Filecoin's DeFi Ambitions, Arbitrum Activity Reached New Highs, and More
7 Highlights from the World of Digital Assets
This week in crypto saw new chains come into their own and old chains re-emerge.
In this issue:
Arbitrum flips BSC in DEX volume
USDT dominance rising
L2Beat and tracking the Arbitrum activity surge
Redemption arc for BSC DeFi?
Top 20 crypto narratives
Filecoin’s plan to bring DeFi to decentralized storage
Everything you need to know about ZK tech and modular blockchains
Arbitrum DEX Volume Flips BSC
On February 16th, Arbitrum DEX volume flipped BSC and has stayed larger everyday since. BSC still has the edge on 7d volume for now, but that will likely change in the next 24 hours.
For context on how significant this is, I looked back 2 years and could only find 2 other instances of a non-Ethereum chain having a larger daily DEX volume than BSC: Polygon for 2 days last month and Polygon for a day in June 2021.
Since it’s emergence in 2021, BSC has been the 1st or 2nd largest chain by volume every single week.
USDT Dominance Rising
Regulatory uncertainty around BUSD and USDC is pushing crypto investors to the relative safety of USDT. In the past month, USDT supply is up 5.91% in the past month, while USDC supply is down 2.99% and BUSD supply is down 21.05%. USDT dominance rose to 51.67%, its highest point since November 2021.
Using L2Beat to Track Ethereum L2 Activity
Arbitrum daily transactions hit 3 new all-time highs this week. The past several days, Arbitrum has processed 70% of the volume of Ethereum main net.
One of the top trends I am watching is the movement of activity from Ethereum main net to its Layer 2s. To fully understand this, I’ve been using the activity page on L2Beat. This dashboard combines the transaction activity from Arbitrum, Optimism, dYdX, Immutable X, zkSync, and more L2s.
Total L2 TPS (red) vs Ethereum TPS (blue)
Top 9 Layer 2s by TPS
Redemption Arc for BSC DeFi
Anyone who was in DeFi in early 2021 remembers how insane those days on Binance Smart Chain were. In time, BSC developed a reputation, much of it deserved, for being the home of scams and low-effort memecoins. That may be changing.
Several serious projects have gained traction on BSC recently:
Level Finance, a perp DEX on BSC, has seen its revenue soar recently. Despite allegations of wash trading, it has one of the better crypto UIs I’ve seen.
Thena, a Solidly fork on BSC, has accumulated $148M in TVL since launching in January.
Top 20 Narratives in Crypto
This incredible thread goes through 20 potential future crypto narratives. Some you’ve probably heard of. Others are rarely mentioned (Decentralized Science?).
The great thing about these less-known narratives is that very few people are following them. If I were starting over, I would choose a narrative like Soulbound Tokens and dedicate 90% of my time in crypto to becoming an expert. In a few months, you could be one of the top few hundred people in the world.
DeFi on Filecoin?
Smart contracts are coming to Filecoin soon, turning its decentralized storage services into the basis of a digital economy built around real-world assets. This thread is from January, but extremely relevant as FIL nearly doubled this week.
Everything You Need to Know About ZK Rollups, ZK Proofs, and Modular Blockchains
This extremely comprehensive thread starts with the basics about what ZK proofs are and how they relate to crypto. Crypto in Black then goes through 16 ZK crypto projects (8 released, 8 upcoming), plus other Ethereum scaling projects. This should get you up-to-speed on one of the most important emergent narratives.
That’s all for this week. For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Until next time,
Patrick Scott
Dynamo DeFi