2022 has been one of the most backwards years in crypto and Web3, especially for India.

It seemed bright at first: from leading crypto exchanges CoinDCX and Coinswitch Kuber deploying big money on sprawling operations, Polygon raising $450 million, Coinbase entering India with UPI integration, Web3 startups springing up, and more.

But things changed quickly, with the central government implementing a 30% income tax on cryptocurrency earnings, a 1% TDS on cryptocurrency transactions, and the rejection of Coinbase’s UPI feature by part of the NPCI (which led to the exchange effectively suspending its plans in India).

With cryptocurrency trading and income already in the red, the drop in the The LUNA (Terra) ecosystem and the FTX bankruptcy only exacerbated the crypto contagion.

However, the founders of Indian crypto and Web3 continued to build into 2022, with a firm belief in their visions and hope that the current bear market will usher in the next wave of mainstream adoption of blockchain applications.

Here are ten of the most inspiring and innovative Web3 startups covered by The Decrypting Story in 2022.

The issues of using Ola and Uber services on Indian metros came to light in 2022. Lack of available taxis, trip cancellations, and price increases have made ride-sharing services more and more difficult to use.

Solving this problem is Drife, a project by Firdosh Sheikh and co-founders Surya Ranjith and Mudit Marda to create a ride-sharing experience with no fees for drivers, market-driven pricing, open governance, and transparency.

Founded in 2021, Drife’s blockchain-based ride-sharing experience includes no driver fees, market-driven pricing, open governance, and transparency.

Read more here.

Do you remember Farmville?

CropBytes is a Farmville-style Ethereum-based farming simulation game that allows players to own farms, fungible virtual food tokens, farm animal products, etc., as well as NFTs, and participate in the in-game economy to win tokens.

In existence for over 4.5 years, CropBytes has amassed over half a million users and over 400,000 organic downloads on Android and iOS.

The game earns revenue by taking a one percent commission on transactions on the platform and also from flash sales of in-game assets such as wells, lakes, land, farm animals, etc.

Read more here.

Imagine a Zoom built on Web3.

Created by Ayush Ranjan and Susmit Lavania, Huddle01 is a P2P (peer-to-peer) video calling and communications platform that does not rely on centralized servers.

This allows you to achieve low latency and high performance. Huddle01 is free to use, does not require any registration and does not track user data.

It also provides rich Web3 features such as token-gating, NFTs like profile images, decentralized storage for meeting recordings (on IPFS and Filecoin), decentralized live streaming (on Livepeer), and more.

Read more here.

2022 proved that the Layer-1 wars were far from over. A prominent Layer-1 project released was Shardeum by WazirX founder Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed.

Shardeum is reportedly the only network that employs autoscaling, where you can automatically increase and decrease capacity and achieve infinite scalability.

It also features a dynamic exchange, where each node added to the Shardeum network will help boost the TPS (transaction per second).

Since Shardeum is EVM-enabled, it supports smart contract-based decentralized applications (dApps) that run on the Ethereum blockchain. It uses a Proof of Stake + Proof of Quorum consensus model.

Read more here.

Started by former Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal, FanTiger it’s a new way to own music.

The startup connects artists with fans through NFTs. On the platform, owning a fractional NFT of a song allows the holder to earn royalty income based on the song’s performance on Spotify, YouTube, Gaana, etc.

On the artist side, FanTiger is a way to raise funds and earn revenue for an upcoming song.

The platform has already signed up with artists like Sunanda Sharma and Naalayak for their music releases. He claims to have several more partnerships in the works, with a focus on music in languages ​​like Punjabi, Tamil, Marathi, Bhojpuri, and more.

Read more here.

Arcana Network, a blockchain startup founded in 2019 by Mayur Relekar, Aravindh Kumar, and Abhishek Chaudhary, provides a comprehensive stack to help blockchain app developers build secure, privacy-preserving apps.

Arcana has built a storage and privacy stack for Ethereum DApps and works with crypto developers, NFTs, DeFi, etc. In fact, it also works with Web 2 (non-decentralized) products in fintech, healthcare, SaaS, etc., to bring data privacy and security.

The startup’s privacy stack provides onboarding for Web3 users using social authentication or passwordless logins, as well as features to securely store user data, provide data access, etc.

Read more here.

For entrepreneur Ankit Wadhwa, India’s huge community of cricket fans was the best place to start NFTs.

At Gurugram in 2021, he launched Rario, one of India’s first cricket-based NFT platforms with built-in marketplace for users to buy, sell and trade Rario NFTs, and presents cricket fans with a digital collector’s experience. .

Officially licensed digital player cards platform produces digital cards for Hero Caribbean Premier League, Lanka Premier League, Abu Dhabi T10 League, etc., and has a roster of more than 1,000 international cricketers like Rishabh Pant, Virender Sehwag, Rashid Khan, Aaron Finch, Faf Du Plessis, Jason Holder and more.

Read more here.

spheron acts as a deployment aggregator startup, helping developers deploy their entire applications to the decentralized cloud.

It provides a developer experience to deploy instantly, scale automatically, and deliver custom content across decentralized networks.

Pioneered by Mitrasish Mukherjee and Prashant Maurya, the idea for Spheron came up during the Arweave accelerator program, where their MVP (minimum viable product) was showcased.

The startup provides an easy way for developers to use various blockchain protocols without having to learn new languages.

Read more here.

What if you could pay once and store your files forever? Nandit Mehra’s Lighthouse Storage is a blockchain startup developing a protocol for storing files perpetually (or through a permanent ownership model).

It allows users to interact, pay for storage, and get a verifiable record of storage across Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain (formerly BSC), Fantom, Optimism, and more.

The startup facilitates permanent file storage on Filecoin, a persistent data storage system based on IPFS (Interplanetary File System), which is a decentralized network for storing, requesting, and transferring data. Both are complementary networks built by Protocol Labs.

Furthermore, it allows developers to build decentralized applications on top of it to retrieve data from their storage network.

Read more here.

With LegitDoc, startup Zupple helps issue tamper-proof digital documents to stakeholders that can be verified from anywhere in the world, in a matter of seconds.

The blockchain-powered startup was co-founded by Neil Kevin Martis, Shesha Vishnu, Francis Serrao, and Neelu Khatri, who saw a need for an on-chain document issuance and verification system.

The startup has been working with the Maharashtra government and started issuing chain caste certificates to up to 65,000 tribes in Gadchiroli in a bid to stop fraudulent claims of government benefits for the underprivileged.

Read more here.