This week’s newsletter focuses on the Exchanges (DEX) market sector, that has a designated dashboard on Token Terminal. Let’s dig in!

Weekly fundamentals #56 – Exchanges (DEX)

This week’s newsletter focuses on daily active users, a metric that has a designated dashboard on Token Terminal. Let’s dig in!

Weekly fundamentals #55 – Daily active users

Benchmarking projects within a specific market sector has never been this easy! In our latest product update we’ve sought to bring even more structure to the Token Terminal web application.

Introducing market sector dashboards

PancakeSwap

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of PancakeSwap with Head Chef, Mochi.

15-minute fundamentals with PancakeSwap

Metavault.Trade

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Metavault.Trade with Anna.

15-minute fundamentals with Metavault.Trade

Arbitrum

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Arbitrum with A.J. Warner – Chief of Strategy at Offchain Labs.

15-minute fundamentals with Arbitrum

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of GMX with core contributor Coinflipcanada.

15-minute fundamentals with GMX

Across

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Across Protocol with Co-Founder Hart Lambur.

15-minute fundamentals with Across Protocol

ParagonsDAO

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Paragons DAO with DeFi Ted.

15-minute fundamentals with Paragons DAO

Gearbox

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Gearbox Protocol with Amplice.

15-minute fundamentals with Gearbox Protocol

A new era in fundamentals-based cryptoasset investing has begun. 

Introducing Financial statements for DAOs

Gains Network

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Gains Network with Founder Seb.

15-minute fundamentals with Gains Network

An overview of Token Terminal's key metrics, why they matter, and how they're derived with examples included.

Token Terminal: Key Metrics FAQ

A breakdown of the operational costs of MakerDAO, Lido, and SushiSwap

How much does it really cost to run a DAO?

An overview of the protocols with the largest number of tokenholders, and a breakdown of the balances of their tokenholders.

How decentralized are the cap tables in crypto?

An overview of the blockchains and dapps that generate the most fees, and an illustration how those fees are distributed between the protocol and its supply-side participants.

Who earns fees in crypto?

A comprehensive overview of usage statistics for the most widely used protocols.

How many active users are there in crypto, really?

It's not. Let's explore the state of crypto through the lens of fundamentals.

Is crypto dead?

Blur

Blur launched in October 2022 and quickly established itself as the market leader in terms of volume in the NFT space. In this episode we gain insights into Blur's day-to-day operations.

Blur – The NFT marketplace for pro traders

Axie Infinity

A dive into the world of Axie Infinity with Co-founder Jeff (Jiho) Zirlin. We discuss the Ronin chain, Axie's two-token model, ensuring the long-term sustainability of Axie's economy, what the future has in store, and more.

Axie Infinity – Digital property rights for all users of the internet

Euler

DeFi lending in a bear market, drivers behind Euler’s growth, the Euler DAO, bad debt in DeFi, feeless flash loans, the Eulerswap AMM, and more. 

Euler Finance – Growing in a bear market

A peek into the current state of the DeFi lending market.

Weekly fundamentals #54

Miller Whitehouse-Levine, Policy Director at DeFi Education Fund (DEF), joined us for an interview to walk through the basics of DEF and the important role that Policy work plays within crypto.

DeFi Education Fund – Policy education and advocacy to help DeFi

Optimism

Smit Vachhani, Head of DeFi at OP Labs, walks us through the basics of what Optimism is, how it works, how it's positioned within the Ethereum ecosystem, current growth drivers, challenges, and plans for the future.

Optimism – a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum

Vesting schedule (token unlocks) data is now live for the first batch of projects on Token Terminal.

Weekly fundamentals #53

BENQI

JD Gagnon, Co-Founder & CEO of BENQI joined us to discuss the basics of what BENQI is, how it works, how it's positioned within the market, growth drivers and challenges, and plans for the future.

BENQI – Liquid staking and lending on Avalanche

Growth in perpetual exchange trading volume due to market volatility and user migration from CEXs.

Weekly fundamentals #52

Pangolin

In this interview with Justin Trollip, CEO of Pangolin Exchange, we discuss the basics of what Pangolin is, how it works, how it's positioned within the exchange market, growth drivers and challenges, and plans for the future.

Pangolin – A multi-chain decentralized exchange

An overview of the current state of Arbitrum, with a focus on user activity and the growing dApp ecosystem.

Weekly fundamentals #51

Morpho

In this interview with Paul Frambot, Founder & CEO of Morpho Labs, we discuss the basics of what Morpho is, how it works, how it's positioned within the lending market, growth drivers and challenges, and plans for the future.

Morpho – A lending pool optimizer for better rates in DeFi

UniDex

In this interview with Krunal Amin, Founder & CEO of UniDex, we discuss the basics of what UniDex is and how it's positioned within the exchange market, current products and their features, growth drivers and challenges, and plans for the future.

UniDex — Aggregating all of DeFi

Token incentives tend to largely outweigh revenue generated during an exchanges early stages.

Weekly fundamentals #50

StakeWise

In this interview with Kirill Kutakov, Co-founder of StakeWise, we discuss the basics of; what StakeWise is and how it's positioned within the liquid staking market, onboarding institutions, plans for the future, and more.

StakeWise — A dual-token model for Ethereum liquid staking

We added the Earnings metric to project dashboards, showcasing the difference between a project’s revenue and token incentives.

Weekly fundamentals #49

Bridge exploits, Ethereum L2 revenues, and comparing the user acquisition costs between Rocket Pool and Lido Finance.

Weekly fundamentals #48

A new era in on-chain accounting has arrived

Launching the Token Terminal APIv2

Ribbon Finance

In this episode with Julian Koh, Co-Founder & CEO of Ribbon Finance, we dive into the current state of Ribbon and discuss recently launched products Ribbon Earn and Ribbon Lend, and the soon to be launched options exchange Aevo.

Ribbon Finance — Building a one-stop solution for crypto structured products

Introducing a new feature: the trending contracts -page! Navigate the most active contracts and addresses, and sort them based on chain, time frame, gas used ($), transaction count, and user activity. 

Weekly fundamentals #47

ETH issuance has decreased by almost ten-fold post merge. BNB Chain is currently the number one EVM-compatible blockchain in terms of user activity.

Weekly fundamentals #46

Decentral Games

In this episode with Miles Anthony, Co-Founder & CEO, we speak about the past 6 months at Decentral Games, the current state of the business, new game modes for ICE Poker, the ICE Merge, and what effects the recent changes have had on the Decentral Games ecosystem.

Decentral Games – Stabilizing the ICE Poker economy

Wondering which protocols are actually sound businesses? We launched a new leaderboard that showcases how much projects are earning.

Weekly fundamentals #45

Perpetual Protocol

Jamie Holmes joined us for an episode of 15-minute fundamentals to dive into the details behind the charts available on Token Terminal. Perpetual Protocol is an on-chain perpetual futures DEX with deep liquidity and builder-ready composability.

Perpetual Protocol – An on-chain perpetual futures exchange

Hop Protocol

Hop is a scalable rollup-to-rollup general token bridge. It allows users to send tokens from one rollup to another almost immediately without having to wait for the rollup’s challenge period.

Hop Protocol – A rollup-to-rollup general token bridge

New episodes of 15-minute fundamentals with Notional Finance and Livepeer.

Weekly fundamentals #44

Livepeer

Adam Soffer, Product Engineering Lead at Livepeer, joined us for an episode of 15-minute fundamentals to dive into the details behind the charts available on Token Terminal. Livepeer is a decentralized video streaming network built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Livepeer – A decentralized video streaming network on Ethereum

Notional Finance

In this interview with Teddy Woodward, Co-founder of Notional Finance, we discuss the risks that lending protocols face during the Ethereum merge, give a detailed overview of Notional's tokenomics, and describe the different roles that community contributors have.

Notional Finance – A fixed-rate crypto lending protocol

We released some UI upgrades to the Token Terminal dashboard for improved usability.

Weekly fundamentals #43

NFTX

In this interview with Quag we break down NFTX's operating model and learn about the drivers behind the data you see on Token Terminal's charts.

NFTX – A liquidity protocol for NFTs

We published the first episode in a new series covering insightful and trending charts in crypto: Charts and trends to follow.

Weekly fundamentals #42

Sudoswap is now listed on Token Terminal.

Weekly fundamentals #41

Over $4.2B has been stolen over the past two years due to lacking security practices. This article explores trends and patterns behind these exploits, including the most common root causes. 

DeFi Exploits: Trends, Patterns, and Lessons Learnt

A walkthrough of the most interesting charts and trends across our key metrics.

Weekly fundamentals #40

Liquity

In our second episode with Michael Svoboda from Liquity we discuss the censorship of USD-linked stablecoins, how the Terra crash and market volatility has affected Liquity, and how the truly DeFi native stablecoin LUSD is positioned amidst these events.

Liquity's unstoppable stablecoin

Weekly fundamentals #39

Weekly fundamentals #38

Crypto Domain Names provide two main benefits: (1) a transparent infrastructure for access to and maintenance of new domain names, and (2) mapping of non-human friendly blockchain addresses to human friendly ones.

The Definitive Guide to Crypto Domain Names

Weekly fundamentals #37

Connext

In this episode, we dive into the current state of Connext with Founder & CTO Rahul Sethuram.

Connext – trust-minimized crosschain communication

Rook

In this interview with the project's CEO Hazard, we discuss Rook's operating and business models, MEV, Keepers, tokenomics, treasury, and more. 

Rook – An open MEV marketplace for Ethereum

Weekly fundamentals #36

Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup designed to scale the Ethereum ecosystem. It increases Ethereum’s throughput by performing some off-chain computation and data storage before settling transactions in batches on the Ethereum Mainnet.

The state of Arbitrum: Scaling Ethereum

Maple Finance

In this interview, we discuss everything that has happened over the last three months including launching xMPL staking, and expanding to Solana. Tune in for the latest on Maple Finance and the plans for its future.

Maple Finance – xMPL, Solana, and market volatility

Weekly fundamentals #35

DeFi Saver

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of DeFi Saver with Co-founder Nenad Palinkasevic. 

DeFi Saver – tools for tracking and managing your DeFi portfolio

Weekly fundamentals #34

Weekly fundamentals #33

Synthetix

Synthetix is a leading protocol for generating synthetic assets on Ethereum and Optimism. Synthetic assets are tokenized derivatives that track the price of another asset.

The state of Synthetix: A derivatives liquidity protocol

A write-up of our discussion about the current state of Liquity with CEO Michael Svoboda.

Interview with Michael Svoboda, COO of Liquity

Weekly fundamentals #32

Filecoin

Filecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that allows its users to store and retrieve data on the internet. It is an open platform and a market economy that connects people who have excess storage space with people who want to store data.

The state of Filecoin: A decentralized storage network

Polygon

In 15-minute fundamentals, we interview core protocol contributors & together dive into the details behind the charts available on TokenTerminal. In this episode, we dive into the current state of Polygon with Aishwary Gupta. 

Polygon – Bringing the world to Ethereum

Lido Finance

In this episode, we discuss the current state of Lido's business, growth drivers, bottlenecks, future roadmap, and the complex topic of whether liquid staking protocols are becoming centralizing forces. 

Lido Finance – Liquidity for staked assets

Weekly fundamentals #31

Euler's business model, differentiators to other lending protocols, current growth drivers, the EUL token, and more!

Interview with Michael Bentley, Co-founder & CEO of Euler Finance

Polkadot

Polkadot is a network of blockchains that aims to provide a scalable, interoperable and secure backbone to the decentralized web.

The state of Polkadot: Web3 interoperability

dYdX

 In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of dYdX with Corey Miller. 

dYdX – a non-custodial trading, lending and derivates protocol

Weekly fundamentals #30

A write-up of our discussion about the current state of Maple Finance with Co-Founder Joe Flanagan.

Interview with Joe Flanagan, Co-founder of Maple Finance

Optimism is a scaling solution that increases Ethereum’s throughput by performing some computation off-chain. In technical jargon, Optimism is an optimistic rollup. 

The state of Optimism: An Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution

Weekly fundamentals #29

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Ribbon Finance with Co-founder Julian Koh. 

Ribbon Finance – 15-minute fundamentals

Weekly fundamentals #28

Ethereum Name Service

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a naming system on the Ethereum blockchain. It improves the user experience of Ethereum by connecting human-readable names to machine-readable addresses.

The state of Ethereum Name Service (ENS)

Weekly fundamentals #27

The current state of Decentral Games' business, Miles' thoughts on the broader play-and-earn ecosystem, Decentral Games' plans for populating the metaverse, and what effect the recent changes in the market environment might have. 

Decentral Games – Play & Earn poker in the metaverse

Weekly fundamentals #26

Goldfinch

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Goldfinch with Blake West.

Goldfinch – crypto borrowing without crypto collateral

Cosmos Hub

Cosmos is a network of blockchains that can securely communicate between each other to transfer data and value. The team behind Cosmos envisions a scalable network of application-specific blockchains.

The state of Cosmos: A scalable network of application-specific blockchains

Weekly fundamentals #25

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of Euler Finance with Co-Founder & CEO Michael Bentley.

Data-driven research on crypto