An All-in-one DeFi Station on Binance Launchpad


https://thienan2146.github.io/c98/

I. Market context

2021 is a relatively hectic year of the Crypto market. In the first 4 months of the year, the market capitalization has increased dramatically, reaching a peak of $2.6 trillion and leading to a stormy growth of the entire market, including Altcoins. From late April to early May 2021, we have witnessed top coins reaching the all-time-high price continuously. For example, ETH, BNB and DOT reached the milestone of $4,400, $690, and $50 respectively. Yet, within just 2 months, Bitcoin halved from $60,000 and a series of Altcoins decreased by 3 to 4 times, which caused the entire market to once again fall into hibernation. This led to a series of projects rushly to rug pull and exit scam. And needless to say, the psychology of the market began to panic.

Just 3 months ago, most investors entering the Crypto market held a bullish view with targets like “Bitcoin surely reaches $100,000 by the end of 2021” or “Ethereum hitting $10,000 is possible!”. However, at the moment, most forecasts of "experts" as well as most investors think that Bitcoin will drop to $20,000, and of course, Altcoins are a mess that no one wants to care about.

It's also funny that almost nothing has changed in fundamentals in the altcoins market in the last 3 months. Even though a few small projects pulled exit scams, most of the large projects continued to operate, the market builders kept building and good projects were still launched no matter how volatile the market was. For example, on 13 July, Binance Labs, one of the biggest incubators of the Crypto market, continued the Incubators program season 3, which focuses on infrastructure construction projects such as Exchange Infrastructure (KYC technology, Onchain, etc.), payment, social networks, etc. This is a clear message from CZ indicating that Blockchain as well as start-ups will still grow regardless of whether the market is up or down.

Perhaps that's why, after nearly half a year of silence, the next IEO on Binance Launchpad is C98, a wallet and infrastructure startup of Vietnamese. This is one of the minority projects in the Blockchain industry that already had a product and a community before opening for sale. In this research, Black Mamba Ventures will evaluate the advantages as well as the growth potential of the product and the intrinsic value of C98. However, since most of C98's products are still in the development stage, it will be difficult for us to give a detailed review of the entire project. This article will be updated in the future, when the main products of C98 are fully released.

II. The history of C98

If you are a Crypto investor living in Vietnam, you certainly heard about Coin98. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Coin98 is almost the largest Crypto community in Vietnam at the moment.

Born from late 2017 to early 2018, Coin98 started as a Vietnamese ICO research and investment community. Of course, like many other ICO investment communities, the first articles on C98 were about “hot” ICO projects at that time, along with other articles about the basic concepts of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.

In the 2017-2018 period, Coin98 continued to develop its investment community. In my opinion, it was almost nothing different from other communities in Vietnam at that time. Coin98's articles are still merely general reviews of projects, and of course, when the bear market lasts, no one wants to read more about projects.

Also, Coin98's orientation changed almost completely in 2019 when they welcomed a new member, Mr. Nguyen The Vinh, as CTO and founder (Coin98 was renamed to Coin98 Finance at this time). As an engineer who worked at FPT Software and VIC Group (another large Crypto community in Vietnam), Mr. Vinh joined Coin98 to support the project's software products.

In January 2020, Coin98 Finance officially launched Coin98 Wallet, a non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet, with the focus on multi-blockchain support. The number of users of Coin98 Wallet are quite impressive, with them reaching over 200,000 accounts after launching for 1 year. For comparison, we can take SafePal, a wallet directly invested by Binance Labs, as an example. SafePal was launched in 2019, and after 2 years, it has more than 500,000 users and 400,000 downloads. The number of users of SafePal is almost double compared to Coin98 Wallet.

With the Coin98 Wallet product, in 2021, Coin98 Finance received an investment of more than 4 million USD from Alameda Research to build a DeFi ecosystem in the Asian market. In my opinion, this is not too surprising. Alameda Research is known for advocating for Solana Layer-1 Blockchain from the very beginning of its development stage. And in Vietnam as well as Southeast Asia, Coin98 Finance and Coin98 Community are also among the most enthusiastic supporters of Solana.

Following Alameda Research, a series of tier 1 investment funds such as ParaFi, Multicoin and Hashed invested in the seed round of C98. On 15 July 2021, Binance officially announced that it will open for sale the 20th project on Binance Launchpad, which is C98, with a hard cap of up to $3.7 million, and a hard cap for individuals up to $20,000.

Before going into the analysis of C98's tokenomics, let's take a look at the products that C98 offers to have a better view of the project.

III. Products of C98

Although the first product of C98 is C98 Wallet, C98 is labeled as a multichain DeFi platform on Binance Research. This means C98 has the ambition to launch the next products to complete its ecosystem. Currently, according to Binance’s research article, those products include Coin98 Wallet, Coin98 Exchange, and Space Gate. Among other unofficial information that the writer has, Coin98 also has the ambition to launch other products such as Launchpad, Derivatives and Lend & Borrow, however, this information is not official. Therefore, this article will temporarily  only cover 3 products, including Wallet, Exchange and Space Gate. Coin98's products all pursue one goal, which is to build a bridge between Traditional Finance (TradFi) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi), providing users a better experience with DeFi. And, C98's products, typically Coin98 Wallet, will also target one of the most necessary fields of the market, which is multichain.

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