⚡AI to Spark the Next Crypto Bull Run?
Plus ZK-Rollups gain traction, Liquid Staking keeps growing, and more
The Dynamo DeFi newsletter covers the most interesting stats, trends, and tools in crypto each week.
In this issue:
On-Chain Metrics
Trends & Narratives
Tool Spotlight
Key Events This Week
🔢On-Chain Metrics
High Level
Total DeFi TVL (including liquid staking), increased from $65.35b to $67.77b this week. Ethereum and Polygon grew the most out of top chains, while BSC, Arbitrum, and Pulse lost TVL.
ZK-Rollups Gain Traction
ZK-Rollups continued to gain traction this week. Both daily transactions and Total Value Locked push higher on zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM, and Starknet. All 3 hit an all-time high in terms of TVL today.
zkSync Era TVL
Polygon zkEVM TVL
Starknet TVL
Furthermore, transactions on all 3 networks are on a long-term uptrend:
It remains to be seen how many of these new users are airdrop hunters, but, so far, this adoption curve reminds me of the early days of optimistic rollups.
Liquid Staking TVL Rises
Liquid staking continued to expand its lead as the largest category of DeFi. Liquid staking now has more than $2b more in TVL than Dexes. For comparison, on January 1st, Dexes had $14.8b in TVL and Liquid Staking had $8.7b.
📈Trends and Narratives
AI to Spark the Next Crypto Bull Run?
As AI tools flood the market and advance rapidly, attention has increased on applications that fuse AI and crypto. I see 3 main synergies:
Blockchain verification to prevent deepfakes
AIs can transact with crypto and make smart contracts with each other
Decentralized GPU networks
This post by Hunter Horsley outlines why AI could spark a new bull-run.
Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle, agreed.
LSDFi Summer Heats Up
The rapid increase in liquid staking TVL (covered above) has sparked a large number of protocols built to supplement liquid staking. This thread covers 5 such protocols:
Vitalik Weighs In On Ethereum Consensus
Between liquid staking, Layer 2s, and other upcoming applications like re-staking, Ethereum as a multi-use settlement layer has flourished recently.
It came as a surprise to some people then, when Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, wrote a blog post that ideas to leverage the Ethereum validator set risk overloading its consensus.
🛠️Tool Spotlight
Token Unlocks
Understanding tokenomics is often the difference between taking profits and getting rekt. The best tool I’ve found for tracking token unlocks and vesting schedules is Token Unlocks.
Use this tool to view a countdown of upcoming unlocks and dive in to view vesting schedules and allocations for specific tokens.
📅Key Events This Week
That’s all for this week. For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.
Until next time,
Patrick Scott
Dynamo DeFi
Little late to read but excellent stuff as usual.