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Venture Capital Partner Adam Cochran's 10,000-word crypto thesis Chapter 3: Outstanding Projects

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Venture Capital Partner Adam Cochran

Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran has released his 2022 crypto thesis and his favorite projects across different sectors, categorizing them into seven groups. This article covers Chapter Three: Outstanding Projects.

Original link: https://twitter.com/adamscochran/status/1476652328736342023

  • 1. God Tier: ETH, YFI, CVX, KP3R
  • 2. Outperform Market/Catalysts: FLX, CRV, ALCX, BAL, ZRX, FXS, RBN
  • 3. Outperform Market + Top Farms: FTM, AVAX, ZEC, Gearbox, Euler Finance
  • 4. Value-Driven/Long-term Outperformance: MKR, HNT, LDO, COMP, RARE, SNX, SYN, GNO
  • 5. Medium Risk, Clear Potential: PERP, FST, CAP, MCB, DPX, HND, API3, ANGLE
  • 6. High Risk, 50x or Bust: GEL, NFTX, RAMP, THALES, PICKLE, BABL, PREMIA, PENDLE
  • 7. Promising: Cowswap, Element Finance, Opyn, Cozy Finance, Pods, Volumex

Fantom FTM

  • Unlike major VC-controlled public chains, the Fantom ecosystem is closer to early Ethereum.
  • The aBFT consensus mechanism is scalable.
  • The staking mechanism stabilizes the coin price and provides substantial returns.
  • With multiple early projects, it has a good developer incentive mechanism.

As users continue to seek the next public chain in the L1 trend, Fantom has gained many new users and developers, and is expected to perform strongly in 2022 with reasonable returns.

Avalanche AVAX

  • Compared to Polkadot, Cardano, and Polygon, its EVM-based scaling solution is clearer.
  • Avalanche's subnet model will change the game rules.

Cochran believes the subnet model is like a mini version of sharding technology, allowing anyone to create custom application chains. Initial experiments on Ethereum sharding will take place on the Avalanche subnet, potentially outperforming the overall market this year.

Zcash ZEC

  • Privacy advantages, dedicated to researching a large ecosystem, zero-knowledge proofs.
  • Zcash could become a key technology for Ethereum's privacy scaling solution.

Cochran's core belief in ZEC comes from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's 2018 tweet.

At that time, Vitalik and Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash, discussed the assumption of Ethereum and Zcash merger. With the future of multi-chain L2, he believes Zcash will ultimately build the privacy transmission protocol/zk-snark layer that Ethereum has always needed.

ZEC will merge with Ethereum at some point, making it a key player in Web3 value transfer, regardless of which way it happens.

Gearbox Protocol GEAR

  • Gearbox aims to introduce leverage and margin mechanisms into DeFi.
  • CEX leverage trading volume is about five times that of spot trading, indicating significant growth potential in the DeFi sector.

Gearbox offers users leverage functions to amplify funds and use them in other DeFi protocols through composability. Cochran believes this will change the game rules completely and drive the growth of many DeFi 1.0 protocols.

GEAR is not yet listed on CEX, but may show strong performance in 2022.

Euler.finance EUL

  • One of the lending models that made significant modifications since Aave.
  • Smart contract/account model.
  • Four lending mechanisms: collateralized, full custody, partial custody, protected.

The vulnerability of traditional lending protocols often lies in the weakest assets on the platform, but Euler's mechanism reduces the risk of these assets while still allowing users to collateralize and borrow a variety of assets.

This mechanism not only makes Euler competitive but, like Gearbox, has the potential to create more use cases for blue-chip DeFi stocks.