While cryptocurrencies have opened the world up to the idea of a decentralized economy, policy changes in a decentralized system still pose a challenge. While foundations or developers usually decide what changes will be made in a blockchain system, governance tokens put the charge of shaping the future protocol of a decentralized network in the hands of the token holders.
With governance tokens, holders can play their part in influencing the decisions regarding the project. These decisions can range from adding a feature in the project to changing the entire governance protocol itself. With blockchain, the changes as decided by the governance token holders are implemented automatically through smart contracts. Or the changes can be voted upon and then implemented by the team maintaining the project.
This isn’t where it ends, these tokens have brilliant use cases that help not only the project but also the community by providing them a sense of owning a portion of the project. Although not termed legally as “shares”, these tokens actually act as them. Projects like Nimbus even provide “dividends” to their token holders by giving them a percentage of the platform's diverse revenue streams as discussed below.
Another fact worth noting about the value of these tokens is that they appreciate rapidly. Due to their practicality, the marketcap shoots soon after they come into existence. An example of this is Uniswap. Their UNI token was released in September 2020 for $3, this token now stands at a valuation of over $30 and a marketcap of $16 billion at the time of writing. Furthermore, UNI rose its ranks and currently stands at #8 in the overall coinmarket ranked according to the market caps.
Since governance tokens stay true to the original philosophy of decentralization, they carry a special place in the hearts of true blockchain and crypto enthusiasts. Governance tokens are here to stay and the following is the list of some of the upcoming and promising governance tokens in the crypto domain.
Compound (COMP)Compound is a money market protocol with COMP serving as a unit of value in the system. It is the biggest governance token as per market capitalization. The platform is a famous decentralized lending and borrowing hub. Based on its idea of liquidity mining which allows the users to earn COMP directly proportional to their activities on the platform, it has become a high-grossing De-Fi project. COMP also has a built-in delegation functionality to delegate the vote.
Synthetix (SNX)Synthetix is a decentralized platform that issues Ethereum-based synthetic assets. These assets differ in the sense that they track real assets like currencies, commodities, and more. In December of 2019, the platform announced a shift to decentralized governance and the token holders have eventually taken control of the treasury and protocol itself.
Besides the governance aspect, users can lock in SNX up as collateral to create synthetic assets, or Synths, like sUSD (synthetic USD).
Nimbus (GNBU)Nimbus is a fintech company that opens the most rewarding traditional financial and investment tools to the world of crypto users. Nimbus Platform is a DAO-governed ecosystem of dApps which generate 10+ revenue streams for users based on IPOs, Crowdfunding, P2P Lending, and Crypto Arbitrage-Trading.
The platform has two kinds of tokens available: a utility token NBU and governance token GNBU. While NBU opens up all functionalities of Nimbus Platform to users, GNBU enables holders to receive revenues from all Nimbus solutions at once on an ongoing basis. It also lets holders decide on the future of the Platform via voting on all important aspects of the Platform.
What makes GNBU so attractive is that there are more than 10 revenue sources which diversifies users’ earnings and mitigates the risks. As they say, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
The GNBU token has just been listed on Uniswap, the biggest decentralized exchange in thу world. This presents many opportunities to the early holders, especially given that Nimbus is set to get listed on one of North America’s biggest stock exchanges by the end of 2021. The bridge between traditional financial services and cryptocurrencies is here to stay.
Kyber Network (KNC)Kyber is an on-chain liquidity aggregator that allows its users to make decentralized trades. July 2020 saw the platform roll out Katalyst upgrade and KyberDAO allowing users to stake KNC in order to earn voting fee rewards and govern the network. Currently, Kyber is one of the most popular decentralized exchanges.
Balancer (BAL)Balancer is an Ethereum-based automated market maker (AMM). The platform has its similarities with Uniswap but unlike Uniswap which allows for two-token liquidity pools, Balancer gives its users the ability to open up pools composed of 8 different ERC20 tokens. BAL is the governance token in effect that allows users to dictate the direction of the protocol.Other famous governance tokens include BZRX, UMA, CRV, and MTA. De-Fi platforms are certainly set to become the future in the crypto world. The De-Fi sector is expected to expand as we go forward and it might just be a very good idea to find an entry point in this domain with tokens like NBU.
