Crypto incubators simply help entrepreneurs refine their ideas and they provide the projects with the enabling environment to go from ideation to execution and thrive sustainably. ZenX is a CeDeFi incubator that merges the best of centralized and decentralized start incubation ideals to support decentralized projects, empower them with technical expertise and growth management that gives such projects the best odds of success.
In this post, we provide an unbiased and unfiltered review of ZenX, how it is different from other crypto incubators, and whether it could be the birthplace for decentralized solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges.
What is ZenX?
ZenX is a DeFi incubator powered by Unizen. Unizen is a CeDeFi exchange that provides a smart ecosystem where deep liquidity is unlocked from both centralized and decentralized exchange elements. Unizen combines the best features of centralized exchanges with the best features of DEXes to provide a better experience to crypto traders and investors. Unizen is powering ZenX as part of its efforts to unlock cross-chain liquidity in the crypto market and to provide users access to early-stage high-quality projects and help those projects break into a ready market of users.
At its core, ZenX empowers its incubatees with the best of decentralization through self-sovereignty, autonomy, connection, and transparency. In addition, ZenX empowers them with the best of centralization with solutions for attaining KYC and AML compliance and access to time-tested networks for liquidity management.
Pioneering Incubatees
An incubator is not deserving of the name unless it has successfully managed the incubation and launch of projects in the industry that it supports. ZenX has hit the ground running with prominent crypto projects such as Cirus, and Dimitra and it has many other projects in the pipeline.
- Cirus
Cirus is ZenX’s first incubated project. Cirus is building a new class of hardware for accessing the cryptoverse to unlock value creation through user-generated actions, node validation, ad revenue, and lead captures among others. The quality of incubation that ZenX provides came to the limelight during Cirus’s IDO which sold out in 10 seconds on Scaleswap. When reacting to the news of the successful IDO, ZenX reiterated that its aim is to support crypto projects that are disrupting established industries and to consolidate the strongest projects to accelerate the pace of adoption of CeDeFi.
- Dimitra
Dimitra is another promising project that has been onboarded on ZenX Labs incubator. Dimitra is an AgTech blockchain startup on a mission to revolutionize smallholder farming globally. The startup is leveraging blockchain technology to provide access to high-tech technologies such as IoT, machine learning, and big data to provide farmers with access to modern farming methods that help them to leapfrog their productivity, yield, and economic output. Unizen CEO Sean Noga notes that ZenX is particularly excited to onboard Dimitra and help it achieve success at scale.
Operational Structure
ZenX Labs is a DeFi incubator; and thus, it has an interesting operational structure that helps it unlock competitive advantages over traditional incubators. The operations of ZenX Labs are governed by a complementary mix of smart contracts, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and multi-asset staking that aligns the interest of a diverse and disparate community.
- Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
ZenX Labs operates as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in which decisions are transparently made by a decentralized member committee and executed by smart contracts. The decisions made by the DAO include the selection process for startups, governance of the activities of the incubator, and managing how stakeholders vote on projects that ZenX will back.
Of course, ZenX has a team managing day-to-day operations but they don’t have any influence on how ZenX is run or what projects make it into the incubator. The holders of Unizen’s native ZCX token participate in the DAO and have voting rights that are proportional to the number of tokens they hold. This ensures skin in the game and it incentivizes token holders to act in the best interest of ZenX Labs, Unizen, and the broader crypto ecosystem.
- Smart contracts
The decentralized operational element of ZenX means that all its operations are managed by smart contracts. As a startup founder, entrepreneur, or early adopter, you can rest in the knowledge that the terms of the incubation are guaranteed to be executed once the contract conditions are met. Unlike a centralized incubator, ZenX can deliver on its mandate without the biases that could influence project selection or fund allocation. Also, ZenX is bound to meet its obligations to its incubatees because the smart contracts have a clearly defined step-by-step process contingent on clear milestones.
- Multi-asset staking
One other key innovation that ZenX delivers to the DeFi startups it incubates is providing them with a platform to showcase their project and attract early adopters. Unizen, the CeDeFI exchange behind ZenX Labs offers a multi-asset staking service in which people who stake the ZCX tokens could earn chain-agnostic and project-agnostic multiple staking rewards. Unizen then goes one step further by offering its ZCX stakeholders the chance to earn some of their staking rewards in the form of token allocations for projects backed by ZenX.
The outcome of this innovation is that the projects backed by ZenX will have an easier path to market penetration because there’s an existing community of ZCX stakeholders who will become early adopters of the freshly incubated projects straight out of the gate.
Regulatory Compliance
One of the biggest challenges facing DeFi projects is the ever-looming regulatory risk that could land them in legal troubles in several markets and jurisdictions. The worst part is that there are no existing playbooks for managing the regulatory risk since DeFi itself is uncharted territory.
ZenX helps the projects that it backs navigate the regulatory maze to provide them with access to the proper legal expertise needed to manage innovation and regulatory requirements without stifling growth.
ZenX Labs also leverages Unizen’s extensive contacts with advisors, stakeholders, and decision-makers in the centralized finance industry to create playbooks for DeFi projects on how best to engage with regulatory requirements.
By providing guidance and useful connections for navigating the regulatory maze, ZenX ensures that the DeFi projects that it backs attain full legal compliance, especially with regards to AML and KYC requirements. ZenX also helps these startups assess and mitigate security risks, and it organizes and completes audits that help the projects have better operational protections.
Competitive Advantages
The DeFI industry is still emerging and there are not yet many DeFi incubators out there; hence, it is not surprising that many traditional startup incubators are moonlighting as incubators for DeFi projects. However, if you want to give your DeFi startup the best odds of success; you’ll most likely be better off being backed by an original DeFi incubator that mixes the best of traditional startup incubators with the core tenets of decentralization. Below are some of the competitive advantages that ZenX has over other types of incubators.
- Decentralized innovation
ZenX eliminates gatekeepers whose personal biases might keep projects that they don’t understand out of the incubator by democratizing the decision on what projects get accepted into the incubator. For the first time, crypto founders can trust their ideas or project to win on their own merit without being hampered because the founders don’t look, speak, talk, dress, or act a certain way.
Whereas traditional incubators overly rely on venture capital, ZenX enables retail investments but its CeDeFi foundations enable it to collaborate with institutions and organizations that can provide value beyond merely writing a check.
- Deep technical understanding
Traditional incubators may have technical consultants who may be able to offer some form of technical assistance to your project, but you’ll still be underserved in that they’ll lack a profound technical understanding of blockchain technology. ZenX is designed from the ground up as a DeFi incubator for crypto projects; hence, it has a suite of technical experts that can provide you with a richer experience.
The projects that ZenX backs also enjoy code reviews and thorough on-chain and off-chain testing conducted by an expert technical team. The technical reviews will also assess the whole architecture of your project to avoid security pitfalls and data flow inconsistencies among others.
- Legislative and regulatory guidance
There’s a lot of regulatory uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market across different jurisdictions but it would be naive to think that the cryptocurrency market exists independent of the global financial and economic system. The mere fact that the end goal of cryptocurrencies is to solve some of the current problems in the global economy means that regulatory guidance is needed to unlock its mass-market adoption.
ZenX helps the crypto projects it incubates to manage today’s regulatory requirements and to proactively position to be forward-compliant with future regulations. Specifically, ZenX empowers the startups that it incubates to be legally compliant with existing KYC and AML regulations from the start.
- Market penetration and Growth
The days of creating a crypto project and expecting it to gain adoption solely on the merits of your code and how it solves a problem are long gone. There are thousands of crypto projects in the market now, and most of them are solving the same or similar products. Hence, an important factor that could determine the success of your project is how quickly you are able to build a core community of early adopters who go on to become evangelists for the project.
ZenX is powered by Unizen, a leading CeDeFi smart exchange ecosystem that is attractive to both CeFi and DeFi users. Unizen offers multi-asset staking to its users and they can opt to earn staking rewards in token allocation from projects that ZenX incubates. The staking reward system, in turn, creates a virtuous cycle of network effects in which Unizen users discover ZenX incubatees, become early adopters, and attract more users for the projects.
Conclusion
DeFi holds immense potential as the future of finance, but beyond decentralizing financial services; DeFi also serves as an example of how blockchain technology and decentralization could unlock more value across different industries.
For DeFi projects to live up to their potential; they need all the help and support that they can get; this is where crypto incubators come into the conversation. ZenX is uniquely positioned to help DeFi startups find product-market-fit, ensure technical resiliency, attain legal compliance, and build a loyal community of supporters and contributors.
ZenX is taking up an exciting challenge in uncharted territory and it would be interesting to look back in a couple of years to see how the incubator has moved the needle in driving the mass-market adoption of decentralized solutions.
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