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📝 Editor’s Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork’s first Ecosystem Mega Issue for 2024!

We’re proud to be partnering with Aptos for this one. The network has been on a tear in 2024 – hitting all-time high weekly active addresses of 1M and monthly 2.5M actives in March.

TVL has also jumped ~200% on the year, sitting at $342M. It crossed the $300M TVL mark just 505 days after launching on mainnet, which is particularly impressive given the historical context. It’s also an indicator of a strong early developer community, as deploying on Aptos is not as simple as launching forked code on a new EVM chain – it requires new code that reasons about parallelized transaction processing, modular architecture, and of course Move, a new high-powered programming language.

As we commonly observe across upstart L1s, first a burgeoning DeFi ecosystem has emerged, featuring novel experiments in order-book based exchanges, liquid staking opportunities, and reputable tokenized treasuries. But non-financial consumer applications are also gaining traction – case in point, Chingari, the web3 streaming service, has 8.75M holders of its GARI token on Aptos – that’s second only to APT holders on the chain.

In this issue, we’ll take you through high-level updates across Aptos’ DeFi and consumer ecosystems, while also diving deep on the key players driving the growth behind these sectors.

To get started on Aptos, check out popular wallets like Pontem or Petra and begin exploring the rapidly growing Aptos Ecosystem.

With that, let’s dive into the coverage.

• Aptos' DeFi ecosystem features a broad array of protocol implementations spanning key sectors including LSTs, spot DEXs, perp DEXs, and money markets. Merkle leads as the premier derivatives exchange, with Mirage and Joule preparing to debut. The ecosystem features two liquidity layers: Econia's orderbook and Pontem's concentrated liquidity AMM. With the launches of Mirage and Joule, developers will gain access to four ways to bootstrap their protocol.

• Capital has moved aggressively into the Aptos ecosystem this year with 4.9M bridged transactions totaling $1.4B of inflows to the chain. Stargate’s Aptos campaign is behind this surge with >$1B of this bridged volume coming since the campaign began in early March. 53% of bridged volume to date has been inbound vs 47% outbound.

• Aptos Ascend, developed with Microsoft, SK Telecom, Brevan Howard, and BCG, is a permissioned network tailored to institutional needs, pioneering large-scale financial innovation. It can process over 2B transactions daily, catering specifically to each partner's requirements.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The team behind DooDoo, a memecoin, burned 100,000 of its own token as a result of a vote was taken on OrderDAO. This seems to have been a celebration that 69% of the DooDoo supply now belongs to the community.

• Aptos positions itself as a highly performant Layer 1 for decentralized financial and consumer applications. Its DeFi ecosystem is showing signs of maturity and is already well-developed with a wide range of protocols across several sectors like lending and exchanges. Aptos’ TVL continues to climb, with 3x growth YTD to $350M today, reaching a peak of $500M in early April.

• Aptos’ supply of stablecoins has also nearly doubled YTD from $50M to $100M. Stablecoin supply dominance as % of total TVL has declined by 13% to 27% meaning TVL is becoming more diversified in a growing stablecoin ecosystem.

• Aptos TVL is becoming more diversified across a greater number of dApps. TVL is now being contributed by 28 total dApps. There are now eight dApps with >$10M TVL compared to two at the start of the year.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Pyth oracle price feed updates make up 10.7% of total transactions on Pyth and is the number 1 interacted function by transaction count on Aptos. The dominance of price feed update transactions within Aptos points to a DeFi-centric specialism for the ecosystem.

• With over 20 games set to launch on the network this year, consumer facing applications are taking a big piece of the cake on Aptos — 41% of users come from dApps and NFTs. In January, Aptos Arena crossed 500k users, while Chingari reports a steady DAU growth from 36k to 80k DAU in 3 months. KYDLabs, the onchain ticketing platform, also reported 50k+ tickets sold in 2023 - accumulating over 55k wallets created onchain.

• On the NFTs side, Aptos counts over 28.8k collections and 4M+ holders. The 3 main marketplaces on Aptos reported a strong growth with 255k active users in February - 139k coming from Wapal. This activity went down to 190k active users in March. New collections are set and expected to launch in the coming weeks.

• Overall, user retention remains strong and stable. The numbers of new users increases, but the number of returning users is higher. On Oct. 19 we observe a spike of 501k returning users and 267k new users, largely due to the launch of Graffio. Graffio registered 1.3M Transactions with the contract, and 605k unique wallet addresses.

• Merkle Trade is the first-ever gamified perpetual DEX, blending gaming with crypto, forex, and commodities trading, revolutionizing the trading experience with its unique level-up system, loot boxes, and exclusive NFTs. Backed by leading investors including Hashed, Arrington Capital and Aptos Labs, it has quickly gained significant traction, attracting over 110k traders and generating $7B in trading volume in just four months since its inception.

• Since the launch Merkle Trade V2 right after Christmas in 2023, the volume and the cumulative position size delta has been constantly growing — average daily trading volume is between $60-100M and cumulative position size delta has reached a whopping $250M+.

• Merkle Trade LP (MKLP) has a very simple and battle-tested design and with 50% of all the platform fees going to MKLP, the APR has been consistently 70%+ for the last 50 days.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Omnichain onboarding has been instrumental to current success of Merkle Trade allowing users from 6 EVM chains to deposit and trade within seconds greatly improving bridging experience. This particular user went ahead and deposited 100k+ USDC into their trading account on Merkle

• Econia, the hyper-parallelized on-chain order book on Aptos, surpasses over $160M in trading volume.

By leveraging the low fee/latency parallelized performance of the Aptos

blockchain, Econia was designed to be not just performant, but also highly capital efficient. For every dollar of liquidity present on the Econia order book, $29.90 of trading volume is taking place.

• Over 91.2k unique wallet addresses have interacted with Econia.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Econia enables market makers to concentrate liquidity around the fair market price of an asset. This differs from traditional AMMs which inefficiently fan out liquidity to either 0 or infinity from the fair market price. Econia processes daily volumes similar to those of leading Aptos AMMs with less capital. When trades are routed through an aggregator, Econia wins a large majority of volume given price impact is lesser than most Aptos DEXs.

• Thala is a DeFi HyperApp and Liquidity Engine on Aptos, powered by Move. The core innovation of Thala lies in offering a unified set of products: a stablecoin, a DEX, liquid staking, and a token launchpad, with each product effectively feeding into the others. Thala has achieved a peak TVL of $250M, propelled by the hype surrounding Aptos, making it one of the largest Move DeFi apps. The three major components contributing to this TVL are the DEX (ThalaSwap), Liquid Staking (thAPT), and the MOD (stablecoin).

• thAPT, the liquid staking solution, has surpassed a supply of 5.5M, of which around 50% has been staked to receive sthAPT, i.e., around 2.85M APT are earning rewards.

• MOD, the first Move-native, overcollateralized, and decentralized stablecoin, has crossed $11.8M in supply.

• Cellana is a community-owned decentralized exchange on the Aptos network that enhances DeFi growth through a sustainable liquidity incentives model. By utilizing the ve(3,3) model in the Move language, Cellana is propelling to the forefront of Aptos DeFi. Cellana's IDO has over $400k raised through fair launch, and achieved a 22x all-time high, securing a top 5 position for TVL on Aptos with over $40M in TVL within just a month of launch.

• Cellana prioritizes security with audits from Movebit and OtterSec, alongside code review by the Aptos Foundation itself. This commitment to security fosters trust within the Aptos ecosystem.

• Furthermore, Cellana's success is underscored by a grant and ongoing monthly incentives from the Aptos Foundation to bootstrap liquidity on the platform, solidifying the position as a key player within Aptos DeFi. Notably, Cellana has cultivated a vibrant community exceeding 300,000 users with over $11M in daily trading volume.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Take a closer look at this particular transaction: a user claiming 3.728 APT as a reward. How is this significant? This transaction showcases an engaged user locking CELL for veCELL, to be able to vote on liquidity pools (LPs). Their weekly votes on LPs directly impacts the pool's APR: the more votes, the more attractive APR becomes. Users earn high yields, projects attract liquidity, and LPs benefit. By aligning user rewards with network health, Cellana creates a win-win.

• Echelon is a high efficiency borrow/lend market designed to scale Move DeFi & liquidity by offering unmatched capital efficiency to borrowers with high LTV loans on select asset pairs, such as stables or LST and native assets. v1 is audited, and went live on Aptos mainnet in March and is expanding to other Move VMs such as Movement's M2 and Initia in 2024. v1.1 will support RWA collateral (i.e. Ondo's USDY) & flash loans. Since launching on Aptos Mainnet Echelon has processed over 25k transactions from 4k users, with over $30M in assets supplied and $20M borrowed.

• More than $30M in assets have been supplied to the protocol in one month since mainnet launch — that's over $1M of deposits per day!

• Over 500 users interact with the protocol daily.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Echelon liquidator bot closes out an underwater position to remove bad debt from the protocol, paying back the lender's collateral to the pool. This transaction earned the protocol $71.8 worth of fees while costing $0.03 in gas! This transaction is one of many that help secure the Echelon protocol and protect lenders, promoting stability across the Aptos DeFi landscape.

• Aries Markets has been the top 1 lending protocol on Aptos since day 1. With the introduction of the incentive program and points program, Aries Markets' TVL has steadily increased to surpass $270M. Aries is no longer just the largest lending platform in Aptos but has also emerged as the No.1 DeFi protocol in the entire ecosystem of Aptos in terms of TVL.

• In 2024, Aries has entered a phase of rapid growth, with total unique users surpassing 560k. It has consistently secured a position among the top 3 platforms in terms of daily active users in the Aptos ecosystem. In the past quarter, Aries witnessed an impressive 80% proportion of new users.

• Aries Markets has achieved a monthly user transaction volume exceeding 440k, with the total transaction volume approaching the $2M mark. In the past month alone, Aries has experienced a remarkable growth of over 80% in user transaction volume compared to the previous month.

• Chingari is the #1 Dapp on Aptos with close to 400k weekly active users onchain.

• Chingari's GARI token has 8.75M+ holders on Aptos blockchain which is only second to APT token which is the native currency of the chain.

• Chingari's admin module used to facilitate transactions for Chingari users on Aptos chain is one of the top 5 modules and the only one not adminstered by Aptos Labs.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Chingari users can gift several in-app items to each other which are in form of NFTs minted on Aptos blockchain. There have been more than 10M such gift NFTs already transferred between the users in the span of last 6 months. The Gift is called "Lollipop" and numbers of NFTs can be verified on Mercatro, one of the leading NFT marketplaces on Aptos.

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