Weekly DeFi Index

We updated the tokens in our DeFi index. This week, the market cap and and volatility indices decreased by -18.00% and -43.57%, respectively, while the volume and volatility indices increased by +4.62%.

Chart of the Week

Decentralised options premium volume reached a record weekly high of $44 million last week, up 57% from $28 million at the end of January. The surge in activity is concentrated in leading protocols like Ithaca and Derive, which processed $26 million and $11 million in premium, respectively.

News Highlights

• LayerZero Labs launched Zero, a high-performance blockchain for institutional financial markets, and announced strategic investments from Citadel Securities and ARK Invest in its ZRO token. Zero uses zero-knowledge proofs and a heterogeneous architecture to achieve high throughput with low costs.
• Tether Investments invested in LayerZero Labs and highlighted LayerZero and Zero as core to its strategy for cross-chain USDT movement and ‘agentic finance’, where on-chain agents can move and deploy stablecoins programmatically across multiple ecosystems.
• MegaETH launched its mainnet as a high-performance Ethereum L2 focused on low latency and high throughput, intensifying debate over how far vertical scaling and specialised L2s can go in addressing Ethereum’s congestion and user experience constraints.
• Ethereum Name Service (ENS) scrapped its plan to launch the Namechain L2 and will instead ship ENSv2 fully on Ethereum L1, citing roughly a 99% reduction in ENS registration gas costs.
• Crypto infrastructure company Fireblocks is partnering with Bitcoin L2 Stacks to offer institutional access to Bitcoin DeFi, enabling clients to custody BTC and interact with Stacks-based lending, trading, and yield protocols through Fireblocks’ infrastructure.
• Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje’s DeFi super application Flying Tulip (FT) will launch its public sale next week. Flying Tulip offers a unified platform for perpetual derivatives trading, spot trading, and lending. The FT token includes an underlying put option, making its valuation ‘closer to a NAV valuation than FDV’ according to Cronje.
• Vitalik Buterin criticised DeFi protocols that simply farm yield on centralised stablecoins like USDC, saying reliance on off-chain custodians undermines decentralisation and that DeFi should prioritise more trust-minimised collateral and designs over short-term stablecoin yield. He also outlined a vision for Ethereum as foundational infrastructure for AI, arguing its credible neutrality and programmable verification make it well-suited for AI agent coordination, data markets, and verifiable AI execution and governance.

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