• 💎 Yield Protocol is hiring for a Go To Market Lead. (Link)
• ⭐ [Redacted Project] is hiring a CMO. (DM me for info)
• 🌎 Projects across the space are hiring for engineering, community, product, and design roles. Fill out our talent form and I’ll personally do my best to connect the dots. (Link)

• 🔮 The Graph just launched 43 RFPs for various ecosystem projects. Apply today to receive a grant. (Link)

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This week our contributor analysts cover Emerging L1s and Scaling Solutions: NEAR, xDai, and Polygon.

• Engagement—Polygon resumes daily active user (DAU) growth, growing 5.91% week over week. For three consecutive weeks, Polygon has well over 100k daily active addresses. Average daily users increased 25.11% month over month and ~269% over the last 60 days. Today, Polygon has 20.38% of Ethereum’s DAU and 20.09% of Binance Smart Chain’s.

• Retention—Since April 14th, Polygon is averaging 34.38% 28d user retention (4.84x final mobile app retention). We define retention as an address making continued transactions in a given week. Below, weekly retention curves show rates are improving as more dapps build on the network.

• Monetization—Despite the weekly increases in users (+5.91%) and transactions (+2.11%), cost per transaction decreased by a substantial -12.52%. The net result was the first weekly revenue decrease since May 31st, with average daily revenues of 11,325 MATIC ($12,395).

• NEAR is a sharded, Proof-of-Stake public blockchain. NEAR supports smart contracts targeting both WebAssembly (Rust, AssemblyScript) and the EVM (Solidity, Vyper). Several new initiatives and projects were launched on NEAR recently including an Ecosystem Treasury DAO with up to 200M $NEAR, Green NFTs program, and the Skyward price discovery auction platform. The NEAR ecosystem is growing in many areas, and the network hit the mark of 10M total transactions last month.

• In the recent quarter, new dapps like Mintbase and NFT.hiphop launched, leading to an increase in the number of new accounts. NEAR accounts have been growing at an average MoM rate of 175% and reached 374,656 accounts as of July 7.

• The first automated market maker (AMM) on NEAR, Ref Finance, saw a large increase in liquidity, volume, and number of pools. Liquidity recently eclipsed $1.6 million, led by the SKYWARD-NEAR pair with over $1 million. The total number of unique pools also grew, reaching 134 total pairs.

• Since 2018, xDai network’s focus on dev tooling, transparency, and sustainability has fostered a progressive community. DAOs, NFTs, games, ExFi (Experimental Finance), and even the Austrian Post are using xDai to scale. Organic adoption is attracting larger projects like Swarm & Curve Finance — it has grown to 600K+ active accounts in the last 30 days and 3M+ wallet addresses. Dark Forest, a first-of-its-kind RTS zero-knowledge game, had 236K+ daily txs by players by July 6.

• xDai runs on POSDAO PoS consensus. In order to secure the network, validators must stake their STAKE token while delegators stake (‘delegate’) their STAKE to delegate candidates (validators). 66% of STAKE on xDai (660K+) is now allotted to staking, driving the continuation in growth of delegators and stakers.

• Bridges between xDai, Ethereum, BSC, and ETH testnets let users move Dai, ERC20s, and NFTs (ERC721s & ERC1155s) cross-chain. 11K+ accounts have transferred ERC20s with the Omnibridge and 27K+ accounts have transferred Dai with the xDai bridge.