Nibiru is a term from ancient Babylonian astronomy used by doomsayers in the 1990s to refer to a prophesied catastrophic collision with Earth by a so-called “Planet X,” known as the Nibiru cataclysm. The development team behind Nibiru Chain named their project to reflect their vision of disruptive innovation to existing systems.

This project is a new Layer 1 blockchain, adopting Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus, and is dedicated to becoming the next-generation hub for DeFi, aiming to replace dYdX. Nibiru is a member of the Cosmos ecosystem, offering a unified and seamless user experience for leveraged derivatives trading, spot trading, staking, and bond liquidity. The project aspires to make trading on Nibiru feel like trading on a centralized exchange without off-chain settlement, full custody of funds, a “guardian” network, or external clearing entities. Everything on Nibiru is driven by smart contracts and automation, enhancing the accessibility and usability of the decentralized exchange ecosystem.

In the blockchain world, there’s a popular saying: “Not your keys, not your crypto,” reflecting the inherent distrust of centralized entities in the cryptocurrency space. The idealistic culture of blockchain, coupled with the real inconvenience of trading on centralized exchanges, has fueled the explosive growth of DeFi. However, the fragmented DeFi ecosystem poses barriers for ordinary users. Ensuring DeFi’s accessibility to a broader audience is the crucial next step in developing Web3.

Project Background

The Nibiru project team was established in 2022 and completed an $8.5 million seed round of financing in April 2023, with a valuation of $100 million. The round was co-led by Tribe Capital, Republic Capital, NGC Ventures, and Original Capital. In January 2024, the project received an undisclosed amount of strategic investment, followed by a community public offering on CoinList. The initial $3 million sale sold out in 9 minutes, and an additional $3 million extended sale sold out in 11 minutes. In February 2024, Nibiru completed a $12 million financing round with participation from Kraken Ventures, ArkStream, NGC Ventures, Master Ventures, Tribe Capital, and Banter Capital. The project’s token, NIBI, was listed on centralized exchanges in March 2024, with a total market capitalization of approximately $15 million at the time of writing.

Source: Nibiru official website

Why Choose the Cosmos Ecosystem?

The Nibiru team is composed of experienced members from projects like Tendermint and Sommelier, as well as core contributors to the Cosmos SDK. They chose the Cosmos ecosystem for its numerous advantages:

1. High Customizability: The Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm framework offer Nibiru immense flexibility, enabling easy integration of perpetual contracts, spot AMM, stablecoins, and oracle modules. This allows Nibiru to quickly adapt and iterate products according to Web3 development trends.
2. Seamless Interoperability: Cosmos’s IBC protocol facilitates seamless connection and value transfer with other blockchain networks, breaking down the fragmented DeFi ecosystem and providing ample space for Nibiru’s cross-chain applications and expansion.
3. Active Developer Community: Cosmos has a large and active developer community, offering Nibiru abundant technical resources and innovative momentum. This benefits attracting users, increasing TVL (Total Value Locked), and promoting long-term project development.

The Cosmos SDK also boasts high performance and a rich set of features, such as staking, governance, and token standards. This saves Nibiru considerable development time and resources, allowing the team to focus on core product innovation.

Nibiru Core Application Suite

The Nibiru team believes that the DeFi financial ecosystem is built on three main pillars: decentralized exchanges (DEX), stablecoins, and lending platforms, called the DeFi Trinity. Other DeFi elements, such as liquid staking, yield, derivatives, synthetics, indices, and payments, are encompassed within this framework. Nibiru aims to address the current fragmented trading solutions by providing a set of core applications natively integrated into its Layer 1 blockchain to meet urgent market needs.

Nibiru’s defined core application suite includes:

1. Nibi-Perps: An on-chain perpetual contract exchange offering up to 10x leverage trading for crypto assets like BTC, ETH, and ATOM. NIBI stakers enjoy governance rights and fee discounts.
2. Nibi-Swap: An automated market maker (AMM) protocol supporting two types of liquidity pools: stablecoin swap pools and constant product pools.
3. NUSD: A stablecoin backed by USDC, used as the quote asset for Nibi-Perps. Users can mint NUSD by using USDC and NIBI in a certain ratio.
4. Nibi-Oracles: A native decentralized oracle system that communicates with other Layer 1 chains in the Cosmos ecosystem via the IBC protocol, providing accurate asset pricing.

Additionally, Nibiru plans to support more types of collateral and offer low-latency feedback from external APIs and smart contracts through Nibi-Oracles.

Source: Nibiru official blog

Developer-Friendly Nibiru

Nibiru has made several efforts to enhance its developer-friendliness:

Security of Wasm VM: Nibiru’s smart contracts run on the Wasm virtual machine, effectively preventing common attacks such as reentrancy and arithmetic overflow, ensuring high reliability of applications.

EVM Compatibility: In 2024, Nibiru Chain will support EVM, allowing developers to use familiar tools like Solidity while enjoying the benefits of the Cosmos ecosystem.

Multi-Language SDKs: Nibiru offers SDKs in various languages, including Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Golang, and Rust, making it convenient for developers from different backgrounds.

GraphQL API: Nibiru’s Nibi-Indexer provides a GraphQL API, which facilitates developers’ retrieval and querying of on-chain data efficiently.

Low-Latency Oracles: Nibiru’s decentralized oracles are maintained by validator nodes, ensuring data accuracy and low latency.

User-Friendly Nibiru

Nibiru has focused on enhancing user-friendliness in several key areas:

All-in-One Web Application: Nibiru plans to launch a unified web application that integrates various dApps and provides a dApp registry, making it easy for users to discover and use different decentralized applications.

Low Gas Fees: Nibiru’s gas fees are lower than those of other Layer 1 platforms, reducing the user entry barrier and encouraging more transactions and interactions.

High Performance and Parallel Processing: Nibiru Chain features high throughput and short block times, minimizing network congestion and ensuring smooth and reliable transaction processing.

Real-Time Application Support: The scalability and parallel processing capabilities of Nibiru Chain make it an ideal platform for real-time consumer applications, offering more possibilities for innovation in Web3 applications.

Nibiru’s Outlook on Derivatives and Web3 Gaming Opportunities

Derivatives Sector

Centralized exchanges have a much higher derivatives trading volume compared to spot trading, but the DeFi derivatives market remains relatively small. This is due to deficiencies in execution speed, fees, and liquidity within DeFi derivatives. Currently, several players exist in the DeFi derivatives space, such as dYdX (Ethereum L2 + dYdX Chain), Hyperliquid (Arbitrum), GMX (Arbitrum, Avalanche), ApolloX (BSC), and Drift Protocol (Solana). Each platform makes different trade-offs regarding capital efficiency, trading costs, frontrunning risks, available liquidity, and execution speed. However, none of their user experiences can match that of centralized exchanges (CEX). Nibiru aims to offer a derivatives trading experience comparable to centralized exchanges through technical innovations while providing the following advantages:

Transparency: On-chain derivatives are open and transparent, eliminating the possibility of behind-the-scenes manipulation and ensuring market fairness.

Composability: On-chain derivatives can seamlessly integrate with other DeFi products, fostering innovative applications. For example, loans backed by derivatives contracts, clever use of NFTs for trade-related metadata, or the creation of entirely new asset classes.

Web3 Gaming Sector

The gaming industry boasts billions of players, and Web3 technology can significantly enhance player engagement by granting them true ownership of in-game assets. Nibiru sees Web3 gaming as one of the most promising applications of blockchain technology, offering an ideal platform for game developers with its high performance and robust tech stack. Nibiru supports:

1. Asset Tokenization: In-game assets can be traded as NFTs, providing players with real ownership and the ability to trade assets outside the game.
2. Security: Players can securely access in-game economies using CosmWasm smart contracts, all of which are verified and proven on Nibiru’s blockchain.
3. High Performance: With high throughput and low latency, Nibiru ensures a smooth gaming experience, capable of handling 40,000 transactions per second (TPS).
4. Interoperability: Game assets can be used across different scenarios and platforms, enhancing their utility and value.
5. Royalties: Asset creators can earn rewards every time their creations are traded, providing continuous revenue.

Nibiru has partnered with the Blockchain Game Alliance and announced games including a mobile RPG and a prize-based savings game. The platform plans to expand into full-chain games, card games, strategy games, puzzle games, racing games, and more.

Tokenomics

Nibiru centralizes the value of trading, yield generation, staking, and other financial activities around its native token, NIBI. This approach prevents fragmentation within its internal ecosystem and reduces dependence on external blockchains.

NIBI serves as the staking and utility token for the Nibiru Chain, playing a crucial role in the network’s Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus and decentralized governance. NIBI holders can stake their tokens to participate in network protection and consensus, earning staking rewards. Additionally, NIBI is used to pay for on-chain transaction gas fees, incentivizing the creation of new blocks.

Upon full dilution, NIBI will have a total supply of 1.5 billion tokens. The distribution of NIBI tokens is as follows:

Source: Nibiru official website

Nibiru Roadmap 2024

Source: Nibiru website

In 2024, Nibiru Chain is dedicated to expanding its ecosystem with several key initiatives. The primary plans include launching gamified airdrop events, integrating with major liquidity hubs, listing on multiple centralized exchanges, achieving parallel optimistic execution, and attaining full EVM compatibility. Additionally, Nibiru Chain will roll out its highly anticipated flagship dApps, such as Nibi-Perps, Nibi-Swap, and NUSD.

Since the mainnet launch in March, Nibiru has supported Wasm smart contracts written in Rust. In June, Nibiru introduced the high-performance EVM execution environment, Nibiru EVM, achieving a throughput of over 10,000 TPS in a single-threaded context. Nibiru EVM aims to provide a developer-friendly environment, facilitating seamless interaction between Ethereum tokens and multi-virtual machine applications. By the end of the year, Nibiru plans to upgrade the network further by implementing parallel optimistic execution, significantly enhancing transaction processing capabilities.

The launch of Nibiru Chain’s flagship dApps will be a crucial milestone in its development, signifying Nibiru’s progression towards a user and developer-centric platform.