Meet Unizen: A Smart Exchange Ecosystem Capitalizing on CeDeFi

Unizen is a smart exchange ecosystem that combines the best features of both centralized and decentralized exchanges, creating a structure coined “CeDeFi.”

In order to provide value as quickly as possible while ensuring future innovation—both from the Unizen team and third party partners—the platform is optimized as a modular build.  The key focus areas for Unizen are high compliance and security, deep hybrid liquidity, and a user interface that gives sophisticated insight for professional traders yet is intuitive enough for newcomers.  The Unizen ecosystem is designed for compatibility, ensuring that you can access a large variety of digital assets and exchanges without ever leaving the platform.

(Image source: Unizen.io)

Unizen’s Leadership Team 

The company behind Unizen is Zen Innovations Pte. Ltd., headquartered in Singapore and incorporated as an Exempt Private Company Limited by Shares on 26 November 2020.  

The leadership team brings with it decades of combined experience in crypto, blockchain, fund management, strategy, tech investing, software engineering, and successful start-ups. Sean Noga is the chief executive officer, running the operation from the headquarters in Singapore.  He is also a managing Partner at the crypto VC and strategic advisory firm JUN Capital Management Ltd.

Features

Designed for both professional and retail investors of any expertise level, trading crypto of all types and volume levels, Unizen has a number of key features aimed to equip traders of all skills and experience and provide a unified, intuitive, and efficient interface with the crypto marketplace.

CeDeFi

The key feature of the Unizen ecosystem is the hybrid centralized/decentralized platform, CeDeFi. While competitors include centralized exchanges like KuCoin, along with DeFi aggregators like 1inch and Macha, Unizen truly provides a unique selling proposition in that it is specifically designed to interface with CeFi and DeFi applications on any network, and can aggregate trades across them.  This is critical and especially exciting for crypto traders everywhere, as there includes additional risks to security, slippage, and asset availability since Unizen users have their trade products and exchanges available on the platform.  This reduces the critical trade execution time, ensures audited products, and allows a single interface for trading—no leaving the platform required.

AI-Driven Smart Social Sentiment (SSS) Indicators

As trades are executed, a key unique feature provided by Unizen is the Smart Social Sentiment Indicator feed, enhanced by AI-driven algorithms.   Leveraging their partnership with LunarCrush, proprietary data crawlers constantly search and aggregate sentiments about a given digital asset across a wide variety of social media outlets.  This raw data is then processed through the AI algorithms and sentiments are able to be distilled.  This information is provided to the user to help inform overall sentiment of the digital asset, which provides incredible insight to aid informed decision making of how best to act in regard to the asset.

ZCX and Multi-Asset Staking

Unizen has created its native token, ZCX as an exchange-based utility token.  It is extremely versatile and robust in that it was created as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, but is also mirrored on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).  Further, it can use a number of supported bridges to convert it into BEP-20.  Holders of ZCX can realize cross chain rewards because the ZCX staking platform is multi-asset.  ZCX is protected from deflation because with each paid listing on the Unizen CEX module, the total supply of (1 billion) will be deflated and burned.  

Staking is another area where Unizen is ahead of the curve.  In order to maximize a diverse set of asset growth for its users, Unizen employs dynamic multi-asset staking on BSC.   By staking, holders are rewarded with multi-asset returns, delivered automatically as part of the smart contract set up by the user when staking, in order to diversify and strengthen the reward value.  Another benefit is distributing rewards, including vesting tokens, from various blockchain node projects to those who are staking.  Stakers also have early access for the ZenX Labs incubator program, which will include exclusive sales (seed, IDO, etc.) proportional to the amount of value locked.

Altcoin Tournaments

Unizen has developed a number of additional features for both users and partners alike.  A highlight of these is a set of “altcoin tournaments”, whereby several different digital assets are entered into the competition to determine which can score highest against three key metrics.  Provided by LunarCrush’s AI-driven algorithms, the metrics are:  UNIZEN  Twitter Indicator™, which aggregates the number of tweets, quoted retweets, retweets, replies, and favorites of each digital asset; UNIZEN Sentiment Indicator™, which aggregates the “bullish” sentiment connected to a given digital asset on Twitter; and the UNIZEN Smart Score™, which aggregates the social sentiment data and the scores of the first two metrics.  The latest winner of this competition was the DAG Constellation Network.

Architecture

Unizen is built around two key components: 

Unizen Modules

The Unizen software team developed a critical set of modules that were built as a foundation for the platform, but also to allow evolution and growth of the platform without major renovation.  The ecosystem was built with expansion, growth, and continuous improvements in mind.  Key modules to date include the CEX module, which allows interaction with Binance shared liquidity, and allows upcoming projects to be listed ahead of their third-party module release.

Third-Party Modules

By optimizing the use of APIs, Unizen is currently working with a number of partners in their design and development of third-party modules, enabled through a software  development kit (SDK).  Unizen has provided standardized guidelines and requirements to ensure that security standards and streamlined UIs are delivered to Unizen users.

Future plans and 2021 Roadmap 

In early 2021 Unizen published a roadmap of key milestones they plan to achieve.  To date, the team has been successful in making progress toward that goal.  So far this year (at the time of writing) Unizen has secured Binance Cloud Services, completed those key modules that make up the foundational operating system, designed and built the “Dynamic Multi-Asset Staking” module, developed the ZenX Labs incubator program, and have achieved a wallet count of over 3,000.

Other milestones in 2021 that Unizen is working toward include releasing the first Unizen CEX module listings, successfully testing trade aggregation across modules, releasing the first third-party DeFi module, implementing the first social sentiment indicator metrics, onboarding additional third-party DeFi modules, providing SDK’s, and achieving DAO governance.

Conclusion

Unizen is a unique ecosystem that aims to be the first to solve the balance between centralized and decentralized exchanges, between proprietary software and a modular third party development, between traditional and innovative staking rewards, and has worked to build this balance into a stand-alone, one stop shop that interfaces with all exchanges and platforms.  The key value adds are flexibility, compatibility, ease of use, and security.