project teams, they can attract like-minded angel investors to raise development funds based on their vision and project characteristics.
• For investors, they can discover potentially promising early-stage projects and gain early high returns through “initial offerings” similar to traditional capital markets.

Astarter Launchpad supports Cardano projects in different forms of fundraising, including:

• Launchpool: An innovative form of ISPO fundraising that minimizes the risk of capital loss for investors.
• IDO: A decentralized and fair method used for fundraising and promotion of IDO projects on Cardano.

To a certain extent, for the burgeoning Cardano DeFi ecosystem, the diverse fundraising model of Astarter Launchpad provides crucial support for the development of startup projects within the Cardano ecosystem. This also indirectly determines the prosperity of Cardano’s ecosystem.

ADEX

ADEX is designed to be a key hub for Cardano-based DEX. Unlike the fragmented trading model of either AMM or order book currently on the market, it achieves a blend of both by virtue of the advantages of Cardano’s underlying public chain: high performance and low cost.

ADEX adopts a dual-mode trading system of “AMM + order book” that allows users to engage in both AMM and limit order trading. It also utilizes the EUTXO model to incorporate advanced smart contract functionalities.

Currently, the main features of ADEX V1.0 include:

• Swap: users can seamlessly exchange their crypto assets without centralized institutions, facilitating fast and efficient trading experiences.
• Provide liquidity: liquidity providers can contribute to the liquidity pool to ensure smooth and reliable trading for users. In return, they receive corresponding dividends based on the trading activities and fees generated by ADEX.
• Earn staking rewards: users can stake tokens in the liquidity pool, contribute to ADEX liquidity, and receive additional rewards as participation incentives.
• Order query: users can effectively monitor and manage their orders. They can view the status of their buy or sell orders, modify or cancel orders as needed, and stay informed about their transaction activities in real-time.

Astarter Money Market

Astarter’s money market boasts unique performance and cost advantages. In comparison to established DeFi money market projects like Aave and Compound, which incur high on-chain transaction costs, Astarter’s money market is built on Cardano, and allows users to engage in lending operations with extremely low transaction gas costs. In this way, it enhances overall yield for users.

Additionally, Astarter’s money market considers to support cross-chain from the outset so as to enable native cross-chain lending services. Users can perform cross-chain stablecoin exchanges and provide liquidity to liquidity pools of different chains to earn rewards.

Technical Service Platform

Astarter’s technical service platform encompasses multiple dimensions, including oracle data feeding, layered modular microservice architecture, and decentralized cross-chain support:

• Astarter’s oracles provide accurate data for various types of DApps in the DeFi, GameFi, and NFT sectors.
• The layered modular microservice architecture is similar to a SaaS system, supporting the use of microservice architecture in blockchain mainnet systems.
• Astarter’s decentralized cross-chain support spans a wide range of blockchain ecosystems, facilitating cross-ecosystem liquidity integration for DApps.

In the DeFi world, once a leading project gains popularity, numerous imitations quickly emerge. Time and security are the lifelines of DeFi projects.

However, at the same time, DeFi products also face certain technological and security barriers in terms of funding requirements, project research, design and development. Particularly in emerging public chain DeFi ecosystems like Cardano, early liquidity and attention tend to be concentrated in projects with a first-mover advantage, such as Astarter.

Therefore, integrating with early projects like Astarter is a crucial strategy for achieving early user acquisition and liquidity accumulation.

Astarter’s Synergistic Advantages in DeFi Services

Developers can easily integrate with Astarter’s microservice architecture that offers seamless integration. Moreover, this support is multidimensional:

For project developers, Astarter Launchpad provides a new funding opportunity for them to raise money from ecological users and ADA holders within the Cardano ecosystem. They thus can introduce a new source of revenue for their projects. For Cardano users, they can invest in Astarter Launchpad, which is a great opportunity to participate directly in the project’s growth and gain extra benefits. In this way, their projects get development funds, and Cardano users get shares.

This mutually beneficial relationship allows projects to acquire development funding while Cardano users gain ownership. It fosters multiple stakeholder interests, collaborative efforts, and the sharing of potential growth dividends.

Based on this foundation, DeFi projects can integrate corresponding ADEX, Astarter Money Market, and Astarter technical platform to achieve liquidity integration and modular DeFi functionality construction.

Investment, Financing and the Project Team

Astarter has established partnerships and investments with several well-known entities in the cryptocurrency industry. They include EMURGO and ADAVERSE, the official commercial incubation companies of Cardano, as well as OKX Ventures, Ruby Capital, Nuls, Bitboy, Altcoin Buzz, and Cardano Equity Pool, among more than 30 investors.

Furthermore, the team behind Astarter consists of veterans blockchain users and developers.

• The CEO of Astarter, Chris, is an early evangelist of cryptocurrency with over 7 years of professional experience. He has served as a senior project manager for multiple blockchain projects and was responsible for market research and analysis for the NULS blockchain.
• Jon Chamberlain, the Marketing and Community Director at Astarter, has been involved in establishing a business solutions center and is currently engaged in blockchain node operation and smart contract development.
• Stephanie, the Chief Operations Officer, is an angel investor and blockchain evangelist with over 5 years of experience with cryptocurrencies. She has worked with the Web3 Foundation, OKExChain, and Binance Smart Chain ecosystems, focusing on blockchain project incubation and strategic marketing.
• CTO Robert Hu has over 10 years of development experience and has led the development of several DeFi, GameFi, NFT, SocialFi, and sidechain projects. He is the former technical leader of Thunder.

Roadmap

According to the official project roadmap, following the release of the ADEX V2.0 public testnet in the second quarter, the ADEX 3.0 version will be officially launched in the third quarter, introducing the “AMM+order book” dual trading mode.

Additionally, in the third quarter, the beta version of Astarter’s money market will be completed, and the Astarter technical support platform will be released. This period will also see the development of AWLs NFT.

In the fourth quarter of this year, Astarter’s money market will be officially launched, offering comprehensive decentralized lending functionality. Simultaneously, the Astarter technical support platform will commence its services, building Astarter’s DeFi circle and matrix ecosystem.

Overall, besides traditional DeFi services, Astarter aims to deeply integrate itself as a key component into various DeFi protocols on Cardano and to play a central role in the ecology. Being at the core, it gradually forms an ecosystem, which poses significant challenges but also unleashes its potential and courage.

Astarter’s official channels:

Official Website: https://www.astarter.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AstarterDefiHub

Telegram: https://t.me/astartergroup

TG ANN Channel: https://t.me/Astarteranncmnt

Discord: https://discord.gg/astarter

Medium: https://medium.com/@AstarterDefiHub

Reddit：https://www.reddit.com/r/Astarter/

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/astartertv