About the editor: Spencer Noon is the co-founder of Variant Fund. If you fit one of these personas, reply to this email and say hi 👋

Today we are debuting a new type of coverage: transaction-level insights.

While OurNetwork is known for its zoomed out and data driven analysis of the top projects in crypto, tx-level insights give our contributors the option to zoom in on the most interesting transactions happening on the projects they cover as well.

This additional dimension should level up the overall quality of analysis published in the newsletter each week. That is because there is a lot to learn about a protocol by inspecting its individual transactions, which can sometimes provide helpful indicators about overall network health, users, owners and much more.

However, as anyone who has ever tried to decipher the advanced details of a transaction on a block explorer before will tell you, conducting this type of analysis today is not exactly easy.

My hope is that featuring tx-level insights in OurNetwork will give our readers the opportunity to learn from the experts and eventually learn how to conduct this type of analysis themselves. And if we’re really lucky, maybe it will catalyze a new wave of user-friendly tools that make tx-level analysis a lot more accessible.

Last thing: tx-level insights will be marked with a 🔬 emoji for the time being as we begin to include them more in our coverage. Now let’s dive into this week’s issue!

— Spencer 🕛

• Multichain (previously known as Anyswap) is a decentralized cross-chain router protocol that provides bridging support for 3,596 tokens, offering the most diverse asset types for bridging. Since its launch in July 2020, Multichain has quickly become one of the most popular bridges in the DeFi space, supporting 89 chains. Recently, Multichain achieved a major milestone by surpassing $100B in cross-chain total volume, with $2.2B of that volume occurring in the last 30 days.

• Multichain’s TVL is currently tracking ~$2.09B. The majority of that TVL is accounted for by Fantom and Ethereum, with $673.24M and $403.76M, respectively. In the past 24 hours, Fantom has seen $7,218,321 of deposits and $3,151,690 of withdrawals via Multichain.

• Multichain saw an all-time high of 632,680 transactions in the month of January of 2022, but that total has decreased in the following months. However, monthly transactions have seen a steady incline since the beginning of 2023, with a high of 251,100 transactions in March.

• Wormhole’s messaging layer facilitated the migration of the DeGods and y00ts collection from Solana to Ethereum and Polygon, respectively. The custom burn and mint implementation allowed holders to burn their NFTs on Solana and seamlessly migrate to Ethereum and Polygon resulting in about $183M of value transfer.

• Wormhole has performed well in providing wrapped asset liquidity on multiple high-value networks, including Aptos and Solana. As of date, users bridged over $18M in assets to Aptos utilizing Wormhole's Portal bridge. Specifically, USDC from Solana and wrapped Ethereum are the most popular asset types bridged to Aptos.

• Wormhole has expanded into the Ethereum ecosystem with multiple Uniswap deployments on BNB Chain and Gnosis. Uniswap plans to utilize Wormhole’s messaging layer to pass governance messages from the destination chains back to Ethereum.

• PEPE, which bills itself as “the most memorable memecoin in existence”, has attracted lots of attention recently despite launching just one week ago. On April 14th, just 114 wallets held PEPE—today 38K wallets hold it. Some of the early PEPE token holders executed a number of memorable trades, such as dimethlyltryptamine.eth, who on April 14th exchanged 0.125 ETH for 5.9 trillion PEPE via two transaction on Uniswap:

  • Trade #1: Swap 0.025 ETH for 2.13 trillion PEPE

  • Trade #2: Swap 0.1 ETH for 3.77 trillion PEPE

• MEV searchers have attempted to profit on the trading frenzy. One sandwich attack from jaredfromsubway.eth did 400K+ in PEPE volume to leave just $4 in profit according to EigenFi. While this alone isn't too notable, jaredfromsubway.eth has completed hundreds of MEV trades and consumed ~6% of Ethereum’s total gas in the past week.
• There are plenty of $PEPE related scams as well. According to research found by scamsniffer, over 495+ wallets have been scammed in PEPE phishing attempts. In one particular case, one wallet lost 494 ETH to a PEPE related phishing scam labelled claim-pepe dot org.