DeFi & L1L2 Weekly — 📈 Polymarket recorded a new high of 462,600 active users in Jan despite volume dip; Holesky and Sepolia testnets are scheduled to fork in Feb and Mar for Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade

Polymarket recorded a new high of 462,600 active users in January despite volume dip; Holesky and Sepolia testnets are scheduled to fork in Feb and Mar for Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade; Ondo Finance unveiled L1 network for tokenised assets.

This week’s DeFi indices showed negative movements, with the market capitalisation, volume, and volatility indices declining -2.55%, -39.86%, and -37.54%, respectively.

• Rocket Pool announced that its Saturn devnet-1 went live. The devnet-1 focuses on the deposit process, including megapool delegate, megapool upgrade process, deploying a megapool and deposit validators, among other features.
• Ethereum’s staking protocol Lido announced the upcoming launch of Lido V3, an upgrade aimed at making ETH staking more modular, flexible, and accessible to institutional investors.
• Uniswap Labs launched the Unichain mainnet, an Ethereum Layer-2 (L2) designed for DeFi, featuring an open and permissionless decentralised infrastructure.

Chart of the Week

Polymarket recorded a trading volume of US$1.26 billion in January, a significant dip from its peak of $2.63 billion in November which was driven by the US presidential election. Despite the reduced volume, the figure remains higher than its pre-election monthly average of $400 to $500 million.

Meanwhile, the platform set a new monthly high with over 462,600 active traders recorded in the same month, marking a 52% increase from its previous record of 304,330 users last November.

News Highlights

• The Ethereum Foundation announced that it will fork the Holesky and Sepolia testnet on 24 February and 5 March, respectively. The development is part of the long-awaited Pectra upgrade, and a mainnet deployment date will be decided in a subsequent call on 6 March.
• Ondo Finance introduced Ondo Chain, a Layer-1 (L1) Proof of Stake blockchain to “accelerate the creation of institutional-grade financial markets on-chain”, and Ondo Global Markets (GM), a platform that provides on-chain access to stocks, bonds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The L1 network will support tokenised real-world assets (RWAs), including those issued by Ondo Global Markets.
• Polygon’s new Agglayer v0.2 mainnet introduced pessimistic proofs, allowing chains with different security models to connect in a safe, interoperable manner. The next release is expected to bring multistack capability to Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains.
• The team behind the Shiba Inu (SHIB) token announced a partnership with the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure (MoEI) to utilise its decentralised solutions. The endeavour is the first time a country is integrating blockchain technology at the federal level.
• World Liberty Financial Co-Founder Chase Herro unveiled plans to create a “strategic reserve” after the company bought $470,000 worth of Ondo Finance (ONDO) the same day.
• Decentralised exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch Network expanded its cross-chain swapping capabilities by integrating ZKsync, a L2 scaling solution for Ethereum. The integration allows its users to seamlessly execute cross-chain swaps involving ZKsync. 
• Story Protocol’s mainnet launch on 13 February will introduce its native token, IP, which serves as a gas and governance token.
• The Berachain Foundation launched its mainnet on 6 February, airdropping its native BERA token to eligible users concurrently. 15.8% of its 500 million token supply was airdropped during the launch.

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