DeFi is recovering more and more, taking stock of the top ten unissued crypto stars
Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France on the 24th. According to French TF1 TV, he may face serious charges of terrorism, money laundering, and drug trafficking. As soon as the news came out, the price of Toncoin, which is closely related to Telegram, once plummeted by more than 20% to 5.71 US dollars, and the intraday decline reached 14.77%.
TON's total hedged value (TVL) was also hit hard, with a single-day decline of more than 39%, a drop of nearly 60% compared to the historic high of 777 million US dollars.
On the other hand, looking at all other L1 and L2 data, TVL does not decrease but increases!
According to DeFilLama data,Solana、Avalanche、scroll、Aptos、zkLinkThe TVL of all other chains has increased by more than 12% in the past seven days. Among them, due to the popularity of Sunpump, Wave Field Tron's TVL is even better. Currently, it has exceeded 8.7 billion US dollars, and the Wave Trx token has reached a record high.
Recently Trump's eldest son Donald Trump Jr. (Donald Trump Jr.) announced the upcoming launch of the DeFi project “The Defiant Ones.”Put power back into the hands of the people and remove corrupt, expensive, and inefficient intermediaries,Make finance great again.
Influenced by comments from many Federal Reserve officials on crypto regulations and expectations of interest rate cuts, Bitcoin successfully surpassed 64,000 US dollars last Saturday, quickly recovering all of its losses since this month. DeFi-related coins such as Aave are fast reaching new highs since this year.
As can be seen from this,DeFiThe field is recovering more and more!
The Manjiang River competes with Baigu
Currently, with the continuous improvement of industry infrastructure, competition in the DeFi field is becoming more and more intense. Since this year, the DeFi sector has attracted more than 900 million US dollars in financing. Hundreds of projects are poised to launch, and the competition among products is even more intense! Whoever can form a novel and attractive business model in this market, and who has a higher market fit (PMF), can dominate the ups and downs of DeFi.
Part 1“DeFi is getting worse? The return of value of leading projects》We analyzed the layout of the DeFi circuit. At the right time, leading projects such as Aave, Uniswap, and EigenLayer applications are ushering in new development opportunities. Today, the author will take you to explore 10 DeFi projects that have not yet issued tokens in some of the hottest fields of DeFi today to discover potential investment opportunities.
Dex and BorrowingOrderly Network
In the cryptocurrency arena, centralized exchanges have won the favor of traders for their liquidity and user experience. However, despite providing transparency and sovereignty, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have shortcomings in terms of liquidity and user experience. What if there was an exchange that combined the speed and liquidity of CEX with the transparency, sovereignty, and settlement of decentralized finance (DeFi)? This is the core philosophy of Orderly Network.
Orderly Network is a liquidity platform built on the Near Protocol, which relies on smart contracts for peer-to-peer transactions and provides users with risk management and shared asset pools. Orderly Network was founded in April 2022 and co-incubated by NEAR and WOO Network. While combining the liquidity and transaction speed advantages of CEXs, it preserves the transparency, sovereignty, and on-chain settlement characteristics of DeFi, and aims to build an efficient transaction ecosystem that not only meets users' needs for liquidity and speed, but also maintains decentralization and transparency.
Orderly Network has previously raised a total of $25 million, with a valuation of $200 million.OKX Ventures、Pantera Capital、Dragonfly、IOSG Ventures, Sequoia China,Jump CryptoA number of other capital companies participated in the investment.
Orderly Network has already achieved initial achievements in the DeFi space:
Total trading volume exceeds $80 billion
Integrate the six major blockchains (Arbitrum、optimism、Polygon, base, etc.)
Total Locked Value (TVL) exceeds $21 million
Over 400,000 unique address wallet user base
Orderly has updated its tokenomics information this month. Of the 1 billion ORDERLY orders, 55% will be used for ecosystem development, 20% for Orderly teams and advisors, 15% for strategic investors, 10% will be kept in the Orderly Foundation's treasury to promote exchange liquidity, etc. Of the total supply, 13.3% is used for airdrops.
ORDER tokens will be TGE on August 26. Users can claim all airdrops on the same day, and the staking activity will begin on the same day.
Up to now, more than $8 million in net fees have been generated. After TGE, 60% of these new net fees will continue to be owned by Orderly stakers. Token holders will be able to stake immediately after TGE, and the staking rewards will be paid in USDC at the time of exchange.
Whether the $ORDER token's economic model can effectively incentivize long-term participation, or is it just a short-term hype tool, is worth watching. Currently, ORDER tokens have been listed for pre-market trading on various exchanges such as Bybit, Gate, and BingX. At that time, you can find opportunities to enter the market after the airdrop pressure is over.
Morpho
Morpho is a lending protocol that combines the liquidity pool model used by Compound or AAVE with the capital efficiency of the peer-to-peer matching engine used in order books. Morpho-Compound improved Compound by providing the same user experience, liquidity, and clearing parameters, but increased APY due to peer-to-peer matching.
On August 1, Morpho closed a $50 million funding round, led by Ribbit Capital, with Hack VC, IOSG, Rockaway, L1D, Mirana, Cherry, Semantic, Fenbushi, Leadblock Bitpanda, and Robot Ventures participating. Also participating in the private token sale are heavyweights such as a16z Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Pantera, Brevan Howard, BlockTower, and Kraken Ventures.
Morpho previously raised $18 million in 2022, with the goal of merging the relatively scarce decentralized finance (DeFi) world with the internet's underlying protocol layer.
According to DeFilLama data, the total TVL is currently close to 1.5 billion US dollars. Although it's not close to Aave's $7 billion level, these funds are currently concentrated in interest rate optimizer features, but there are many ways to import them into new features.
The Morpho token budget is sufficient and flexible, and can attract users through subsidies in the early stages. Morpho's smooth operation history and amount of capital have allowed it to accumulate a certain amount of safety and brand, increasing user trust.
It is worth mentioning that although Morpho tokens have been issued and used in voting decisions and project incentives, they are in an irtransferable state. Therefore, it does not have a secondary market price, and users and investors who receive tokens can participate in voting governance, but they cannot sell them.
If you have any remaining funds, you can consider putting in Morpho. Of course, if the annualization rate is not high, you can get some $Morpho subsidies. Morph is likely to grant a wave of subsistence insurance to those who deposit funds in the future like EigenLayer, so you can win a wave of potential airdrops.
All in all, Morpho has plenty of market potential and technical advantages as an innovative DeFi lending protocol. But to stand out in the fierce DeFi market, Morpho needs continuous innovation while focusing on user experience and market education, ensuring security and stability, and establishing effective governance mechanisms.
Liquidity staking and re-pledgingKarak
Karak is a general re-staking network. Similar to restaking programs such as Eigenlayer, it also uses point gameplay to motivate users to re-stake to obtain multiple benefits. Currently, Karak supports the re-pledge of various mainstream protocol assets on networks such as the Ethereum main network, Arbitrum (L2), and K2 (L2) networks. Its team members are from companies such as Coinbase, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Twitter, and Goldman Sachs.
Karak is a popular type of milk tea in the Middle East, and the name highlights its geographical background. In December 2023, Karak announced that it had received $48 million in Series A funding at a valuation of over $1 billion, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mubadala Capital, existing investors Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Institutions such as Coinbase, Proof Group, Nima Capital, and Naval Ravikant participated. Among them, Mubadala Capital is the second-largest fund in Abu Dhabi, and most of the other investors are well-known investment institutions in traditional and crypto circles.
On February 28, Karak announced the launch of an early access program where users can restake on Karak to earn XP points, but the response was mixed. However, since opening a private channel on April 8, Karak's TVL has skyrocketed. As of August 26, Karak's TVL was US$810 million.
Symbiotic
Symbiotic is a universal re-staking system that enables decentralized networks to guide strong, fully sovereign ecosystems. It will provide decentralized applications with a method called Active Verification Service (AVS) to jointly protect each other. Users will be able to re-stake assets they've already deposited into other cryptographic protocols to help protect these AVSs (whether aggregation, interoperability infrastructure, or oracles) in exchange for rewards.
The project announced on June 18, 2024, that it is collaborating with Ethena Labs and LayerZero to pilot a generic re-staking framework aimed at improving the security and operational efficiency of cross-chain assets. This move not only provides a more secure cross-chain transfer method for Ethena's assets such as USdE and susDe, but also ensures the reliability of transfers through the LayerZero DVN network. Symbiotic's innovative framework will provide economic security for partners in the LayerZero ecosystem and enable DVN operator choice through consistent tokens. Additionally, the Symbiotic project completed a $5.8 million seed funding round on June 11, 2024, led by Paradigm and Cyber Fund, injecting strong impetus into its future development.
Unlike Karak, it doesn't allow LRT to be deposited into its platform. This allows only LST to be deposited into Symbiotic for re-staking. If a liquid restaking agreement wants to provide LRT for Symbiotic, they must set up a vault or operator to allow users' deposits to be delegated to them to re-stake on Symbiotic.
In light of the recent controversy surrounding the Eigenlayer airdrop, many users were unhappy with the airdrop terms, and some users started to initiate withdrawal requests on the platform. As users and farmers look for the next deal to earn revenue and farm airdrops, Symbiotic seems like the next logical choice. As of August 26, its TVL has exceeded 1.7 billion US dollars.
Puffer Finance
Puffer is the first native liquidity re-staking protocol (NLRP) built on EigenLayer. Native liquidity restaking tokens (nLRTs), or PUFeth, have been introduced. Holding PUFeth can accumulate the dual rewards of Ethereum PoS proof-of-of-stake and re-staking. The nodes within the agreement use Puffer's anti-forfeiture technology, which can effectively reduce the risk of forfeiture, improve capital use efficiency, and obtain higher rewards through native re-staking.
As of August 26, Puffer TVL has exceeded 1.4 billion US dollars, and its rapid development is mainly due to the support of many investors.
Puffer announced in April that it had successfully completed Series A financing. Raised a total of $18 million, valued at $200 million, led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Avon Ventures (venture capital fund linked to the parent company of Fidelity Investments), Lemniscap Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, Mechanism, GSR, and several top angel investors also participated. It previously raised a total of $5.5 million in angel and seed funding rounds, including prominent investment institutions including Lemniscap, Lightspeed Faction, Brevan Howard Digital, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Ventures, DACM, LBank Labs, 33DAO, WAGMI33, Concave, SNZ, Token The support of many well-known institutions, such as Pocket and Canonical Crypto, demonstrated broad industry support and confidence in Puffer's vision.
Following this funding round, Puffer received strategic investment from Binance Labs, further strengthening its position in the liquidity repledging ecosystem and laying a solid foundation for the upcoming mainnet launch and long-term future development.
Kelp DAO
Kelp DAO is a triple-yield re-staking protocol based on EigenLayer. RsETH is a Liquidity Reclaimed Token (LRT) issued by Kelp DAO to provide liquidity for illiquid assets deposited into restaking platforms such as EigenLayer.
In May, Kelp announced a $9 million token financing at a valuation of $90 million, led by SCB Limited and Laser Digital (Nomura Securities cryptocurrency division), with Bankless Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, Draper Dragon, DACM, Cypher Capital, GSR, HTX Ventures, and DWF Ventures participating. Additionally, angel investors such as Gitcoin's Scott Moore, Frax Finance's Sam Kazemian, Aave Chan Initiative's Marc Zeller, Jump Crypto's Saurabh Sharma, and AltLayer's Amrit Kumar also participated in this investment round.
As of August 26, the TVL on the KelpDAO chain has exceeded 700 million US dollars.
According to the latest roadmap posted by Puffer on social media, it will launch the Puffer UniFi testnet in September. Withdrawals were opened in early Q4, puffer V2 was launched, and TGE was carried out; AVS and UniFi mainnets were launched later in Q4.
derivativesHYPERLIQUID
Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual contract exchange. Hyperliquid offers one-click transactions and instant transactions. For more advanced traders, the platform offers partial take profit (TP) and stop-loss (SL) orders as well as API support. Its local treasury is open to the community for market-making and clearing strategies.
After the collapse on August 5,HYPERLIQUIDIt became the JLP with the best bid, and also another Perp DEX worth watching. On August 7, Hyperliquid's daily trading volume surpassed $4.3 billion, a record high. At the same time, its network traffic also reached a record high, and all services were normal and there were no outages.
Hyperliquid focuses on Perp DEX and continuously strives to achieve growth in users, trading volume, and market share. At one point, it became the most popular Perp DEX in the English-speaking world. According to official website data, Hyperliquid has now accumulated more than 190,000 users and 132 types of tradable assets. According to DeFilLama's data, Hyperliquid's total trading volume reached US$284.9 billion, squeezing the derivatives circuit into third place on the entire network (first place Jupiter, second place GMX).
But Hyperliquid isn't limited to DEX; its vision is to build an L1 chain with excellent performance and optimize the DeFi primitives built on it. The app chain was built by hand by the team, using only Tendermint for consensus. It is reported that it can handle up to 20,000 operations per second, including orders, cancellations, and settlements, which is about 20 times the current capacity of dYdX v3.
SynFutures
SynFutures is a decentralized derivatives exchange where anyone can list and trade futures and perpetual contracts for any asset. By creating an open and trustless derivatives marketplace, SynFutures positions itself as a derivative Amazon, introducing a list of unlicensed assets and providing the widest variety of trading pairs.
SynFutures has successively completed three rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of 38 million US dollars. The last round of financing was in October 2023. Pantera Capital, Dragonfly, Polychain, Standard Crypto lead investors, Framework Ventures, CMS Holdings, Wintermute, Hashkey Capital, Mirana Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Bing Ventures, Bybit, Susquehanna International Institutions such as Group and Kronos Asset Management participated in the investment.
At present, SynFutures has launched many long-tail asset trading pairs, such as $YES, $PAC, $DEGEN, $WIF, $MERL, etc., which have surpassed 150 billion US dollars in trading volume, and their share of daily trading volume has stabilized at around 8% of decentralized derivatives platforms. According to DeFillMA data, its daily trading volume is in the top four of decentralized derivatives exchanges.
The number one derivatives trading volume on the Base Network is currently one of the most active ecosystem projects on the Base Network. Meanwhile, according to a report recently released by Messari, the total trading volume of SynFutures Q2 on Blast exceeds 98 billion US dollars, accounting for 66% of Blast derivatives trading volume. Synfutures currently supports the DAO Perps project to trade project tokens such as Lido, Cygnus, and Bifrost as collateral.
In addition, SynFutures is also actively cooperating and promoting with major exchanges. We expect SynFutures to perform even better in 2024 and push the on-chain derivatives market to a new level of activity.
Bluefin
Bluefin (formerly Firefly, dTrade) is a decentralized perpetual contract protocol that allows users to trade perpetual contracts anytime, anywhere with up to 20 times leverage. Bluefin has several key features that set it apart from other solutions. The CLOB mechanism provides traders with minimal delays and the ability to place orders without paying gas fees, improving speed and user experience to rival centralized exchanges (CEXs). Other key features include implementing sub-accounts on on-chain exchanges, customizable order cancellation parameters, zk-login, a read-only account access mechanism that provides a centralized solution, etc.
Bluefin has received a total of $17 million in financing since its inception in 2020 and will launch its governance token in the near future. The exchange allows users to trade cryptocurrency perpetual contracts on the Sui network, and prior to the token launch, the exchange also recently received an undisclosed amount of investment from trading giant Flow Traders. Bluefin said in a statement that the company will use the proceeds to expand business beyond perpetual contract trading and develop a decentralized financial ecosystem.
According to Bluefin's tokenomics, the maximum supply of BLUE tokens is 1 billion, with an initial circulation of 116 million. Investors and the Bluefin team will have a three-year vesting period, and the lockdown period will expire one year after the initial launch next month. The company also plans to use 32.5% of the tokens for user incentives, including airdrops, trading rewards, liquidity provision, and future growth plans, according to the document. DEX also plans to launch an aggregator and “Bluefin Pro” for trading spot digital assets, which will provide cross-margin trading and faster execution.
Bluefin raised capital from large hedge funds such as Brevan Howard Digital, Tower Research, Cumberland DRW, and Susquehanna International Group. The exchange said its trading volume has so far surpassed $33 billion and monthly revenue of over $1 million.
RWA circuitSuperstate
Superstate is a blockchain-based government bond fund that uses the Ethereum blockchain as an auxiliary record keeping tool. Superstate aims to use existing US securities regulations to achieve broad global issuance in a fully compliant manner, and implement the most advanced tokenization framework, strong DeFi composability, and broad ecosystem coverage to bring the highest quality yield treasury products to market.
In November of last year, SuperState, founded by the founder of Compound, completed Series A financing of $14 million. This round was led by Distributed Global and CoinFund, Arrington Capital, Breyer Capital, CMT Digital, Department of XYZ, Folius Ventures, Galaxy Digital, HackVC, Modular Capital, Nascent, and Road Capital Management participated.
According to reports, Superstate plans to use this capital to establish its team and develop private equity funds, so that institutional investors can also smoothly enter the crypto world. Specifically, they can provide investors with tokenized versions of bonds or other common assets and trade or borrow on platforms similar to Uniswap.
Recently, Superstate announced the integration of Chainlink Data Feeds (Chainlink Data Feeds) into its tokenized treasury bond fund, the Superstate Short-Term US Government Securities Fund (USTB).
The team said, “This integration enables Superstate to safely bring net asset value (NAV) data to the chain and enhance the fund's composability in the on-chain financial market. Additionally, Superstate will integrate Chainlink Proof of Reserve in the coming months to further strengthen on-chain verification of AUM data.”
According to relevant data, BlackRock, Ondo, and Superstate became the most influential companies in the RWA sector in the first quarter. The RWA market achieved rapid growth in the first quarter. Driven by huge institutional interest and the launch of innovative products, tokenized treasury securities including BlackRock's US dollar institutional digital liquidity fund, Superstate's short-term US government securities fund, and ONDO's USDY increased by 41% to nearly 1.3 billion US dollars.
