Clover Finance

Clover Finance (CLV) is a “one-stop” cross-chain DeFi bridge that provides a more accessible gateway to DeFi for everyone, including those that may be new to Decentralized Finance (DeFi). It was founded in May 2020 and the live mainnet was launched in July 2021.

The rapid and exponential growth of the crypto ecosystem hasn’t come about without its fair share of problems. The two core problems that need to be solved are high gas prices (transaction fees) and network congestion due to bottlenecks that cause the network to slow down and raise gas prices. In addition, as the wider crypto eco-system grows, there are more blockchains being introduced and while this helps reduce network congestion there is definitely a need for some form of cross-chain compatibility and easier access.

Network congestion is a growing problem in the crypto world

Currently, the bulk of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) action is happening on the Ethereum blockchain, the second-largest crypto blockchain network after Bitcoin. Ethereum and Bitcoin both use what is known as a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus system for validating transactions. On the plus side, the Proof of Work consensus model is pretty robust and in crypto time a relatively tried and tested technology. The key problem with Proof of Work-based blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin is slow transaction times resulting in higher transaction fees, in some cases fees exceeding the value of the transaction. As a result, many organizations are scrambling to tackle this growing problem, one of these projects is Clover Finance.

What does Clover Finance Do?

Clover Finance is building what is known as a foundational layer to enable Gasless user interactions to make the user experience easier and simpler, especially for those that are not hardcore crypto users. As crypto slowly edges towards something a little less techy and slightly more mainstream, the user experience needs to be easier and the cost of transactions and network congestion problems need to be addressed as the situation will only get worse as crypto-based technology scales and touches more of our daily lives.

Cross-chain compatibility is needed

The other issue is cross-chain compatibility, when there was only one blockchain and one coin, Bitcoin, it was relatively easy, everything happened on the one blockchain network and there was a single cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. This is clearly not the case anymore and things are only accelerating. Clover Finance is developed based on substrate, the foundation of the Polkadot network. Polkadot is what is known as a sharded multi-chain network and is able to process many transactions on multiple chains in parallel, thus severely reducing the bottlenecks that are prevalent on blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum where transactions are processed one at a time and not very efficient. One Clover Finance product, Clover Wallet allows users to view multiple assets without having to switch networks and supports Ethereum, Polkadot, Kusama and Binance Smart Chain to name a few.

Who are the people behind Clover Finance?

The founders of Clover Finance are Viven Kirby, Burak Keceli and Norelle Ng. Viven Kirby is an experienced enterprise resource planner and serves the role of project lead at Clover. Burak Keceli is the tech lead at Clover Finance and has been an avid programmer since the age of 10, he was the creator of MBO Games as well as an instant cross-border payment platform, Stagg. Norelle Ng is the operations lead at Clover Finance and a seasoned blockchain expert with a background in human-computer interaction.