‘Common Cryptocurrency’ Surges to $70M Market Capitalization

An obscure sensible contract has been guzzling gasoline on Ethereum. 

XEN Torrent is accountable for over 11% of the transaction charges paid on Ethereum over the previous 24 hours, making it the second-largest gasoline client after Uniswap’s router contract. 

And but, not many individuals have heard of XEN regardless of its look among the many family names driving Ethereum utilization. The token is up almost 500% previously month, nevertheless.

“Our method is to resolve the adoption downside before everything,” ZEN TZU, a pseudonymous core crew member at Honest Crypto Basis, the corporate behind XEN, advised The Defiant. “XEN is designed to be extra of peer-to-peer money than store-of-value,” they stated. 

The challenge’s whitepaper positions the token as “a common cryptocurrency to realize the unique mission of blockchain.” The paper lists blockchain buzzwords like self-custody, transparency, and decentralization, as features of that mission. 

One key function of XEN is customers can simply pay the transaction charges on a supported blockchain to accumulate the token totally free. Nonetheless, the minting course of will yield progressively much less XEN over time.

Jack Levin, the challenge’s founder and former Google engineer, advised The Defiant that an utility referred to as DBXen, which makes customers burn XEN with the intention to use the protocol, was accountable for the elevated demand for the token on Ethereum.

Mint and Stake

At its core, customers mint XEN by way of its web site. After ready for a user-determined interval, they will stake XEN with the intention to purchase extra tokens, in response to the whitepaper. The specifics of what number of XEN a consumer will get depends on a components supplied within the paper. 

There’s additionally an increasing ecosystem of functions round XEN. One referred to as XEN Knights, launched earlier this month and entails burning the token for an NFT-like asset referred to as an Ordinal, which lives on the Bitcoin blockchain. One other, referred to as XENFT, permits customers to batch-mint XEN with an NFT, in response to a publish on the discharge. 

XEN’s design is gas-guzzling by nature. One other of the challenge’s sensible contracts was accountable for 40% of Ethereum gasoline utilization in October, making the blockchain’s native asset deflationary for the primary time after EIP-1559 and the Merge.

‘Fringe’ Undertaking

Contemplating the nagging consideration that crypto solves an issue that doesn’t exist, it’s arduous for folks to get excited a few new challenge like XEN. The challenge isn’t nicely built-in with the dominant DeFi initiatives like Lido and Aave, established NFTs like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, or many influencers in both of these Ethereum-dominated ecosystems. 

For instance, initiatives like Voltz, the rate of interest swap protocol, have the blessing of an early license granted by Uniswap, arguably essentially the most profitable DeFi challenge. Voltz permits buyers to invest on the rates of interest of main lending protocols like Aave and Compound. 

XEN, however, seems to be popping out of left area, which can make it arduous to belief by contributors in ‘mainstream’ crypto tradition, which facilities round Twitter and the Ethereum blockchain.

Nonetheless, there’s a rising view that crypto wants to maneuver past its self-referential tradition and on to greener pastures the place folks could not know or care concerning the lore behind DeFi protocols. 

Joe Blau, the co-founder of a challenge within the XEN ecosystem referred to as Fenix Protocol which is ready to launch within the coming weeks, is conscious of the token’s place within the bigger crypto group. “We’re on the perimeter,” he advised The Defiant. “We’re not within the core.” 

Blau is acquainted with the large names in DeFi, reeling off among the high initiatives’ names with out lacking a beat. He thinks there’s one other set of customers outdoors the  Ethereum-centric membership. 

“They don’t actually care if it’s Compound on Ethereum or a Compound fork on another chain or if it’s Uniswap or if it’s PancakeSwap or if it’s Spookyswap,” he stated. 

Multichain Strategy

XEN’s creators have deployed the token on 10 totally different blockchains. That’s a dramatically totally different method to the deliberate manner that a lot of the largest protocols by way of complete worth locked (TVL) slowly broaden to different chains.

A former engineer at Uber, Blau stated XEN took the “land and broaden” method that the ride-sharing firm took when it launched in lots of cities in a brief time period and tried to develop enterprise from there. Blau conceded that many chains, like BNB Chain, are successfully centralized. This admission does, in some methods, appear counter to XEN’s said mission of working from blockchains’ “first ideas” like decentralization. 

Blau argues that there are upsides to the broad method XEN is taking. “We’re discovering wonderful builders in several pockets,” he stated. 

It’s unclear whether or not XEN will work in the long term. If it does, it definitely gained’t have been by way of the standard route in DeFi, and it’ll have burned quite a lot of ETH alongside the way in which.