Liquid Staking Overtakes Lending, Solidly Forks Gain Traction, and More
7 Highlights from the World of Digital Assets
This week in crypto saw increased traction for liquid staking, Solidly forks and Layer 2s, while a few alternative DeFi ecosystem continued building.
In this issue:
Liquid staking flips lending in TVL
Solidly forks gain traction one year later
Arbitrum daily transactions flip Ethereum main net
Coinbase launches Base Layer 2
Tron dominates global stablecoin payments
TON DeFi ecosystem begins to take shape
Landslide Network connects Avalanche to Cosmos
Liquid Staking Flips Lending in TVL
Yesterday, for the first time ever, Liquid Staking surpassed Lending in TVL, to become the second largest DeFi category.
With the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade enabling ETH unstaking, Liquid Staking is likely to continue growing as a category.
One second-order effect of this is that, since staking is the least-risky way to earn yield on-chain, ETH staking might come to be viewed as the “risk-free rate” for crypto. This would cause lenders and liquidity providers to demand higher rates from other yield sources.
Solidly Forks Gain Traction One Year Later
One year after the drama of the initial Solidly launch, Solidly forks are having a moment. Over the past week, Solidly forks on Optimism, BSC, Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Canto have all grown significantly.
Arbitrum Daily Transactions Flip Ethereum
On February 21st, for the first time ever, an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup passed Ethereum main net in daily transactions. Arbitrum transactions surged to over 1M in one day.
Although, they’ve since retraced, this represents a notable milestone in Ethereum rollup adoption.
Coinbase Launches Base Layer 2
The biggest crypto news of the week was Coinbase’s announcement about their new Ethereum Layer 2 that is built on the OP Stack. This thread by xNEO does a great job of summarizing what you need to know:
If you prefer a video format, I also summarized this news in less than 7 minutes on my YouTube channel.
Coinbase’s choice of the OP Stack to build their Layer 2 has also sparked renewed interest in the Optimism ecosystem. If you’re just getting up-to-speed on Optimism, Subli has been covering everything Optimism for months in both a newsletter and podcast:
Tron Dominates Global Stablecoin Payments
This interesting thread by Cuy Sheffield explores on-chain stats surrounding stablecoin adoption.
The surprising (to some people) kicker is that, even with Ethereum Layer 2s gaining adoption, Tron stablecoins still have more users:
To read the entire thread:
TON DeFi Ecosystem Begins to Take Shape
The Open Network (TON) is preparing to build out its DeFi ecosystem.
For those unfamiliar with TON, it originated as Telegram’s blockchain network. After an SEC suit, Telegram returned all money they had raised in the TON ICO and officially separated itself from TON.
Recently, however, Telegram began auctioning off usernames on TON and the Telegram founder spoke of integrating DeFi into Telegram. Since a large portion of crypto business is conducted on Telegram, I could see this DeFi ecosystem doing well.
Here’s an informative thread to get up-to-speed on TON:
Landslide Network Connects AVAX to Cosmos
Avalanche and Cosmos are two of the biggest dappchain ecosystems in crypto. A new IBC-integrated subnet would connect them. Learn the details in this thread from 0xsurferboy:
That’s all for this week. For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Until next time,
Patrick Scott
Dynamo DeFi