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• Sparked by “DeFi Summer” in 2020, Ethereum hosts one of the most mature and diverse DeFi ecosystems, with primitives adopted across many chains. Decentralized exchanges (DEX’s) make up the largest category — representing 48% of the sector's market cap, followed by stablecoin issuers & lending protocols (33%) like MakerDAO and asset management protocols like Lido (13%). ETH is a centerpiece of this activity, with $40B in value held by smart contracts.

• Activity across major DEX’s on Ethereum mainnet has risen lately, but is yet to cross levels seen in through 2022. Monthly trading volumes across Uniswap and Curve rose to $35B in April from $15B in October, a 140% increase. Uniswap's quarterly volume grew by 55%, reaching $84B in Q1 2024.

• With 32.5M ETH staked, Ethereum's staking sector has flourished — the largest liquid staking providers, Lido stETH & Coinbase's cbETH are deeply entrenched across DeFi. 2.5M stETH (~27% of supply) is deposited in lending protocols like Aave v3, while cbETH has relatively less usage as collateral.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: On Apr. 17, MakerDAO's DAI, hit a record $71B in transfer volume, largely driven by MEV and swap transactions across DeFi protocols. In this transaction, an address converted 1.25M USDC to DAI via Maker's peg stability module (PSM-USDC-A), swapped DAI for USDT on Curve.fi, then used the 1inch aggregator, showing how users & bots leverage Ethereum's sophisticated and interconnected DeFi ecosystem for liquidity optimization and arbitrage.

• Since January 2023, trading activity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) within the Solana ecosystem is on the verge of passing $300B as of May 2024. Over the past couple of months, the average trading volume has soared to more than $80B, accompanied by a robust participation rate featuring over 8M monthly active wallets. Jupiter Exchange has emerged as a significant contributor in this arena, accounting for 58% of the total volume with transactions worth approximately $170B. Moreover, the presence of diverse trading platforms like Orca, Raydium, Lifinity, Phoenix, and Meteora not only showcases the competitive landscape but also highlights the continuous innovation occurring within the Solana DEX sphere.

• Starting from January 2023, the non-fungible token (NFT) secondary markets on the Solana blockchain have seen significant growth, achieving a trading volume of over 39M SOL. This figure equates to approximately $2B USD. The market dynamics have supported a high level of activity, with 700,000 distinct wallets purchasing about 15.6M NFTs. This expansion reflects a robust demand and a growing collector base, indicating a flourishing interest and investment in Solana-based NFTs during this period.

• LSTs have also been an area of growth — Since August 2021, users have executed approximately 12.4M staking transactions through 460,000 distinct wallets on various LST protocols in the Solana ecosystem. Currently, these protocols collectively hold more than 21M SOL in staked assets. Among these LST protocols, Jito holds the majority of staked SOL at 49%, while Marinade Finance follows with 30%.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The Token-2022 Program on Solana has successfully processed more than 11M transactions, resulting in the creation of 615,000 tokens, of which 46,000 are fungible. This program, an enhancement over Solana's initial token framework, provides capabilities such as minting and burning of tokens. Additionally, it incorporates sophisticated features such as transfer fees and the ability to issue tokens that can bear interest.

• Stacks, the leading Bitcoin L2, peaked in new accounts created on the network, crossing the 85,000 monthly new accounts for the first time in a year. All this happened following Cointelegraph reporting on the highest ever active accounts for Stacks. Both of these milestones can be attributed to the rise in Bitcoin Decentralized Finance (BTCFi) on Stacks, with multiple new DeFi protocols launching such as Zest, Hermetica, and LISA.

• Activity on the leading Bitcoin L2 skyrocketed after multiple DeFi protocols announced their mainnet launch and points programs. Liquid Stacking protocol StackingDAO saw 30,000 users new to liquid stacking come to Stacks, Velar skyrocketed with over 10,000 users, while ALEX is still leading the charge.

• As a result of new DeFi applications launching on Stacks, STX denominated TVL significantly increased in Q1 and Q2 of 2024. This, partially due to liquid stacking protocols like StackingDAO and LISA driving more liquidity to DEX pools such as Bitflow and ALEX, as well as the launch of Zest and Hermetica.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: A thriving DeFi ecosystem consists of liquid staking providers providing liquidity to DEX pools where you can earn loyalty points for future benefits and potential loyalty rewards. This transaction is a smart contract call that stakes stSTX, a StackingDAO liquid stacked version of Stacks' native token STX, into the Bitflow DEX STX-stSTX reward pool that allows you to earn loyalty points for both StackingDAO and Bitflow. The transaction symbolizes a healthy DeFi ecosystem, secured by Bitcoin.

• Sei Chain launched in August 2023, and until January 2024, there weren't any significant DeFi activities. During this period, the TVL of DeFi platforms remained around $5M. However, growth began thereafter, and in less than three months, the TVL surged by 1,180%, reaching $77M. Until January, Astroport and Levana, both trading platforms, were the primary DeFi projects. However, in late December, Kryptonite and Silo, functioning as liquid staking platforms, launched, further fueling DeFi growth. Additionally, with the rise in SEI's price during this period, liquidity provision on Astroport had a significant uptick and now stands out with nearly $28M locked, constituting 61% of the total DeFi TVL on Sei. There are other projects, but they have yet to gain significant popularity, with TVLs below $500k.

• Liquid staking is new to the Sei chain, and there are only two options available at the moment: Kryptonite and Silo Stake. Together, these platforms boast a TVL of $16.5M, constituting 35% of the total TVL on Sei. In March, the TVL on these platforms increased significantly, growing by 700% at its peak to nearly $30M USD. However, due to fluctuations in SEI’s price, their TVL dropped by 40%, although there weren't substantial changes denominated in Sei.

• Overall, Sei has 80k unique DeFi users, and DeFi accounts for 26% of total activities on the platform. Almost nine months have passed since Sei's launch, during which time users have made 1.1M transactions on DeFi platforms. The activity share indicates that almost 75% of users were active in trading, with 90% of total transactions related to Astroport. In January, the SEI’s price experienced significant growth in a short period, and there was a meme hype on Sei. This led to the trading volume on Sei reaching around $180 million during that period. However, after the hype subsided, we witnessed a decrease in trading activities every month. Nevertheless, the daily inflow and outflow to DeFi platforms show an overall positive trend.

• The Open Network is a layer-1 blockchain designed by Telegram and continued by the open source community. The Open Network Foundation is the steward of the ecosystem growth and the latest initiative to boost the ecosystem activity is called The Open League. The Open League started its pilot season in March 2024 and since then TVL has grown by 800% (from $23M as of 1 March to $200M as of 15 May) and now there are more than 545K unique DEX users on TON. The goal of The Open League is simple: identify the best projects on TON and let them compete all the while incentivizing their pools and/or social viral mechanics. As a result the two leading DEXs experienced a surge in trading volume as well as new Jettons (TON version of ERC-20) listings. And the best part is that new ecosystem users are able to seamlessly interact with the DEXs all through a Telegram Mini App (TMA) expereince. At the same time other metrics for The Open League tokens experienced hyper growth as well. From the period of 1 March to 3 May, number of liquidity providers increased by 410% (from 4K to 22K), daily DEX trading volume increased by 834% (from $2.5M to $23.9M), daily traders increased by 431% (from 4.8K to 25.5K), and holders of Jettons increased by 1,023% (from 114K to 1.2M). This also concided with growth in both trading volume and price of Toncoin.

• Liquid staking on TON is growing and outperforming other venues in terms of staking rate. Cumulatively $320M is in liquid staking on TON driven mainly by Tonstaker and Bemo. There are 57.1K holders in TON liquid staking and the average amount of Toncoin held by an user is 786 which suggests an evenly distributed demographic versus few large holders driving the growth.

• USDT on TON was launched as of mid-April 2024 and it took 4 weeks for USDT natively minted on TON to surpass $200M in circulation. TON was the fastest Layer-1 blockchain to achieve $100M in native USDT circulation. As of May 2024, the Wallet on Telegram (@wallet in your Telegram attachments and settings menu, for non-US users), has 15M signed-up users who can hold and stake USDT on TON as part of the @wallet earn program. There are more than 65M USDT on TON staked in the @wallet earn for yield farming as of May 2024. Demand for USDT on TON as well as Toncoin for various staking, launchpad (for example OKX Jumpstart supports mining of Notcoin via Toncoin), and trading needs has been growing. This is evidenced by the growth in activity from both EVAA (lend and borrow protocol on TON) and Storm Trade (perps DEX on TON which allows for Toncoin collateral to leverage trade various tokens).

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