Groundbreaking technology like the launch of the industry's first high yield aggregator, offering the best interest rates by scanning multiple blockchains, and the Xend Finance Hackathon, featuring keynote speeches and panels from Mike Novogratz, Binance, Huobi, Coindesk, and Cointelegraph, are just a few of the achievements Xend Finance can brag about in just one year after its mainnet launch.
Xend Finance broke into the industry as the first DeFi platform for credit unions, cooperatives, and individuals, but has now evolved into much more as a global blockchain bank for everyone. Backed by Binance and Google Launchpad, this company bridges the gap between financial services and decentralized blockchains.
It, daily, tackles the problem of currency devaluation and inflation by allowing users to seamlessly convert their fiat currency into stable cryptocurrencies and earn unbeatable interest when they save.
One month before its mainnet launch, in February 2021, Xend Finance secured investments led by NGC Ventures, Hashkey, and Tech Fusion which brought the total investment in the company to $2 million. Also in February, through DAO Maker, the Xend Finance Share Holding Offering (SHO) generated over $144 million. These were assets staked by more than 3,200 eligible users with 14,452 issued tickets.
Alongside its mainnet launch, Xend Finance introduced the $XEND Token through a Token Generation Event (TGE) on Balancer. The $XEND token rewards users for performing operations within the Xend Finance protocol.
In September, the company kicked off the Xend Finance DeFi Hackathon, the largest Blockchain Hackathon to ever take place in Africa. This was created in line with Xend Finance’s efforts to improve Africa’s access to blockchain technologies. Developers built on top of Xend Finance’s Layer-2 DeFi protocol and were rewarded with over $1 million in prizes.
Choosing the winners of the hackathon was the responsibility of an all-star lineup of judges from Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Google, Coindesk, and Huobi. The Hackathon concluded in December when Lazeray Finance and FarmGrid emerged as the winners.
Fast forward to December, when Xend Finance had a major breakthrough. They created the first cross-chain high yield aggregator on Binance Smart Chain and Polygon. It was the perfect solution to the bottleneck of monitoring yields and transferring cryptocurrency across several blockchains in a bid to find the highest yield. This was definitely a breath of fresh air for yield farmers, investors, and savers across the globe. They can now find all the information they need in one place—the Xend Finance dashboard.
The Xend Finance mobile app also came into the picture in December 2021. It allowed an even more seamless way of converting devaluing and unstable currencies into US dollars. This, coupled with the ease-of-access through the mobile phone, made it quickly one of the apps with the highest store ratings in both the Apple store and the Google Play store. At the end of January, with the help of the Xend Finance app, the company hit 10,000 users, and by the end of February, they had blown past 20,000 users.
December also featured the launch of the only African Decentralized Launchpad. This was created to help African companies who normally have a hard time accessing resources for their projects and garnering the attention of investors.
TheLaunchpad provides exposure for African ecosystem projects and connects them with power brokers around the world. In addition, it provides everyone with easy access to top projects that are usually only available to top ventures, just by staking and holding $XEND tokens.
In a bid to empower young adults starting their careers, Xend Finance began an outreach program to universities starting in Nigeria. The roadshow started in February 2022 with the University of Nigeria, Enugu campus. They onboarded and engaged new users, signing up over 1,000 users who were excited about finding a long-lasting solution to inflation, currency devaluation, and the struggles of saving in the Nigerian Naira. Their next stop was the University of Lagos and they onboarded over 1,000 users there as well.
Did I mention the awards? Imagine starting the year with an award at the TechPoint Awards 2021. Xend Finance won the award for the “Most Outstanding Alternative Use of the Blockchain”. According to Techpoint, this award was created to celebrate startups building solutions on the blockchain apart from cryptocurrency. Ugochukwu Aronu, Xend FInance CEO and the brilliant mind behind Xend Finance accepted the award.
To be honest, there is a lot that Xend Finance has achieved that we cannot cover in this article, major milestones achieved in their short period of existence. For example, there is the rapidly growing community of over 100,000 people across several of our social media platforms.
But one thing is sure: they are on the fast track to providing blockchain solutions to everyday financial problems. And they are just getting started. Take a glimpse of their plans for 2022, nothing short of mind-blowing.
If there is a company to watch out for 2022, it’s definitely Xend Finance.