❈ DEFI TOTAL TVL ❈

$49.89 Billion (+2.19% last week)

❈ Chain TVL Winners & Losers ❈

zkSync Era (+31.64% last week)
Starknet (+19.15% last week)
Cardano (+10.64% last week)
Bitcoin (+7.09% last week)

Metis (-3.35% last week)
Aptos (-3.42% last week)
Acala (-6.47% last week)
Ronin (-9.92% lasr week)

Besides some crazy price action and swings (caused by bank failures, false wallet alerts, and low liquidity across the board) it was a quieter week in DeFi.

❈ Mastercard Crypto Credential

Mastercard announced a new effort to create the infrastructure necessary to better attest blockchain transactions. Mastercard hopes to define verification standards and offer technology needed for various use cases across the segment. More info here.

❈ Alex Pertsev was released

Alex (core developer of Torando Cash) was released from Dutch prison with continued surveillance. He was arrested back in August shortly after the United States Treasury Department placed dozens of Tornado Cash addresses on the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions list. After spending 9 months in prison, Alex will await trial from his home.

❈ Levana is building the “GMX of Cosmos”

I’ve talked about GMX in this newsletter before. It’s a perps exchange that allows traders to trade with high leverage and shares the fees with LPs who provide liquidity to the traders. GMX has been an absolute beast during the bear market and has been one of few protocols to main both a high (and increasing) TVL in their protocol and also saw it’s token reach new All Times Highs.

Levana - a team that was building an interesting NFT-enabled DEX on the Terra ecosystem during the blowup just announced that they passed an audit process for a new protocol they built which is essentially “GMX but on Cosmos”. More info here.

❈ MUX Protocol

Keeping on the topic of GMX-related products. MUX V2 is a cross-chain version of GMX (it’s more complicated than that but that’s the 1-liner explainer). The advantage of MUX is that they can source liquidity from multiple chains and tokens which, theoretically should lead to deeper and cheaper liquidity for traders. You can currently earn 58% APR supply liquidity in the form of MUXLP (similar to GLP on GMX).

You can learn more about Mux here.

❈ Equilibria

Equilibria is building the “Convex of vePENDLE”.

That sentence probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone who isn’t a defi expert. Pendle is a really cool protocol that I’ve mentioned before. It separates yield-generating tokens into Principle Tokens and Yield Tokens. Effectively allowing you to buy future cash flows. I’m really excited about the long-term potential of these kinds of products as DeFi continues to mature.

The Pendle protocol has a token - Pendle with ve-mechanics. (Just like CRV of Curve). The goal of Equilibria will be to lock up vePendle and provide a liquid version.

You can learn more about Equilibria here, they have their launch event tomorrow.

If that was still confusing - don’t worry. I’ll cover ve-tokenomics in an upcoming Defi Deep Dive.

DefiLlama continues to prove that they’re some of the best builders in the space. This past week they launched a new page that has verified expenses of some of the biggest DAO’s.

You can see it here.

Coinbase also announced that they’re taking action against the SEC to provide further regulatory guidance for the crypto industry as a whole. The article linked at the bottom of the announcement is a good read.

Uniswap is seeing an increase in the number of active and new users on their platform. This past week saw a huge spike in users on their platform. Almost approach levels from the Bull Market top in 2021.

Data from DefiLlama.

That’s all for this week! As always - stay safe and stay yielding.

-Andy