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Category Overview, Uniswap, CoW Swap, STON.fi, Aerodrome, and DeDust

• At the peak in ‘21, monthly trading volume on DEXs reached ~$240.2B. Today, it hovers around ~$120.3B. This means that the sector is one doubling away from all-time highs, with the trend on its side. Uniswap is the category leader, with a monthly trading volume of ~$62.0B in May 2024.

• At the peak in 2021, monthly active traders on DEXs reached ~14.1M. Today, the figure sits ~11.3M. The sector is ~80% on its way to new all-time highs, with the trend on its side. Uniswap is the category leader, with a monthly active trader count of ~4.1M (based on a rolling 30-day window) on June 19.

• At the peak in ‘21, total value locked (TVL), i.e. liquidity, on DEXs reached ~$77.2B. Today, it sits at ~$14.1B or at ~20% compared to all-time highs. Since neither trading volumes nor active traders have come down as much, it means that DEXs today operate in a more capital efficient manner compared to ‘21. Uniswap is the category leader, with a TVL of ~$6.5B on June 19th.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Different DEXs may serve different user bases and use cases. Here’s an example swap on CoW Protocol (aggregator). The transaction executes a ~$280k swap from LUSD to USDT. The transaction highlights a key difference between CoW and Uniswap; CoW has an average trade size of ~$61k, whereas Uniswap only ~$1k.

• Uniswap, crypto's leading DEX by volume, has shown strong growth across V2 and V3. Q2 2024 volume hit $71B, with similar performance to last quarter's >$80B, highlighting Uniswap's dominance. Daily volumes consistently exceed $10B, sometimes spiking to $30B. This consistent growth, despite market fluctuations, underscores Uniswap's crucial role in decentralized trading and its efficient liquidity provision across both versions.

• Uniswap V3's concentrated liquidity model drives efficiency, as seen in $23.7B USDC-WETH and $9.4B WETH-USDT volumes — over 50% of the $44B across top 7 assets in Q2 2024. Adoption of V3 pools with varied fees, like $7.2B USDC-USDT, outpaces V2, reflecting Uniswap's innovation improving liquidity across decentralized trading, especially for the largest pools.

• Uniswap V2 Q2 2024 data reveals resilience, with meme tokens driving activity, while assets highlighted in green are top 5 performers during Q2. PEPE-WETH and HPOS10I-WETH lead in activity, exceeding 100,000 trades. These meme pairs, alongside established tokens, show 100-250% price changes. V2's simplicity attracts diverse assets, from high-volume memes to niche pairs with 100-10,000 trades, demonstrating its enduring role in the DeFi ecosystem.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This transaction on Coinbase's Base, a Layer 2 network, appears to be a large-scale arbitrage trade involving Uniswap and ERC-20 tokens like USDC and WETH. The user is transferring over 332 ETH and millions of USDC tokens between addresses over a series of transactions. This indicates the presence of meaningful MEV on Base, as traders seek to profit from price discrepancies. While this signifies an active and liquid market, excessive MEV extraction could also point to potential inefficiencies on the network.

• Since inception, CoW Swap has handled more than $45B in trading volume across 1.2M trades, and has found an incredible $275M of surplus for its traders. On CoW Swap, users submit "intent to trade" orders that are executed by professional third parties known as "solvers." Solvers find the best prices for each trade across AMMs, private market makers, and by matching users peer-to-peer in Coincidences of Wants. These optimal execution paths usually find surplus for users, giving them more than they asked for.

• Since the start of 2024, CoW Swap has averaged a monthly volume of $2.2B and retained a 15% market share across DEX Aggregators. Among the intents market, however, CoW Protocol holds a 67% market share, which has grown from 46% in December 2023.

• CoW Swap launched on Arbitrum One less than two weeks ago and has already processed more than $16M in trades on the L2. Most of the volume was generated through the CoW Swap main interface, Safe{wallet} native swaps and the CoW Swap Safe app. Regardless of where you're trading, all traders get to enjoy the signature "moo" sound after every trade!

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: CoW Swap is the only DEX that gives you more than you asked for. This trader was selling 3,000 ETH for USDC and received a whooping 174,000 USDC extra thanks to CoW Swap's unique batch auction trading mechanism. Based on their slippage settings, the trader's limit price was 2,844 USDC per ETH, but the solvers found an execution path that gave the user an execution price of 2,902 USDC per ETH. In the end, the user received almost $8.7M for their trade instead of the $8.5M they thought they would.

• Aerodrome has flipped Uniswap volume on Base since May 25. Aero volume has hovered between $100M-$200M recently and Aero volume share is 60% while Uniswap's is 40%. Aerodrome recently released its Concentrated Liquidity pool model called Slipstream, which functions similarly to Uniswap v3. AERO generated consistent revenue for months before the Slipstream launch, but Slipstream took Aerodrome volumes to unprecedented levels.

• Aerodrome swap fees and volume have recently resurged in Epoch 42, following 2 epochs of dropped volume and fees. Swap fees were $1.8M in Epoch 42, while they hovered near $1.5M during the prior 3 Epoch's.

• Locked Aerodrome(veAERO) holders grow every Epoch.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In this transaction, we can see that an address interacts with a contract to put 18.5M AERO into the voting escrow to receive an equivalent share of veAERO NFT. Aero voter profitability has continued to rise through epoch's. This is one of the largest transactions on the AERO contract and shows the dedication that entities may place into the AERO yield-bearing system.

• STON.fi holds 75.2% of total DEX volume on TON, regularly exceeding $20M daily. The DEX is designed for easy integration with TON wallets, such as Tonkeeper and TON Space. These integrations enable the trading of any TON-based token. STON.fi achieved an important milestone by listing the TON-based Tether (USDT) and launching NOT, the token of the popular Web3 game Notcoin, which has over 35M players.

• The number of unique users on STON.fi over the entire existence of the project has surpassed 1M — at 1,450,000 - .1.5M will be hit shortly. 84% of all DEX users on TON choose. 58% of TON’s liquidity is concentrated on STON.fi, which generates around $43.4M in daily volume.

• As soon as native USDT went live, STON.fi got 100M TVL within a week and in under a month got over $165M TVL. Overall TVL is around $250M. STON.fi has the second largest stable/native coin pool — only Uniswap has a larger pool for ETH/USDC.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: STON.fi has also been home to the best meme coins on TON. REDO is the leading meme with most volume and transactions. Resistance Dog (REDO) is a community run memecoin, paying homage to Pavel Durov’s (founder of Telegram) hand drawn creation of a hooded dog, as a symbol of digital resistance against internet censorship. The memecoin started out in January with some traders getting in around $0.0001469, now it trades at $1.10, making some a very tasty profit, not to be barked at! With the distribution of 900M users, NOTCOIN (35M users), Hamster KOMBAT (150M users), memecoins look to have a home on TON as many more look to be launched.

• DeDust.io, a leading TON DEX, now stands at $314M in TVL, growing sixfold in two months. Liquidity is mainly concentrated in the TON/USDT pool (~$261M TVL), which has shown significant growth, driven by a generous rewards program. The pool with SCALE, DeDust.io’s native token, is second with a TVL of around $8M.

• Trading volume grew by 5-10x, from around $2M/day in winter to $10-20M/day since mid-March. This significant increase is due to The Open League, an event designed to incentivize projects to grow their audience and engage with users.

• Around 10% of the total SCALE supply is staked 1.5 months after the staking launch (May 2). DeDust.io uses its token to drop a portion of swap fees, which are converted into SCALE and distributed to stakers. Currently, 1.66 million out of 16.7 million tokens are staked.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: SCALE staking TVL is driven by large wallets like hy9X, who purchased SCALE for 99,700 USDT and 17,200 USDT. sC2E, is another large wallet which bought $SCALE for 24,600 TON (around $190k at that time). All tokens were staked immediately: here's an example.

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