Beyond DeFi: Future Cryptocurrency Industries to Watch

DeFi is quickly becoming mainstream, with trading activity growing by triple-digit percentages during the last year. But what else lies on the horizon for Cryptocurrencies?

DeFi stands for “decentralized finance,” and it aims to change everything we know about today’s financial systems. Using financial applications in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, traditional digital payment methods (and their substantial fees) would become obsolete. Anyone with an internet connection could freely use their funds in seconds without going through often expensive intermediaries.

While building an entirely new financial system from the ground up is the most ambitious project that humanity has undertaken in over 50 years, many are, understandably, more interested in the sector’s potential to generate tremendous wealth.

Cryptocurrency Industries to Watch

DeFi will allow crypto users to build their version of Wall Street: one without the excessive red tape, regulations, and corruption that cripples the current financial system. This sector also yields limitless potential for savvy traders and seasoned financial engineers to make money quickly, but there’s always a catch.

They must recognize projects that tie real value to their promises and potential. With the abundance of projects in today’s crypto world, this is easier said than done.

Today, we’ve hand-picked a list of industries that have successfully adopted cryptocurrencies and offer potential and real value to users. Without further ado, here are some of the most promising projects the crypto sphere offers!

DeSci (Decentralized Science)

Web3 decentralized science cooperatives seek to overcome the obstacles of modern scientific research.

Scientific progress is a delicate balance between the drive for innovation, polishing the studies that lead to it, and obtaining the funds to make it happen.

For scientists and scholars, securing funds for their studies is a challenging task, one that does not always play in favor of further developing science in general. Research grants and patrons are often more interested in profit-promising projects than potentially ground-breaking research that could benefit all humanity.

There’s no need to state how the internet elevated, modernized, and streamlined scientific research globally, linking and enabling joint efforts between scholars and professionals worldwide at unprecedented speed. Sadly, as time went by, scientific research began to suffer today’s web2 model drawbacks, which range from profit-hungry publishers, unintended (or purposeful) monopolies on scientific research to pay-walled access, and even financially or politically driven censorship.

Initiatives such as DeSci stand as one of the most promising means to tackle highly-gated grants and expand scientific research (and its peer-review process) for often overlooked research areas via the many benefits of blockchain technology.

DeSci stands for decentralized science movement. Even though it is and was initially championed by science scholars and professionals, its communities also include other disciplines and intellectual pursuits such as arts and humanities. 

In other words, Deci is a group of internet-native businesses focused on research collectively owned and managed by its members. DeSci comprises many DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), which act as cooperatives and communities of researchers studying effective and marketable solutions to many problems. 

By its very nature, DeSci comprehends DAOs with specific interests, each focused on a scientific or humanistic area.

In DeSci DAOs, Scholars and professionals work together with their backers to carry on their research toward scientific breakthroughs and solutions. They vote and govern their DAOs jointly, collaborating throughout decision-making as a community.

Scientific DAOs are an effective way for researchers to advance their work without paying thousands of dollars to major publishers. Thanks to DeSci, they can submit their studies for peer reviews and generate awareness amongst potential investors. Through smart contracts, patrons can purchase tokens to join the community and secure funds for the scientific research to carry onward.

More importantly, Deci DAOs have a multiplicative effect on the whole research chain. For instance, VitaDAO works as an open cooperative that anyone can join, either by purchasing VITA tokens, submitting work contributions, or entrusting other forms of intellectual property deemed relevant to the project. Their goal is to deepen the research into medications and therapeutics that extend the human lifespan.

VitaDAO aims to prevent its researcher’s findings from being monopolized by pharmaceutical conglomerates while keeping its scientists and scholars safe from censorship orchestrated by either corporate or political entities and their respective agendas.

VitaDAO, like many other DeSci projects, rewards tokens to professionals that collaborate or peer review their colleague’s work since it directly elevates the DAO’s quality of their research.

Drug Development

Medical research has a tremendous impact on healthcare, especially when developing life-saving treatments for patients.

Even though there’s an impressive body of work behind promising medicines that could benefit many, their improvement and later production are often held back by a lack of funding for Phase II and III Clinical Trials, both of which are essential proofs of a medicinal drug’s efficacy.

Medical trials constitute a crucial safety requirement for patients and consumers but can also become financial obstacles, especially for patented medicines. Such trials require millions (if not billions) of dollars from major pharmaceutical companies to cover their research and development costs before commercializing these drugs.

This process leaves thousands of off-patent drugs and treatments on “hold” indefinitely, simply because there isn’t enough funding to take them through the clinical trials that prove their efficacy in curing other diseases and ailments.

As such, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology once again present a viable solution to incentivize clinical trials for off-patent therapies that are otherwise ignored. Backers can fund these clinical trials through DAOs and minimize their risk through Pay for Success contracts. Funding agreements are exclusively offered to medicines with the highest chance of yielding medical breakthroughs.

Initiatives such as Crowd Funded Cures target off-patent medicinal drugs developed by independent researchers and offer backers pay-for-success contracts to fund a drug’s clinical trials. These contracts greatly reduce the cost per person when funding the efficacy studies of an off-patent medicinal drug. Once the efficacy is satisfactory for all backers, clinical trials are funded to commercialize the drug and provide all investors with an outcome payment (ROI).

This DeSci-affiliated platform opens the door to repurpose generic drugs to treat and cure diseases through a scalable financial model. With the collective support of its backers, the platform can fund these otherwise impossibly expensive research and patenting processes that only big pharmaceutical companies can partake in.

Data Monetization: Ocean Protocol

Using data effectively is essential to creating products and services that your customers need, making it a critical resource to any business, regardless of its size. Ocean Protocol seeks to connect data providers and consumers into a marketplace that leverages the Ethereum blockchain.

Ocean Protocol is an open-source protocol that allows businesses and individuals to monetize their data while preserving privacy and complete control. Ocean Protocol effectively works as a data marketplace that connects and facilitates transactions between data providers and consumers. Providers mint datatokens and sell the right to access off-chain data sets, while consumers purchase the tokens and redeem direct access to said data.

Consumers can access datasets that would otherwise be impossible to find, while its owners retain full control of their data, regardless of who bought it. The datatokens are publicly available for trade and act as an additional income stream for data publishers while providing data analysts, researchers, and scientists tremendously valuable insight.

Ocean Protocol has announced partnerships with several industry giants, such as Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Unilever, to name a few. Some have already begun integrating their project with Ocean Protocol, with direct use in the automotive and healthcare industry.

In a world where data is king, Ocean Protocol stands as an incredibly promising project that you’d do well to follow closely.

Healthcare

Cryptocurrency is a decentralized technology that lives on software platforms. These digital tokens are then used via blockchain technology to streamline online transactions while avoiding payment platform-specific fees.

The healthcare industry is well known for its bureaucracy, elevated costs, and inconvenient complexity (especially during emergencies and health crises). Sadly, healthcare systems are organized and operate in a way that makes us go through all sorts of hoops and loops to coordinate even the most basic medical assistance for ourselves or our loved ones.

Naturally, cryptocurrencies are starting to be noticed as a convenient, efficient, and technology-based way to tackle the unnecessary obstacles that traditional medical services present to patients and their families.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain are app-based technologies that go hand in hand, providing the necessary convenience and financial benefits that people need to access healthcare services.

Digital tokens are used as funds with an equivalent value to other currencies that can be managed, sent, and received via blockchain technology without a middleman such as banks (and their pay-to-use fees). More importantly, cryptocurrencies also allow us to purchase consultation, transportation services, and medication and incentivize more regular visits to specific healthcare providers.

Such is the case of initiatives such as Solve.care, which brings a centralized, easy way to keep up with health checkups, estimating insurance plans & health costs for better decision making, and a fast-track process with which to tackle emergencies as well as long term medical treatments.

The best part of the Solve.care app is that it allows each user to view easy-to-understand cost summaries, find doctors, pharmacies, procedures, and medical transportation, and even compare their costs with that outside of their network.

The point is for users to have a quick, verifiable, and cost-effective way to get in touch with physicians, keep track of their year and monthly checkups and tackle emergencies easier and in a timely fashion.

When facing medical emergencies, patients and their families can rapidly find through the Solve.care platform not only the right physicians and medical facilities, make quick appointments and find immediate transportation at the best available price. All of which can be conveniently paid through SOLVE tokens.

Say a relative has a sudden health setback. Through Solve.care’s app, you can quickly find a specialist and coordinate an appointment. Once the patient’s ailment has been addressed, Solve.care keeps you connected with your physician for an adequate follow-up, allowing patients to report on their everyday progress.

Doctors can also refer their patients to other specialists within Solve.care if there’s no satisfactory improvement, so patients and their families can choose within a range of qualified health professionals (who are then immediately briefed on a patient’s condition) to continue their treatment.

Due to their convenience and agile mechanisms, healthcare cryptocurrency services are becoming more available as more and more professionals and service areas join throughout platforms such as Solve.care, aiming to provide people with personalized medical services.

Music Industry: Audius

Cryptocurrency has secured a powerful foothold in the music industry, thanks to Audius. Audius is a streaming app that leverages the Ethereum network to connect artists and their fans in a completely new way.

It’s no secret that a plethora of problems plagues the music industry. Artists are known to receive only a small fraction of the revenue their creations generate and are routinely locked out of distribution or sales decisions by middlemen and record labels. Copyright issues are also a major issue that most labels and artists still struggle with.

Audius aims to solve these issues with a revolutionary idea: everyone can distribute, monetize and stream music. An artist can upload and distribute their creations through decentralized nodes, allowing them to keep their song’s ownership and perceive up to 90% of the revenue in AUDIO (Audius’ native cryptocurrency).

In 2020, the network registered between 30,000 and 50,000 unique users. The number grew to a staggering 6 million monthly unique users in 2021, shattering even the most optimistic growth predictions.

Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning (Audius’ founders) know that if they wish to compete with Spotify and Apple Music, they’ll need to gain significant traction before monetizing the platform. Today, Audius is still free to use, but there are concrete monetization plans that will kick in as soon as the founders believe the time is right.

The platform continues to grow rapidly, with an expanding artist roster spanning multiple genres. Deadmau5, Katy Perry, Nas, 3LAU, Steve Aoki, The Chainsmoker, and Jason Derulo are among the biggest players on the platform. Still, you’re guaranteed to find talented indie artists competing for the prestigious “most streams in a week” title at any given time. 

Because Audius caters to both new and established creators in the music industry and offers a streamlined alternative to complicated (and often exploitative label deals), we consider it one of the most promising cryptocurrency endeavors for this year.

Review

Whether you believe in the Blockchain and cryptocurrencies’ potential to build a more transparent world or thoroughly understand the sector’s blank slate potential to make money, you’ll find our list filled with breathtaking opportunities.

DeFi will continue to expand, and its current influence is both recognized and feared by those heavily invested in today’s traditional and outdated financial system. With its expansion into other sectors of the economy, this year promises tremendous opportunities to those bold and clever enough to recognize the value in a service offer.

Disclaimer: This article contains sponsored marketing content. It is intended for promotional purposes and should not be considered as an endorsement or recommendation by our website. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research and exercise their own judgment before making any decisions based on the information provided in this article.