Morpho | Spark | Euler | Aries | BENQI | Gearbox

• Morpho is a trustless and efficient lending primitive enabling permissionless market creation across EVM-compatible blockchains. Its ecosystem also includes Morpho Optimizers, peer-to-peer layers on top of pools like Compound and Aave, enhancing capital efficiency by matching lenders and borrowers directly. As of Jan. 15, 2025, Morpho has reached $5.94B in deposits and a total value locked (TVL) of $3.74B, highlighting its rapid growth and adoption across decentralized finance.

• Morpho’s user base continues to grow rapidly, now surpassing 105,000 cumulative unique wallets across Morpho protocol and optimizers. Base, the Layer 2, has been a significant driver for Morpho since the protocol's June 2024 deployment — Base contributes over 85,000 wallets to Morpho's ecosystem.

• Morpho has reached $5.54B in total deposits, showcasing remarkable growth with a surge of over 317% since mid-November. This significant acceleration in deposits over just three months demonstrates strong and growing institutional confidence in the protocol.

• In the past 3 months Spark has more than doubled its total supply reaching an all-time-high of $8.63B in December and $3.24B in borrowed assets after the launch of the Spark Liquidity Layer in November, with plans to expand allocations to Ethena, the synthetic dollar protocol. Since the December peak, though, $3.0B was withdrawn, leaving Spark’s supply at $5.63B (-25%) with $2.03B (-27%) in borrowed assets, a drop significant enough to drop Spark from 2nd to 4th place in terms supplied assets, with both Morho and JustLend overtaking it in DeFi Llama's overall lending protocol rankings.

• Flash loans on Ethereum made up 30 through 50% of Spark's volume during the peak reaching $3.2B weekly, up from the $100M through $1.5B range, while borrow and repay (lending) volume has over quadrupled to $1.4B. On Gnosis, an Ethereum sidechain, flash loans exceeded $400M in the 2nd week of November making up 90 - 99% of Spark’s volume.

• User activity has been stable on both the Ethereum and Gnosis apps with an average of 57.5 and 20 daily active addresses over the past week. The proportion of new addresses has been on the decline, however, remaining below 10% for most of Q4, with only a brief growth spur breaking the spell in January.

• Euler is a modular DeFi lending platform enabling users to permissionlessly create tailored markets. It supports features like multi-collateral support, aggregated vaults, and oracle flexibility for enhanced capital efficiency. After launching in September, Euler’s TVL grew quietly but gained momentum in the last 30 days, growing 38x to a peak TVL of $249M. Earlier this week, it took another big step forward by launching on Base, opening the door for more users to join.

• Euler's modular design, focused on flexibility, has driven a ~30x surge in active loans to $100M+ with markets such as Resolv, Euler Yield (stablecoin looping), and Apostro BTC (leveraged BTC staking). Additionally, Gauntlet, a risk modeling firm, now manages risk for Euler Prime, Euler's flagship lending market.

• Euler has seen a surge in its active user base, with a 758% jump to 3,580 users in the last month. To encourage further participation, Euler recently rolled out an incentive program, rewarding users with a 1:1 version locked of the EUL token to users who supply assets in selected markets.

• Aries Markets, the largest DeFi platform on Aptos, experienced exponential growth in 2024. Over the year, total deposits surged from $30M to $880M, while TVL, excluding borrowed assets, grew 20x from $20M to $400M, representing a 2,000% increase. When including borrowed assets, the peak TVL reached $880M, marking an $850M increase. This remarkable growth highlights Aries Markets’ position as a leader in the DeFi space on Aptos.

• Aries Markets has successfully executed an incentives program, distributing $16.9 million in rewards for incentivized stablecoin yields. Users can earn a direct yield of 10-15% on their deposits, and by leveraging looping strategies, they can achieve up to 30% returns.

• On Aries, the stablecoins zUSDC and USDT comprise 80% of the total borrowed assets. Aries Markets also holds over 50% of the stablecoins within the Aptos ecosystem. With the launch of native USDC on Aptos, further growth and adoption are anticipated, solidifying Aries’ leadership in the ecosystem.

• BENQI is a non-custodial liquidity market protocol on Avalanche, enabling users to lend, borrow, and earn interest with digital assets. The protocol is one doubling away from new milestones - comparing early January 2024 to 2025, weekly borrows skyrocketed from $11.8M to $192M, marking a 16x surge. The debt netflow followed this trend, climbing from $5.3M to $15.3M. Over the past 12 months, BENQI facilitated $5.06B in total borrows against $5.03B in repayments showcasing strong protocol adoption.

• WAVAX, leads BENQI lending with $2.83B (55.9%), followed by USDC at $1.24B (24.6%), WETH.e at $348M (6.9%), USDT at $345M (6.8%), and BTC.b at $210M (4.2%). These five assets make up 98.4% of borrowing, showing user preference for major assets and AVAX derivatives.

• In the past 12 months, BENQI welcomed 14,388 new borrowers, making up 66% of the total borrowers, while 7,557 were returning users, accounting for 34%. This demonstrates BENQI's strong user base, as 91% of borrowers avoided liquidation. Additionally, 86% of borrowers successfully repaid their loans.

• Gearbox closed its 2024 with a 270% TVL growth, reaching $110M+ from $30M+ at the beginning of 2024. The year saw Gearbox integrate 40+ assets and protocols like Ethena, LRTs, Pendle and Sky, creating network effects that led to significant TVL growth. The protocol also expanded to two more Layer 2s — Optimism and Arbitrum. The expansion saw Gearbox's revenue grow to $4.1M for 2024, a 6 fold growth over 2023. This growth was achieved without compromising on security as the $0 of bad debt was incurred.

With the integration of new protocols and assets, the protocol also experienced an the inflow of ~5K new addresses. Specifically, the protocol gained 1.6K new borrowers, representing 26x growth. The passive lending side saw users increase by 6K+ addresses. The passive lenders earned over $13.5M in fees in 2024.

• This usage saw Gearbox borrowers induce over $2.5B of volume on decentralized exchanges (DEX) through Credit Accounts. Over $1B was traded on Curve, a DEX, while 3% of the entire 2024 volume on Balancer, another DEX, was driven by Gearbox's usage. Gearbox also delivered the 2nd highest volume of any account abstraction based protocols in 2024.