Unido - Bringing Enterprise Capital To DeFi
Unido is a technology ecosystem that tackles the management, security and accessibility challenges of decentralized platforms.
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2021 kicked off to an interesting start! A recent major announcement that likely comes to mind is Tesla investing $1.5 Billion USD in Bitcoin. However, Elon Musk isn’t the first CEO to invest such a large sum into cryptocurrency.
In fact, Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy Inc. stated: ‘’The scarcest asset in the world is Bitcoin. It’s digital gold.’’. Saylor used to be a low-profile tech executive, until he started investing major sums of money into Bitcoin.
As a result of his high-volume Bitcoin purchases, both Saylor’s net worth and popularity have surged simultaneously. To be specific, a February filing shows MicroStrategy holds approximately 71,000 Bitcoins, currently valued at $3.386 Billion USD!
Michael has been a big advocate for Bitcoin for a while now and in the process has convinced many companies to add digital currencies to their balance sheet. During this time, Bitcoin’s price has rapidly increased, leading to mass awareness of the companies that have invested large sums into it.
With Elon Musk’s advocacy for cryptocurrency, it seems inevitable that other companies and institutions will follow suit, whether it be from genuine interest in the technology or to meet the needs of their investors. Unido aims to capitalize on this next phase of adoption by supporting corporate entities with tools that make DeFi accessible and safe. Let’s discuss exactly how they propose to achieve this.
Onboarding Enterprise
Various platforms are available that bring convenience to retail investors such as the numerous dashboards, DeFi aggregators and even DeFi games. Institutional investors, however, have vastly different requirements to retail investors. Currently, there is no platform that enables enterprises to deploy their assets into DeFi and manage them as a team.
Unido is a technology ecosystem that tackles the management, security and accessibility challenges of decentralized platforms. This means Unido enables large enterprises to finally capitalize on DeFi (Decentralized Finance).
The Unido Enterprise Platform offers unique features that haven’t been seen before:
1) Enterprise Crypto Banking Suite
This suite enables enterprises to manage their day to day operations and capital expenditure such as payment transfers of digital assets, multi-user wallet management, user governance tools, analytics and reporting - all in a simple to use interface while being interoperable.
2) DeFi Vault Access
A feature imperative to security, is Unido’s multi-user wallet management, where multiple signatories hold a piece of the private key. Imagine, the CEO of an enterprise wants to transact an amount of digital assets from the company account. Once the transaction is requested, all signatories would get pinged on their devices, prompting them to sign or reject the transaction with their portion of the private key. This prevents one person from managing all the funds in a wallet, increasing security in the process.
In addition to this unique feature, the DeFi vault offers insights and a secure and integrated bridge into various available DeFi platforms, such as Uniswap, Balancer and Yearn Finance. This enables the enterprise to easily compare and deploy idle assets into the best available options to earn yield.
Further, analytics and reporting enables them to easily visualize the profits and/or losses of all open positions. This further allows for improved asset performance.
With the rapid innovation that DeFi brings to the finance sector, comes some potential legal issues. As this niche is still relatively new, there are still a lot of things that need to be mapped out. Fortunately, by using the Unido platform, enterprises can be sure they are deploying assets into DeFi in a way that meets their security needs.
The Enterprise Platform is available as both an off-the-shelf product and offered as a white-label solution, with customization options. Unido believes this customization will increase the potential client base and make the enterprise platform suitable for a large variety of clients. Some examples include asset managers, private banks, custodial services, and more.
Summarized, Unido offers a platform that reduces the entry barriers for enterprises to deploy assets into decentralized finance applications. This will allow them to access pools for yield farming (liquidity mining) and maximize their asset performance, using analytics and reporting. This is tied together in a secure platform that offers a multi-sig experience.
Unido Core API
In addition to enterprises, Unido will perk the interest of software developers as they’ll be able to build new products and services on top of the platform. The Core API will be easy to integrate as a conventional API and will offer the previously mentioned advantages to decentralized applications leveraging this API.
Essentially, the API enables enterprise-grade security in a decentralized application, acting as the gateway to the ecosystem. Here are some example use cases, within and beyond the DeFi space:
Manage synthetic assets of derivatives, one of the fastest growing segments with a sea of opportunities.
Signing off on the movement of goods on a supply chain ledger.
Various data that blockchain technology already encompasses such as assets, user data, personal data, medical data, and much more.
The core API will come with Unido’s governance model (Unido DAO). To truly create a decentralized and self-sustaining ecosystem, on which developers can freely build, the Unido DAO will be vital. This ultimately transfers the centralized authority of the foundation into a decentralized governance mechanism. If you’re interested in the governance model, then be sure to read further in Unido’s white paper.
Tokenomics
UDO tokens will be used throughout the whole ecosystem via interaction of participants with the network. This includes platform access, consumption fees and the governance model mentioned above.
Enterprises will be granted an access license upon an annual payment or platform fee. Every enterprise or developer who wishes to access Unido products is required to hold UDO tokens. Without it, the core API rejects any interaction. When a license is acquired, the payment is moved into a smart contract until the license expires, at which point it needs to be renewed. Tokens are initially locked for at least 6 months.
UDO is also used to validate any transaction on the network. Transaction fees are based on monthly volume of transactions/month and are calculated in fiat value. Of these collected fees, 60% are burnt, 20% are allocated to the ecosystem development fund and 20% are taken into the project reserve.
A portion of the UDO tokens are to be unlocked through liquidity mining to incentivize token holders who provide liquidity on the supported trading pairs on decentralized exchanges. This will be offered in the early phase of the project, with the initial pools for UDO/ETH and UDO/USDT.
Tokens are to be distributed according to the following metrics:
Token Evaluation
Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that Unido has a working product, which prospective clients can schedule a demo for. This means immediate token utility for UDO at the Token Generation Event (TGE), which is a somewhat rare find.
Judging by the roadmap, the current service on offer is limited to Multipac, Unido’s multi-sig wallet. There’s mention of existing digital banking clients utilizing this tech in the whitepaper. Looking forward, upcoming milestones for 2021 include the TGE, DeFi interface release, liquidity mining, Unido Core development, and an ecosystem grant to incentivize development. From there, 2022 and beyond should see the Unido wallet app released, with the addition of margin and lending, as well as a marketing push for both retail and enterprise customers.
Looking at the multi-sig wallet in a silo, a notable competitor would be Gnosis, who’s utility token, GNO holds the 114th spot on Coingecko with a sizable $250 Million market cap. Realistically, this comparison is only fair once Unido can match their $22 Million total value locked (TVL). In terms of DeFi aggregators, market cap disparity is massive, with OctoFi’s OCTO valued below $39 Million and Bancor’s BNT valued at $606 Million.
The Unido TGE for UDO starts on February 26, 2021 following an Initial DEX Offering (IDO) on Polkastarter. While the token price hasn’t been announced, the initial market cap is meant to be roughly $500,000. For the latest developments on this, follow Unido on Telegram or Twitter.
Conclusion
At first glance, Unido could appear as another DeFi aggregator and dashboard, however the key differentiators such as the multi-sig wallet, and regulatory compliance cannot be understated. Our brief competitor analysis above shows the broad spectrum of possible future market share and this will likely be contingent on the success of onboarding enterprise level clients. While, the initial market cap looks desirable to us, remember to trade and invest at your own risk and don’t get stung by slippage and massive gas fees!
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