Yes, that's one thing, collateral. And I saw some DeFi projects focused on privacy of their users so DeepOnion could co-operate. Moreover, there could be finally some usecase for DeepVault, it is a decentralized notary service so it could be integrated into some DeFi project. These projects will offer more and more decentralized services, not only lending and exchanges, but also e.g. insurance so they might be interested in notary services as something additional as their competition advantage.
But currently there might be a technical problem, because DeFi projects usually work with ERC-20 tokens. I believe it will change in the future, but it might take some time. However, it might be possible to create ERC-20 compatible wrapped ONION as there is already e.g. wrapped BTC.
So the Team should definitely explore this area more as it might be a great opportunity. Of course, it can turn out that there are no significant benefits, but it is worth trying.
Wrapped ONION on ETH would be a good idea WONION
In the future can bring benefits when interacting with ERC20 tokens and for using ONION as colateral in Defi platforms.
Also Chainlink is another good project that will function as a bridge between current non blockchain companies willing to connect their commercial software to a blockchain project. So they might connect to ONION so their users can have private tx.
Wrapped ONION (I also like the name WONION) would be extremely useful and not only in interacting with other ERC-20 tokens and DeFi projects, but it would in general enable smart contracts much earlier than they will be developed as a second layer on top of DeepOnion blockchain.
As a result, it would be possible to convert Dev and Bounty funds from ONION to WONION (of course with ratio 1:1) and lock them via smart contract in the near future. I have noticed that this fund locking is becoming more common among new projects, most simple is a time lock, e.g. every year some part of the funds can be released from the smart contract. This would massively increase trustworthiness of this project and might attract many new investors.
And it seems that there are already solutions for this such as trustswap.org mentioning time-locked tokens as one of its usecases. Even more complex event-released payments should be possible.
I really like this kind of brainstorming, but it would be nice if more Team members participated. Especially a feedback from some tech guys such as the Devs would be very beneficial.