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 Foundationannounced 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 Financeintroduced 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 Networkexpanded 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’smainnet launchon 13 February will introduce its native token, IP, which serves as a gas and governance token.
The Berachain Foundationlaunched 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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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.
