Token Picks: Polytrade
Polytrade, a Tokenization Marketplace
What’s Polytrade?
Polytrade is a marketplace aggregating tokenised assets, enabling users to own a fractionalized portion of the underlying asset.
The project raised US$3.8 million in March 2023 from Alpha Wave, Matrix Partners, @0xPolygon Ventures, @CoinSwitch Ventures and other investors.
At the point of the fundraising, the project was focused more towards trade receivables financing, rather than a tokenised asset marketplace.
Besides the main marketplace, the project also launched an NFT collection featuring 999 NFTs that provide airdrop allocations to upcoming new RWA assets.
What’s For Sale?
Polytrade’s concept is simple; as a retail user, you can access and trade a diverse range of RWA assets on their platform, purchasing the assets either as a whole or a fraction.
Across the marketplace, there are over 4,000 listed assets, with no KYC needed to trade any of them.
There are two main asset classes tradable on Polytrade:
Discovery Assets: Tokenized assets directly integrated from leading protocols such as Uniswap and Balancer.
Secondary Assets: Tokenised assets wrapped by other users using Polytrade’s ERC-6960 standard.
Any individual can list or sell an asset. However, do note that it has to already be tokenised as an asset in your wallet. This means that the verification of the underlying asset lies not with Polytrade, but with other third party protocols such as @Courtyard_io
Additionally, listers would have to provide first-loss capital, lowering the risks of defaults.
Is it Working?
A quick browse on the platform reveals certain assets listed on Polytrade’s marketplace are not even directly tradable. You are required to navigate to another protocol’s site instead, where the tokenised asset can only be purchased there.
Additionally, certain items are listed on @plumenetwork’s testnet, which makes me wonder if the listings are even live.
For items that were listed as exclusive drops, there does not seem to be any participation from retail towards their fractionalisation.
The overall viewing gives the impression that despite the nice exterior, Polytrade’s market seems to be greatly under-utilised.
Tokenomics (As of 6 Sep 2024)
$TRADE currently trades at US$0.5048 per token.
Market cap currently stands at US$18.9M, with circulating supply at 37.5%. - FDV currently stands at US$50.5M.
Volume currently stands at US$1.2M 24H Daily Volume. Approximately ~66% of the volume are on the CEXes such as @kucoincom and @XTexchange, demonstrating that the on-chain transactions are not as much.
While $TRADE was meant to be used as medium of exchange for products listed on the marketplace, a glance on the platform seems that this has not yet been facilitated.
Most transactions are conducted in stables as of now.
A loyalty XP system has been implemented, which likely suggests an inflationary airdrop environment for $TRADE tokens.
There has been no further developments of the utilities, and a deeper browse does not bring up in-depth information about the tokenomics.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, aggregators have proven to work in the crypto market; a quick glance over to @JupiterExchange substantiates this.
However, Polytrade’s marketplace seems devoid of activity, which could suggest that the interest towards tokenized assets are still not as strong. Low yields in comparison to DeFi building blocks could be a contributory factor.
Coupled with the poor utilities of the token, $TRADE seems to be a hard justification be long on.
I still believe tokenised assets are a big market to be tapped into. Projects that can drive liquidity inflows to otherwise inaccessible markets will definitely stand to benefit from the volume flows. Unfortunately, Polytrade at this juncture does not seem to facilitate that.