Introduction

Lithium offers founders new ways to capitalise Web 3.0 projects, using blockchain technology and a mature network of partnerships to support idea validation, development, launch, and marketing. Facilitating the funding of highly talented founding teams helps to reduce the current market failure - assisting the development and legitimacy of the blockchain space as a whole, whilst directing capital to projects focussed on real world use cases.

Lithium was born out of a requirement to solve the systemic faults across the early-stage crypto space. The name Lithium was chosen because it couldn’t encompass our vision and mission any better: Lithium is an element in the third group of the periodic table, which encapsulates the focus on Web 3.0 and nicely ties to the three products that make up the Lithium ecosystem:

• The Launchpad

• The Incubator

• The Community

Our founding team has traded cryptocurrencies for years, primarily on the Ethereum blockchain. As adoption rates increased and the space became increasingly saturated, Ethereum began to both slow and become expensive, creating a suboptimal space for Investors looking for maximum returns.

Unless you were sending significant sums in each transaction on the blockchain, the fees of each transaction were incredibly high in many cases, deterring the average retail investor from exploring the opportunities provided by projects launching across the Ethereum network.

As adoption rates continued to rise, additional blockchains began to establish themselves to solve the problems experienced on Ethereum or to focus on specific value adds for the specific blockchain’s users. Examples of these new and exciting blockchains are

• BinanceSmartChain (BSC)

• Solana (SOL)

• Polygon (MATIC)

• Fantom (FTM)

• Cardano (ADA)

• Polkadot (DOT)

Having assessed the pros and cons of each blockchain, Lithium’s native chain is Polygon, which is a Layer-2 solution created to help drive mass adoption of the Ethereum platform. Its diverse arsenal of scaling solutions allows developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) that prioritize performance, user experience (UX), and security. The main reasons we chose the Polygon network include:

• Building the simplest launchpad in the world, we’re focussed on creating an insane customer experience. Polygon has full EVM/WalletConnect support; native mobile applications, and a suite of developer tools to facilitate a world-class user experience.

• Polygon processes 65,000 transactions per second with a block confirmation time of under two seconds. This transaction throughput allows super quick transaction times — removing lag and latency in the process. Polygon fully supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Ethereum’s blockchain-based software that allows developers to construct decentralized applications (dApps). Like a startup looking to ‘growth hack’ it's way up the value chain, this enables Polygon to piggyback on the popularity of Ethereum and benefit from the already existing network effects.

• Unlike Ethereum, however — which is impacted by super high transaction fees, Layer 2 protocols like Polygon have gas expenses up to 1000 times cheaper than the parent network. Even though Polygon had to hike its gas prices 30x to deter spammers — gas fees of just $0.02 among the top protocols are still some of the lowest in the space.