⚡Crypto Finds Utility in...Hamster Racing?

Plus Telegram bots, TVL contracts, 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

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🔢On-Chain Metrics

Total Value Locked Trends

Total DeFi TVL (including Liquid Staking) shrunk from $66.58B to $64.11B this week.

Of major chains, Optimism was the only one to grow this week.

Of the top 7 $100M+ protocols by TVL growth, 2 were Real World Assets, 2 were on BNB Chain, 2 were on Optimism, and 1 fit into the LSTFi category.

Cross-Chain Flows

Ethereum saw the largest 7-day net inflows, while Optimism, Polygon zkEVM, and Fantom also saw inflows.

Top Earning Protocols

The standouts within the top earning protocols this week were MakerDAO and Unibot.

Unibot jumped into the top 10 protocols by fees this week—over the past 24 hours, it’s even higher at rank 6. Unibot is a Telegram bot for copytrading, trading with MEV protection, and sniping DEX listings. More on this in the narratives and tool sections below.

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📈Trends and Narratives

Telegram Bots Promise to Fix Crypto UX

User experience is one of the biggest issues plaguing crypto. A recent wave of Telegram bots have introduced a novel solution for this. These apps allow you to manage on-chain activities like DEX trading and airdrop farming directly from your Telegram app.

The most popular of these, Unibot, pumped over 100X recently, as it attracted thousands of users. In this thread, I went through my thesis on this narrative, and how it could fuse with the AI narrative as more capabilities are integrated into these bots:

Gambling on Hamster Races?

In this newsletter in the past, I’ve talked about the potential for gambling as the crypto vertical most likely to have a DeFi summer esque event. We saw an inkling of this over the past week after a team of devs launched a dapp for betting on real life hamster races using crypto.

Since then, this has spawned a host of copycats, with other animals, marbles, and even rocks. As much as this seems like a joke, it reveals a deeper truth about crypto’s utility. There’s a saying that “the next big thing starts out as a toy” and this is the perfect example of that. Permissionless and programmable payment rails for novel types of gambling is a killer use-case of crypto. Hamster race betting is just a proof of concept.

Real World Assets Continue Trek Upwards

Real world assets continued their trek upwards as one of the few DeFi categories to be growing. stUSDT, whose growth does not appear to be entirely organic, led the category, but nearly every major protocol grew as well.

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🛠️Tool Spotlight

Use Unibot to Snipe DEX Listings

Like I mentioned in the ‘Trends & Narratives’ section above, Telegram bots have been automating many on-chain actions. Unibot is the best tool I’ve found for assisting with DEX-related tasks. Unibot allows you to buy and sell tokens on-chain with:

• Limit orders

• MEV protection

• Frontrun protection

• Honeypot protection

They also have tools to mirror (copytrade) other wallets and to input token addresses and snipe them on DEX listings. All of this happens directly within your Telegram app. While Unibot creates and manages new wallets. making this less secure, it’s a useful tool for deploying small amounts of capital on-chain. You can try out Unibot with this link.

If you want an in-depth walkthrough for setting up and using Unibot, I created a guide here:

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📅Key Events This Week

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That’s all for this week. For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

Until next time,

Patrick Scott

Dynamo DeFi