About the Editor: Spencer Noon is an independent angel investor. Looking to get in touch? DM him on Telegram or reply to this email and say hi 👋

• dYdX Chain is an open-source perpetual exchange built as a proof-of-stake appchain leveraging the Cosmos SDK. It's customized for high-performance trading and full decentralization. Three months post-launch, dYdX Chain has experienced significant growth with cumulative volumes crossing $33B, total value locked (TVL) reaching $50M in USDC, open interest increasing to $55M, and 2.5K unique active traders. dYdX Chain has surpassed dYdX v3 and Uniswap as the largest DEX by daily trading volumes.

• All transaction fees (trading fees denominated in USDC, DYDX-denominated gas fees, and USDC-denominated gas fees) are distributed to Validators and Stakers in exchange for contributing to the security of the protocol. To date, dYdX Chain has distributed over 5M in USDC to over 12,200 Stakers.

• dYdX Chain governance voted to adopt a Launch Incentives Program setting aside $20M in DYDX from the Treasury to be distributed over 6 months. At the end of Season 1, Chaos Labs initiated a proposal to distribute $5M in rewards to 2,006 accounts. Traders are now competing for Season 2 rewards.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: dYdX Chain launched with 33 markets. The process for adding a new market to the dYdX Chain is a decentralized and permissionless one; any asset with a reliable price feed that validators subscribe to can be added and traded on the dYdX Chain, subject to a successful governance vote. The dYdX community has since voted in favor of adding the TIA-USD, JUP-USD, AAVE-USD, and BNB-USD pairs, with more markets expected soon. A new market listing tool was added to the front-end to support this process.

• THORChain is a crosschain liquidity protocol, which bypasses wrapping by running its own nodes on other chains, and links RUNE liquidity in pools with other popular assets like ETH and BTC. Its earlier years marred by vulnerabilities, THORChain has since recovered and introduced innovations like its slippage-reducing ‘streaming swaps.’ Recent growth has it executing $50-200M daily in outgoing swap volume in February, albeit a partial cooldown after recent months’ spikes of up to $382M (Jan. 8).

• THORChain’s native token RUNE, while serving as store of protocol value ($330M TVL on Feb. 12) and a governance token, is also a key liquidity instrument. In the month leading up to 2/12/24 it enabled $287M+ in swaps for each of its top two routes, both involving BTC (followed by ETH and stablecoins).

• THORChain's affiliate program recently began incentivizing wallets and dApps to integrate its swap tech. Just this year, TrustWallet already collected 293.7k RUNE (over $1.6M at the time of writing) in affiliate fees, indicating robust activity that could draw interest from future partners.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In the summer 2023, THORChain added lending to its suite of DeFi offers. Borrowing operations are growing slowly, although the fundamentals are solid: newer users often borrow larger amounts than original borrowers, and loans are becoming progressively more overcollateralized, from 2x collateral that early borrowers put down on average, to almost 5x for Bitcoin and 3.5x for Ether loans now. The largest loan to date was 96k USDC on Sept. 29 2023, backed by 213.87 ETH for a 2.97 collateralization ratio.

• Osmosis is the main shared liquidity layer for the Cosmos ecosystem. It recently crossed $7.7B in cumulative trading volume according to datalenses.zone (starting from ~Dec. 12). There has been ~$200-300M in average weekly trading volume recently. The lion's share of this volume has come from OSMO trading pairs, followed by USDC, ATOM, DYM, and TIA. Osmosis peaked at 178k daily active users and 65M daily trading volume in January. Users also performed 1.8M IBC transfers to and from Osmosis in the last month.

• Osmosis has generated ~$12.9M in cumulative swap fees over time. This translated into ~$5.2M in protocol revenue over the past year, ~84% of which was in the past 90 days. Most of the taker fees took off in November '23 and the transaction fees ticked up in December.

• The TVL in Osmosis has risen back over $200M. $70M+ of this is in Stride asset pools on Osmosis. ~55% sits in the top 10 pools. In the past 90 days, it seems there's been more net outflow. This ticked up around January 9th '24. We've seen a net inflow to staking and superfluid staking in the past 30 days.