About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Synthetix, Chainlink, Friktion, Katana, and Opyn.

• Synthetix is a derivatives liquidity protocol enabling the creation of synthetic assets, allowing integrators to build financial derivatives. Protocol fees and trading volume have reached all-time highs as Perpetual Futures and Atomic Swaps gained traction. Trading volume and fees peaked at $200m and $1m, respectively, and average $75m and $200k per day. All of Synthetix’s integrators such as Kwenta, 1inch, Curve, Lyra, and Polynomial are seeing increased usage.

• Over the last 90 days, Synthetix’s volume has come from four primary sources - 1inch, Kwenta, Curve, and Lyra. 1inch integrated SNX Atomic Swaps in early June and now accounts for 67% of protocol volume. Whales and DeFi arbitragers use this feature, as average trades routed from 1inch are ~$850k.

• The beta release of Synthetix Perps has generated $3.1b+ in volume and $11m in fees since its March release. Low fees and latency on Optimism enabled the onboarding of 30-40 traders per day. New markets are being debated through governance, as is a proposal by the project’s founder to incentivize perps trading.

• Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink’s market share recently surpassed 95% of the Total Value Enabled (TVE) which include transactions like swaps, borrowing, derivatives, etc that need a price feed.

• While TVE grew from c.$627b to $2.26t in 2021 (driven by the rise of DeFi on Fantom and Binance chains), volumes are down back to $800b, reflecting the wider market drawdowns. TVE by Chainlink is now more diversified by chain due to new activity by MDEX (Heco) and AlpacaFinance and BiSwap (BSC).

• Development activity, estimated by deployers addresses on testnets, is up by 47% in 2022. Developers came up with new Decenteralized Oracle Networks (DONs) ideas for Relayers and SNARKs during the Spring hackathon. All eyes next are on the Chainlink Hacker House during SmartCon 2022 in NYC this Sept.

• Friktion is a Solana protocol that provides full-stack portfolio management designed to perform across market cycles. Friktion has so far launched 4 different Volts in order to fulfill their mission of allowing users to build a portfolio that generates returns in bull, bear, and crab markets. Despite the fact that the crypto market is in a bear market, Friktion is seeing consistent growth in unique users. They have successfully onboarded a total of 16,709 unique users as of August 3, 2022.

• Flipside's Friktion Scavenger Hunt has successfully onboarded the most new users to Friktion, totaling 2701 new users on March 29th and 30th. Launch of new Friktion Volts seem to bring new users. However, they are not main catalysts for onboarding more users to the platform.

• Friktion users appear to be more interested in DeFi apps, as the top 5 programs based on transaction count are all DeFi. Even so, Friktion users also explored other verticals where NFT-oriented projects such as Magic Eden and Metaplex rank, which were among the top 10 most interacted programs.