📝 Editor’s Note:

Today we’re debuting Zoomed-in, a new onchain deep dive series from OurNetwork.

Each Zoomed-in issue will be authored by one of the marquee contributors from our analyst community. It will feature a deep dive on a single project of their choosing, going a level deeper than a standard OurNetwork issue to help readers understand what’s really happening with top projects and ecosystems onchain.

One inspiration for us as we designed this series was The Players’ Tribune, a sports publication allowing readers to hear directly from professional athletes in their own words. My hope is that we can create a similar type of platform for the industry’s top onchain analysts and researchers, who really ought to have more a larger audience viewing their great work.

You can sign up to be a contributor here or ping the Editorial Team to register your interest in authoring zoomed-in coverage. We are always interested in featuring independent analysts looking to make a name for themselves in the space. We’d also love to work with any data-driven research desks/crypto funds to repurpose one of their recent internal memos to share with our audience.

Shoutout to core contributors Owen and Cody, who were instrumental in us getting this pilot issue published today, and finally, stay tuned for more announcements on how these issues will fit into our regular schedule, upcoming issues, etc. very soon!

Okay it’s time to zoooooooom in.

- Spencer 🕛

The network at a glance: Aptos is a high-performance L1 built for decentralized web-scale applications and capable of processing a peak TPS of 8,400. Aptos has processed 490M+ transactions since launching on mainnet in 2022, with 2.3M MAUs and 38 DeFi protocols deployed onchain.

Re7 Capital specializes in liquid crypto investment strategies and DeFi R&D, including working with blockchain ecosystems to build and grow their DeFi use cases. (Editor’s note: Re7 is also home to Lewis Harland, ON’s most prolific contributor ever! 👑)

• 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. Aptos’ TVL continues to climb, with 4x growth over the last three months to over $400M. In this deep dive, we review some of the top DeFi protocols on Aptos and focus on how users are taking advantage of the nascent ecosystem.

• DeFi primitives continue to expand on the chain and improve user experience. TVL in the top DEXes has grown by almost 5x since the start of the year to over $120M. Slippage on trades has dropped to less than 25 bps on 6 figure sizes according to Re7’s proprietary research. Watch for improved slippage as liquidity moves over to concentrated pools on the upcoming LiquidSwap v1.

• Aptos protocols are moving quickly through their stages of development, evidenced by examples like Thala working swiftly towards progressive decentralization and community-led governance. Developer activity on Aptos is also up 69% M/M with nearly 200 developers having deployed 62 protocols on the chain to date according to Artemis [3].

• As with other proof-of-stake chains, APT has its own variations of liquid staking tokens. In the last 30 days, Amnis has grown over 50%, moving from around 6M APT staked to 9M APT staked. Daily growth average of over 1% puts it in the top spot of liquid staking tokens (LSTs) on Aptos with a 2x differential over Thala’s thAPT, the second largest APT LST.

• Liquid staked assets have been central to DeFi on EVM chains and we expect that a similar dynamic will emerge in Aptos’ DeFi ecosystem. Borrow rates for APT have stayed below 3%, making a nice spread between borrowing and staking returns of 7%. Average borrow rates over the past 30 days were below 1.8%. The e-mode borrowing soon to be available on Aries and Echelon will allow users to move from 4x to 10x leverage on LSTs.

• Cellana is a new ve(3,3) DEX. Airdrops to early Aptos users and a strong emissions program have pushed the DEX’s TVL to over $30M in the span of a few weeks. The first month of trading fees exceeded $500k annualized, all passed back to veCELL token stakers. Much of the volume on Aptos DEXs comes from larger pairs and cross chain txs such as APT, WETH, WBTC, USDC/USDT, with additional volume coming from memecoins and newly launched DeFi ecosystem tokens.

• What does this mean looking ahead? With activity and volume picking up, the CELL ve(3,3) model will likely continue to generate high fees which distribute to veCELL holders on a pro rata basis. LiquidSwap, another DEX on Aptos which doesn’t yet have a token, is also well positioned to continue taking an outsized share of total chain volume — the DEX recently passed $10M per day averages.

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