About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund. Web3 founder or data analyst looking to connect? Reply back to this email.

Coverage on the Aptos ecosystem: General Overview, Rise Wallet, and Pontem Network.

• Aptos is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain. Aptos’ breakthrough technology and programming language, Move, are designed to evolve, improve performance and strengthen user safeguards. Aptos Labs, co-founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, is dedicated to creating better network tooling and seamless usability to bring the benefits of decentralization to the masses. Aptos brings a paradigm shift to Web3 through better technology and user experience. As the lowest-latency, highest-throughout blockchain in the market, Aptos empowers developers to build with consumers in mind to create the next wave of killer applications. Aptos mainnet launched on October 12, 2022, seeing an immediate spike in users and eventually finding sustainable adoption at ~500k MAUs.

• Since launch, Aptos NFTs have been a major driving force on the network - creating deeply rooted communities and strong user adoption. Aptos Monkeys currently has 429k APT in total volume. The network has seen over 1m NFTs minted across 5k collections.

• The Aptos Network has seen consistent and sustained growth over the past several weeks. NFTs have been a large contributor, with an average of 6.5k APT in daily trading volume. Outside of NFTs, Aptos recently saw an all-time high TVL with 58.3m in TVL locked on the network.

• Rise is an easy-to-use Aptos wallet available on both extension and mobile (iOS and Android). Our mission is to provide the best user experience on Aptos. Rise is available in more than 15 languages, allowing users to receive notifications, swap within the wallet and get help from our live chat support team. We have seen a 92% uptick in weekly active users in the past 14 days, most related to the recent APT price surge. Note that the data below is only for the previous 2 weeks.

• Out of 38,086 user-signed transactions in the past 14 days users have predominantly been engaging with NFT marketplaces such as Topaz and BlueMove. Aptos DeFi is building momentum with projects such as Aries Markets and Tsunami Finance.

• Rise allows users to expand their extension and use more screen real estate for a better overview. In the past 14 days, users have been accessing the extension 59% of the time, with mobile and expanded view tied at 20% of the time. At times of higher load users are using expanded view more often.

• Pontem is building two core DeFi products on Aptos: a wallet and DEX. Pontem wallet is one of the most reliable gateway to interact with Aptos by being the first (and currently only) Ledger compatible wallet and embedding leading dApps in the wallet UI like the Topaz NFT marketplace, Liquidswap, Liquid staking, and lending after comprehensive DD for each dApp. After the third month of launching in late October, the downloads of Pontem wallet increased by 40%, reaching 240k downloads. Liquidswap supports both volatile and stable pairs. Liquidity providers can earn variable and fixed APRs with risk-adjusted yields. During the first week of launch, Liquidswap reached $13m TVL and 13k DAU. Concentrated liquidity functionality is also on the way. Liquidswap is very young, but the unique user increased steadily even during the FTX issue. Now, Liquidswap has gained about 120k unique users.

• As an indicator, the growth rate of trading volume on Liquidswap reached 250% after the first month of launch. Though the increase in trading volume has slowed down after the collapse of FTX, Liquidswap regained the energy after they launch farming with a 20% growth rate, and hit 170m cumulative trading volume.