To successfully find product-market fit as a blockchain, you need to attract both developers and users to your network. I’ll give you bonus points for making sure that the network is largely governed by the community. By no means are these tasks easy, but Nibiru Chain seems to have it all figured out.
In this article I’ll explain what excites me about Nibiru, and why I think they are a top contender for a piece of the layer-1 pie. Happy reading, anon.
TL;DR: why I’m excited about Nibiru
- Community-owned: the community owns 60% of the supply, and thus, holds a large share of the voting power. A byproduct of that is that the end-users have a large financial stake in the network.
- Vertical integration: Nibiru adopts a web3 ‘Super App’ approach through vertical integration. By innovating at the base-layer, Nibiru impacts both the application space as well as the end-user experience.
- Ease of building: Nibiru makes it very easy for developers to build on top of Nibiru. Not only due to the tools that Nibiru has already built, but also through extensive docs, SDKs, easy-to-use APIs, and a substantial developer toolkit.
- Strong team and core contributors: backed by the best, and developer by talented builders.
- Strong ecosystem: plenty of on-chain shenanigans to be engaged in. From the core-apps to the extension of them which will be built by talented teams building on Nibiru.
- Token utility: used for paying gas fees on the network. Stake it with validators to help secure the network.
Why most blockchains fail, and why Nibiru Chain will succeed.
Plenty of layer 1 blockchains have come and gone. Not many of them achieved their desired product-market fit. Some of them are merely a distant memory in the minds of users who once bridged over their funds, only to realize they bridged over to a barren wasteland.
5 common pitfalls for layer-1 blockchains:
- Failure to attract developers by making it too hard to build on the network
- Unable to build a vibrant ecosystem
- Lack of overall security and network stability
- Inability to handle large transactional throughput
- Creating an image of a “VC-owned” chain, instead of giving power to the community.
These pitfalls are well taken care of in the case of Nibiru.
What is nibiru chain?
Nibiru is a breakthrough smart contract ecosystem ushering in the next era of money. With Nibiru, the team leads the move towards ease. Adopting a Web3 ‘Super App’ approach through vertical integration.
The team perfectly addresses the pitfalls mentioned earlier in this article. They’ve put tremendous thought into designing the ecosystem and the technology.
Most importantly: Nibiru strikes a perfect balance in both user and developer experience.
Tackling common pitfalls: here is what makes Nibiru different
(1) attracting developers and ensuring ease of development
What’s the KeeEeeEEey to success, in the words of Steve Balmer?
Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.
Nibiru is designed to be the most developer-friendly ecosystem. For this purpose, The team has created an extensive, purpose-built suite for developers. The dev toolkit ranges from user-friendly smart contracts with gas fee royalties, to custom-built solutions that devs can easily integrate into their Nibiru applications.
Nibiru has made sure to innovate at the chain level. Providing killer innovations such as a native oracle, smart contract royalties, easy-to-use APIs, and a whole library of SDKs.
(2) Building a vibrant ecosystem
Nibiru tackles this in two ways. To start off, Nibiru has attracted 100+ allies from various verticals. This ensures that there is plenty of on-chaining to be done at launch. Dozens of projects are building on top of Nibiru, including core dApps, RWAs, DeFi, and infra solutions.
Solution number two centers around vertically integrating DeFi primitives. The Nibiru Chain team has built native applications to showcase the capabilities of the chain. As well as bootstrapping powerful tools to attract traders and users to the Nibiru chain.
These applications are not to be slept on.
The flagship core apps include:
- Nibi-Perps: perpetual futures exchange that allows you to trade a wide spectrum of assets with leverage — on-chain, non-custodial, with minimal gas fees.
- Nibi-Swap: native multi-chain DEX for trading assets. Access swaps, pools, and time-based liquidity incentives.
- NUSD: Nibiru’s stablecoin which will be used as the quote asset for Nibi-perps. NUSD is collateralized by USDC.
- Coded Estates: bringing homes and rentals on-chain. Democratizing access to RWA, specifically real estate. On-chain ownership and decentralized ownership of real-world assets are arguably one of the most logical use cases of tokenization.
- Nibi-Oracles: accurate pricing of assets using a native system of decentralized oracles. Both external APIs and smart contracts tap into the Oracle Module for secure, low-latency feeds.
(3) Ensuring overall security and network stability
The many innovations that Nibiru has made at the base layer lead to a high degree of overall network security. No other blockchain focusses on vertical integration to control both the application space and end-user experience. You know what they say, if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
To top that off, Nibiru has joined forces with top security partners: Chainanalysis, Salus Security, Zellic.
In terms of network stability, well, most of the highly reliable validators in the space are supporting the infrastructure of Nibiru. While not many of you will be familiar with these names, we can see that DoraHacks, Nodes guru, Strangelove, and many other reliable partners are helping to keep the network stable. And maybe myself as well, soon!
The Nibiru chain has been battle-tested through a series of testnet iterations. The incentivized testnet garnered over 137M transactions, over 80K nodes, and more than 30K smart contracts. Here are some interesting metrics for you:
(4) Community-first approach: empowering your users
Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of Nibiru and the Nibiru chain; the community holds the power!
A whopping 60% of the total supply is dedicated to the community, as you can see in the graphic below.
In my opinion, this will be the core driving factor to the growth of Nibiru. It’s what caused many community-owned chains to have strong growth. In web3, the community is your lifeline. So you best make sure they are well taken care of.
(5) Network speed: being able to handle large transactional throughput
Balancing speed with decentralization is a challenge that most blockchains struggle with. In most cases, speed is achieved at the cost of decentralization. [redacted] and [redacted] are good examples of this. You know which ones I’m talking about 😉
Speed is important. Especially as an ecosystem of killer apps that attract large amounts of users. Games, for example, generate a lot of transactions. Your chain needs to be able to handle all that volume. Again: you need SPEED.
Well, we’re in luck: Nibiru’s testnet achieved extremely high scalability with instant finality, 1.4s block times, and over 40K TPS.
Who is building Nibiru and who is backing it?
It’s safe to say that Nibiru has a very unique approach. Which also gives them a shot at becoming a top ecosystem within the space. However, a vision is only as strong as the people executing it. Which paves the question: who is actually executing it?
To kick things off, I like to take a look at the backers of a project. Nibiru has no shortage of strong investors. Just look at some of these names:
- Cogitent Ventures
- Krak Ventures
- Tribe Capital
- MV Global
- Banter Capital
- ArkStream Capital
- NGC Ventures
- HashKey Group
- Republic Crypto
- Cryptomendo 😉
- And many more
Let’s dive into the brains behind Nibiru. Starting with the three co-founders of Nibiru:
Unique Divine | Co-Founder & CEO of Nibi Inc.
- Led data science efforts and the development of DeFi trading strategies for the Sommelier Protocol (cross-chain vaults as a vehicle for passive yield) before starting Nibiru.
- Professional background primarily in applied machine learning (genomics, gravitational lensing, and NLP)
- One of the top students in Applied Physics and Computer Science at Columbia University School of Engineering (grad + undergrad).
- Financed his education through earnings generated from algorithmic trading, combining transformers for processing historical sequences and reinforcement agents to make trading decisions.
Kevin Yang | Co-Founder & CTO of Nibi Inc.
- Senior Software Engineer at Google for 3 years (Google Ads team).
- Broad experience of digital products in Web2 at companies like Coursera and Headspace.
- Top graduate in computing at Waterloo. Kevin won multiple hackathons during both his academic and professional career.
Jonathan Gimeno | Co-Founder & Director of Engineering of Nibi Inc.
- Tendermint’s Engineering Director for 3 years. Jonathan was also a key contributor on the Cosmos-SDK and Gaia.
- Gimeno has 15+ years of experience with developing distributed systems and backend infrastructure.
To top it of, the founding team is advised by some heavy hitters in the industry:
Thanks for reading, anon <3
Disclaimer: I am an investor in Nibiru. I am not a financial advisor, just an anon with a RGB keyboard.
Want to learn more about Nibiru? Check out their channels:
Website: https://nibiru.fi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NibiruChain
Discord: https://discord.gg/nibirufi
