DeFi & L1L2 Weekly — 📈 Weekly active addresses on L2s were 5x higher than on  Ethereum; Ethena plans to launch iUSDe in February 

Weekly active addresses on L2s were 5x higher than on Ethereum. Ethena plans to launch iUSDe for financial institutions in February. Solayer launched the Solayer Foundation and LAYER governance token

Weekly DeFi Index

This week’s DeFi indices showed positive movements, with the market capitalisation, volume, and volatility indices growing +4.05%, +7.13% and +67.07%, respectively.

• Aave’s founder, Stani Kulechov, indicated plans to enable a fee switch for its users in an X post after the idea was first discussed in April 2024. The proposal aims to enhance revenue management by enabling the platform’s decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to adjust how fees are collected and distributed. Concurrently, the Aave community pushed back against the proposal to peg Ethena’s USDe to USDT.

Chart of the Week

Ethereum-based Layer-2 (L2) networks witnessed a strong start in 2025. According to analytics platform GrowThePie, the weekly active addresses on L2s exceeded 10 million last week, continuing the momentum from December 2024. This amount is five times that of Ethereum’s 1.96 million weekly active addresses within the same period, indicating increased DeFi activity and stablecoin liquidity.

Base and Arbitrum took the lead with eight million combined weekly active addresses.

News Highlights

• Ethena is preparing to launch iUSDe, a new product targeting traditional financial institutions, in Q1. iUSDe is a wrapped version of its Ethena staked USDe (sUSDe) designed to be held and used by traditional financial entities. The team will also continue to expand its DeFi ecosystem while building a Telegram function that lets users send, spend, and save with crypto.
• The Frax Finance community approved the adoption of BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity (BUIDL) Fund as a reserve asset for the protocol’s new stablecoin, Frax USD (frxUSD). The adoption would enable yield generation, multiple transfer options, and minimised counterparty risk. 
• Solana-based restaking platform Solayer Labs introduced the Solayer Foundation, an independent non-profit organisation dedicated to scaling the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) and distributing its governance token, LAYER. Solayer’s 2025 roadmap also unveiled its hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain, Solayer InfiniSVM, which has a multi-execution cluster architecture that is supposedly infinitely scalable.
• The team behind the Shiba Inu launched TREAT, a new token designed to enhance governance, rewards, and utility of the Shiba Inu ecosystem. The initiative aims to transition the meme coin to a functional blockchain network with real-world applications via SHIB Pay, an on-chain payment system. Users can make direct payments with TREAT, bypassing traditional processors while ensuring transparency and trust through blockchain verification.

Recent Research Reports

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• Ethereum Pectra Upgrade: The Pectra upgrade aims to address Ethereum’s mainnet performance with three key objectives: fix existing network issues, improve user experience, and prepare for future upgrades
• Alpha Navigator: Quest for Alpha [November 2024]: Our latest issue of Alpha Navigator, an institutional-focused report, covers macro trends, market-neutral pair trades, style factor screening, and event-driven ideas.

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