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

• Polygon ($MATIC) is a collection of scaling solutions for Ethereum, including PoS, Supernets, and zkEVM. The number of active wallets on Polygon PoS increased by 48% in April of 2023, compared to the number of active wallets in February of 2023, the period of lowest monthly activity in the last 7 months. DeFi wallets grew by 74% in the same period, and 45% MoM compared to March of 2023. Another noteworthy detail: the number of active wallets that had made more than 2 transactions on Polygon PoS was the highest among the past 6 months (1.74M wallets).

  

• PoS recorded the second highest network revenue over the past seven months in April of 2023 at $5.1M, only 12% less than the all-time high network revenue of $5.8M in February of 2023. (Network revenue = transaction fees accrued to MATIC holders + staking incentives to validators)

  

• A growing trend in non-financial NFT sales volume can be observed on Polygon PoS. Last month saw $64M in NFT sales volume, contributing to a total of $200M over the past three months. Compared to the prior three months (November of 2022 to January of 2023), that is a 230% increase in NFT sales volume.

• Polygon zkEVM has cleared $10M bridged via the main Polygon bridge with no incentives, and a few major infrastructure providers like Chainlink still working on deploying. Recent Ethereum gas spikes continue to indicate why L2s are important for scaling, so Polygon continues to emphasize the creation of DeFi infrastructure. Breaking down the total volume bridged to the zkEVM, the majority (~75%) of the transactions are under $100, with an average value of $743.

• In late March, the Polygon zkEVM launched. Initial bridge volume has primarily been ETH (more than half of the total bridged assets). Chainlink has publicly committed to support zkEVM in Q2 of this year, allowing for implementation of large DeFi protocols.

• DeFi on zkEVM is quite early, with only ~$2.5M in TVL. DeFi projects set to deploy include Balancer, Clober (orderbook DEX), Satori (perps), QuickSwap Perps (perps), Aura, Hidden Hand, Clearpool, and others.

• OpenSea is the most popular NFT marketplaces on Polygon, with ~80-90% of the market across key parameters such as volume, sales, and users. Magic Eden has been gaining traction, becoming the second largest NFT marketplace on Polygon, seemingly due to partnerships with collections such as y00ts. Over the last 60 days, OpenSea’s highest daily trading volume was $1.8M, and average daily volume was $591K; MagicEden’s highest daily trading volume $1.2M, and average daily volume was $74K.

  

• Over the past 60 days, the two top-performing collections on OpenSea Polygon were y00ts and Trump Digital Trading Cards (including Series 2). Both collections registered ~$6M in volume, driving the highest trading volume days.

  

• While OpenSea's volume is predominantly on Ethereum, Polygon's volume share has been rising. In terms of daily active users (DAU), Polygon has been growing faster lately. On average, 40% of OpenSea's DAU are on Polygon, peaking at a high 87% at one point (when gas on Ethereum was at 6 months high).

• Live on Polygon PoS, Lens Protocol has enabled creators to earn over $327k through content creation, with the majority of revenue coming from unique social engagement features, such as in-app collecting.

• Lens Protocol has been one of the most popular projects on the Polygon network. As of February 15th, Lens accounted for 22.2% of all Polygon transactions, and continues to account for 4-5% on an average day.

• Lens has also been able to retain the majority of their users. Average 6-month retention is tracking around 59%.

  

• On Wednesday at 9:52AM MT, Elon tweeted a Milady. The floor price was less than 4 ETH, but in less than half hour, the floor price temporarily rose above 7 ETH.

• The extreme volatility led to some interesting NFT-Fi action. Two users scored very high loan amounts on Blend, well above the current floor price, at the time of writing. Additionally, there were numerous active wallets trying to "Trade the tweet":

  • Trade #1: Borrowed 5.50 WETH against #3871 #MIL on Blend with 20% interest

  • Trade #2: Timed a 5X leveraged long on Milady, earning $600 in 15 minutes.

• Well that’s interesting…someone borrowing a Milady on Blend for 4.20 ETH reaches a notable 420% interest 🤔