❈ DEFI TOTAL TVL ❈

$49.26 Billion (+0.69% last week)

❈ Chain TVL Winners & Losers ❈

Core (-57.88% last week)
Arbitrum (+18.53%)
Wave (+11.07%)
Hedera (+9.05%)
Solana (+7.58%)

Moonbeam (-12.19%)
Kadena (-13.22%)
Canto (-16.36%)
Stacks (-19.79%)

❈ Arbitrum Airdrop

This past Thursday, the $ARB airdrop became claimable. There was a lot of craziness that ensued as you might expect when you give 625,143 wallets the ability to claim free money.

Some people really took the airdrop seriously in the hopes that they could be one of the first individuals to sell $ARB or enter an LP position and earn fees from all the volume going through DEXs during the first few hours. I know a lot of people who created their own RPCs, claimed from the smart contract itself, etc. I personally didn’t think any of this effort was really worth it.

I have no intention of selling my $ARB anytime soon, so I waited 24hrs to claim and had no issues, and paid low gas since chain activity had died down.

After the initial spike when the token first became live, $ARB seems to be ranging from $1.20 - $1.40. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks/months! Congrats to everyone else on their March Defi stimulus check!

❈ Coinbase Wells Notice and starting to donate to pro-crypto candidates

I encourage everyone to listen to the Empire podcast episode (linked in the content section below) that goes over the Wells notice and speaks to how closely Coinbase has tried to work with the SEC.

Coinbase also created Crypto435 a campaign to grow crypto advocacy and awareness.

While Coinbase isn’t defi (it’s a centralized US company and exchange) you have to appreciate the fight they’re fighting for the crypto industry as a whole.

❈ DEX vs CEX volume ratio hits ATH

Last week I wrote about decentralized exchanges and how they operate at a very basic level.

This past week, we just reached an all-time high when looking at the DEX vs CEX volume ratio. As Hayden from Uniswap points out, this is up 25% since the collapse of FTX (a centralized exchange).

It will be interesting to see if the current banking scare/crisis encourages more and more individuals to turn to defi as a safe haven as trust decreases for centralized institutions.

❈ zkSync Era is now live

zkSync is the first Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible zk-Rollup to launch on mainnet. If that sentence sounds like a foriegn language to you, I’ll explain EVM, scaling solutions, L2’s, zk-rollups, etc in later ELI5 posts. For now, all you need to know is that you can now bridge funds over to this new chain. That being said, there’s almost nothing to do on it just yet. There is one DEX, Mute, which you can use but that’s about it until more defi projects launch.

❈ Other headlines

• Nasdaq to offer Bitcoin custody services by Q2 ‘23 (link)

• Do Kwon (Terraform Labs/Luna+UST) was arrested in Montenegro (link)

• SEC sued Justoin Sun and related entities for illegally selling crypto securities (link)

• Timeswap - a borrowing and lending protocol on Arbitrum is the first protocol to enable the new $ARB token as collateral (link)

• CCP games raised a $40 million VC round led by Andreessen Horowitz to build an AAA-quality web3 video game. (link)

SmileeFinance (website | twitter)

This is a pretty advanced defi protocol that has a VERY niche use case but I wanted to include it so that everyone can start to see just how sophisticated defi has become and how innovation is actually happening.

TL;DR on Smilee Finance:

When liquidity providers provide liquidity into a pool on a DEX, they take on the risk of impermanent loss. (I will be covering what impermanent loss is this Thursday in the ELI5 post.)

Impermanent loss occurs when there is volatility. When someone enters an LP position, they are essentially short volatility (betting against it).

Smilee is working on a structured product that would allow individuals to long volatility of specific crypto assets, thus allowing LPs the ability to be equal amounts long + short volatility, essentially hedging out their impermanent loss risk.

If you want to learn more, 0xTindorr wrote a really awesome thread about what they’re building.

Empire with Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos had a really awesome episode this week where they talk about the SEC, Coinbase’s Wells Notice, BTC, and the $ARB airdrop. Definitely worth a listen. (link)

If you’re interested in learning more about zkSync and its launch, the announcement post has a lot of good information. (link)

What happened on-chain this past week?

❈ Arbitrum Airdrop

Nansen created this really cool dashboard to analyze the $ARB airdrop.

A few interesting screenshots:

❈ Solana Daily Transactions

Solana is seeing a resurgence in daily transactions on the chain. This past week, they have been achieving new highs in daily transactions for 2023.

That being said, there’s still some cause for concern. Daily Active Addresses are on the decline.

and TVL (total Value Locked) has remained relatively flat

Source (Artemis.xyz)

❈ That’s all for today. As always - stay safe and stay yielding ❈

Question: What other sort of on-chain data analytics and charts would you like to see in future weeks?

-Andy