Wondering what the next frontiers for DeFi are?
Our new #Binance report covers emerging trends in DeFi markets, from new types of derivatives and yield paradigms to modular lending designs, prediction markets, and more.
Read the full report here.
Highlights:
2024 has seen a substantial influx of capital into DeFi, driving the total value locked (“TVL”) up 75.1% year-to-date (“YTD”) to US$94.9B, from US$54.2B at the year's start. This boost has benefited nearly every DeFi sector, across both major and niche markets, leading to the emergence of differentiated markets that are making previously inaccessible financial primitives available on-chain.After a 148.6% increase to US$9.1B this year, Yield is now the 8th largest DeFi market by TVL. Leading the push to bring interest rate derivatives on-chain, Pendle has seen a remarkable 1962% growth YTD to US$4.8B, benefitting from the rise of yield-bearing assets and increased rate volatility spurred by liquid restaking and speculative point systems.The circulating market cap of stablecoins has reached US$161.1B this year, the highest in nearly two years. Capitalizing on a market gap for a more capital efficient yield-bearing stablecoin, Ethena has surged 2730.4% to a US$2.4B market cap, becoming the 5th largest stablecoin. Its unique delta-neutral strategy, combining staked ETH and perpetual futures funding rates, has provided a distinct advantage.Money markets have grown this year, with on-chain TVL up 47.2% to US$32.7B. The demand for more flexible lending products, such as those that can incorporate long-tail assets as collateral, has fueled interest in modular lending. Morpho has responded with Morpho Blue and MetaMorpho, which combine the simplicity and pooled liquidity of traditional lending with the efficiency and flexibility of isolated markets, attracting billions in deposits in just a few months.Prediction markets reached a new peak this cycle, with TVL hitting a record US$55.1M after a 57.7% rise YTD. Historically thriving on political events, and with U.S. elections in sight, Polymarket has seen a significant resurgence, with average monthly volumes soaring from US$6.1M in 2023 to US$42.0M in 2024.The market upswing has revitalized on-chain derivatives activity, propelling average daily volumes from US$1.8B last year to US$5.4B this year. Hyperliquid has capitalized on this trend to increase its market share to 18.9%, making it the second largest by trading volume, trailing only dYdX. Its edge stems from being a high-performance, fully on-chain perps DEX on its own L1, providing CEX-like experiences and unique products like pre-market offerings and exotic pairs.
Read the full report here.

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officially approves 8 spot Ethereum ETFs from BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, Bitwise, VanEck, Ark, Invesco Galaxy and Franklin Templeton. This decision came after an unexpected U-turn when the SEC began engaging with issuers earlier this week, requesting amended and resubmitted 19-4b filings. The next step is for the S-1 registration statements to be approved and effective, after which trading of the ETFs may start.
2/ Fantom Foundation introduced Sonic Foundation and Sonic Labs for their upcoming new Layer-1, Sonic Chain. The Sonic Foundation will oversee Sonic’s governance, manage the network treasury, orchestrate partnerships, and develop the DApp ecosystem. Sonic Chain is a parallelized EVM chain designed to be a high-performance L1 with sub-second finality. Fantom Foundation closed a strategic funding round of $10 million — led by Hashed — to support the Sonic Foundation. This round included participation from UOB Ventures, Signum Capital, Aave Foundation, and several angel investors including Stani Kulechov, Robert Leshner, and Sam Kazemian.
3/ The U.S. House passed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), establishing a new regulatory framework for digital assets and enhancing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) oversight. FIT21 sets up definitions for crypto assets, and divides responsibility between the CFTC and SEC. The House recorded a 279-136 vote on Wednesday, with 71 Democrats and 208 Republicans voting in favor, versus 3 Republicans and 133 Democrats who voted against.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎:
Breakthrough DeFi Markets

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ The number of crypto deals in Q1 2024 increased by 52.1% QoQ and has reached its highest level in nearly two years. Also, the pre-money valuations of VC-backed crypto firms rebounded over 70% QoQ in Q1 2024. However, with the growing activity, the practice of tokens launching with high valuations and low float has sparked debate due to concerns about limited upside for retail investors. Check out our recent Binance Research report (link below) which dives into the details of this phenomenon.
2/ The CME Group plans to offer spot Bitcoin trading through the EBS currency trading venue in Switzerland, introducing more complex Bitcoin trading strategies. Robinhood has launched its inaugural crypto-staking product, enabling European customers to stake $SOL for a 5% yield, and is also broadening its crypto services with localized language support in Italy, Poland, and Lithuania.
3/ Binance has launched its Funding Rate Arbitrage bot for users to utilize arbitrage strategies using perpetual futures and spot trading pairs. Blast has announced that its planned airdrop will take place on June 26, with a larger allocation amount as compensation for the delay of the airdrop from May to June.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎:
Macro Thoughts: Not All Doom and GloomLow Float & High FDV: How Did We Get Here?

The prevalence of tokens launching with high valuations and low initial supplies has stirred discussions due to concerns over limited upside for retail investors.
Our report examines the situation, driving forces, and considerations for investors/teams.
Read the full report here.
Key Takeaways:
The prevalence of tokens with high valuations and low initial circulating supply has been a topic of discussion among the crypto community in recent months. This stems from concerns that such a market structure leaves little sustainable upside for traders after the token generation event (“TGE”).Data from CoinMarketCap and Token Unlocks confirm the growing trend of tokens launching with low circulating supply and high valuations. Notably, it is estimated that approximately US$155B worth of tokens will be unlocked from 2024 to 2030. Without a corresponding increase in buy-side demand and capital flows, the substantial amount of tokens coming onto the market poses selling pressure.Factors such as an influx of private market capital, aggressive valuations, and upbeat market sentiment have contributed to the trend of tokens launching with high fully diluted valuations (“FDVs”).The current market set-up makes it important for investors to be selective and discerning by considering fundamental aspects of a project, such as tokenomics, valuation, and product. Project teams may also need to consider the long-term implications of decisions made relating to tokenomics design. VCs continue to play an important role in our industry and can work together with project teams to ensure equitable supply distributions and reasonable valuations.
Read the full report here.

Slowing economic growth and persistent inflation in the U.S. have raised worries about the risk of stagflation.
Should you be concerned?
In our latest report, we examine the drivers of weak economic data and the impact on growth assets like crypto.
Key Takeaways:
In this first edition of our “Macro Thoughts” series, we examine concerns related to stagflation and its impact on growth assets like crypto.While there are indicators of slowing economic growth and sticky inflation, we believe that stagflation concerns may be overblown considering resilient domestic demand and moderating wage growth.Probabilities of rate hikes or the Federal Reserve (“Fed”) not cutting rates this year are not zero, but these scenarios do not seem likely.The recent correction in the crypto market may not be entirely negative as it positions the market for more sustainable growth. Moreover, despite the correction, the market is still up 38% year-to-date.
Read the full report here.

Heard about Bitcoin's new Runes Protocol?
Our new #Binance report explores the basics of Runes and how they work, how they differ from BRC-20 tokens as well as their effects on Bitcoin's metrics so far.
Check it out here
Highlights:
The advent of Ordinals and Inscriptions marked a turning point in the story of Bitcoin, welcoming in a new era for the flagship cryptocurrency. We saw all types of Bitcoin NFTs, and the community even found a way to put fungible tokens on top of Ordinals with BRC-20 tokens. Most recently, the builder behind Ordinals (Casey Rodarmor) launched a new and more efficient way to put fungible tokens on Bitcoin. Enter the Runes Protocol. The Runes Protocol utilizes Bitcoin’s unique UTXO model in order to bring fungible tokens to the chain. Bitcoin’s UTXOs, which hold piles of Satoshis (sats), are extended to also hold balances of arbitrary fungible tokens, called Runes. There is no change to Bitcoin’s software or consensus rules. Everything required to reconstruct Runes exists inside the Bitcoin chain, with no third-party or off-chain components. Runes are completely unrelated to Ordinals, Inscriptions, and BRC-20 tokens, and are directly competitive with BRC-20s. Runes are much more efficient at using blockspace compared to BRC-20s (and contribute less to state bloat). They are also likely to be more compatible with Bitcoin protocols (wallets, bridges, and scalability solutions), as they simply exist on UTXOs (like Bitcoin). In contrast, BRC-20s usually required Ordinal-supported infrastructure in order to interoperate. At launch, only 13- to 26-character Rune names are available. Every four months until the next Halving, a shorter character limit will be unlocked, e.g., all 12-character names will be unlocked by August 2024. This will culminate in the unlocking of one-character Rune names in 2028, creating an intrinsic hype cycle for Runes over the next four years. Runes have had a visible impact on Bitcoin’s fees and transaction count, responsible for over US$145M in fees and around 45% of all Bitcoin’s transactions since launch. Runes have internal airdrop mechanics (such as delayed minting) and more features in development. Bitcoin soft fork proposals have also been gaining more traction in recent months. Runes’ infrastructure improvement will be key, especially if they aim to dethrone the incumbent BRC-20 standard.
Read the full report here.

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ In May, Bitcoin reached a significant milestone as total transactions surpassed one billion, demonstrating the network's growing usage and activity. Notably, the introduction of Inscriptions, Ordinals, and BRC-20s has been a major driver of Bitcoin’s accelerating growth, accounting for a large portion of the network’s transactions. Runes, a newly launched token standard on Bitcoin, is also contributing to this momentum. Our most recent report thoroughly explores these dynamics.
2/ Vitalik Buterin has proposed EIP-7702, aiming to enhance account abstraction on Ethereum by allowing externally-owned accounts to temporarily function as smart contract wallets during transactions. Susquehanna, a $438B asset manager, has disclosed its purchase of $1.3B worth of spot BTC ETFs.
3/ LayerZero has offered Sybil farmers the opportunity to self-report and receive 15% of their intended airdrop allocations, aiming to distribute tokens to genuine users and discourage excessive airdrop farming. Hyperliquid has announced its plan to transition to HyperBFT- a consensus algorithm capable of supporting 200K TPS.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎: The Future of Bitcoin: Tokens

Time to look at this month's market insights!
Our research team analyzed the state of the crypto market and provided insights on Bitcoin Runes, liquid restaking, stablecoin supply, and more.
Read the full report: Here
Highlights:
The crypto market experienced downward momentum in April, closing the month with an 11% decrease in total market capitalization. Several factors, including changes in expectations of rate cuts, geopolitical risks, and a slowdown in flows of spot BTC ETFs, were seen as the main contributors to the downward pressure. The Runes Protocol, a new token standard for fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network, has generated over US$130M in fees since launching on April 20. They have also been responsible for roughly 50% of all of Bitcoin’s transactions since then, across 3M+ transactions recorded, generating approximately 33% of all fees on the network. Total value locked (“TVL”) in liquid restaking protocols continued to track upward, crossing the US$10B mark in April. Apart from the liquidity benefits of LRTs, a key driver of growth has been “point farming,” where users participate in these protocols to earn points in hopes of being eligible for future airdrops.The total supply of USD-pegged stablecoins has been on an upward trajectory this year, reaching US$160B in April, the highest level in nearly two years. This growth corresponds with a broader market upturn, emphasizing stablecoins as crucial indicators of crypto market demand. Particularly, First Digital’s FDUSD and Ethena’s USDe have been major beneficiaries of this growth, increasing 80.0% and 52.3%, respectively, in April alone.The TON network has witnessed a surge in on-chain metrics as DeFi TVL and monthly active addresses both broke all-time highs in April. This was largely driven by the launch of “The Open League,” an initiative that aims to bring millions of Telegram users on-chain and drive activity on the TON network.
Read the full report: Here

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ It has been a challenging week for crypto assets. Total crypto market capitalization fell by around 6.3% week-on-week as macroeconomic concerns weigh on overall sentiment. The rapid decline in crypto asset prices triggered liquidations amounting to millions of dollars. Traders continue to monitor stagflation risks and interest rate policy trajectory in the U.S..
2/ BlackRock's tokenized fund BUIDL has become the largest tokenized treasury fund just six weeks after its launch, capturing 30% of the market share. Much of BUIDL's rapid growth has been attributed to Ondo Finance, whose $50M inflow last week brings its total contribution to $140M. Overall, the on-chain tokenized fund landscape has seen steady growth, with a QoQ increase of 42% in Q1 2024.
3/ Elsewhere, MicroStrategy has introduced the Orange protocol, using ordinal-like inscriptions to anchor digital IDs on Bitcoin. Separately, Tether has invested $200M to acquire a majority stake in Blackrock Neurotech, a company specializing in brain-computer interfaces. This move highlights Tether's dedication to supporting transformative technology.
4/ EigenLayer has announced its highly anticipated token launch. 15% of $EIGEN has been earmarked to be distributed to ecosystem participants over multiple seasons. The airdrop, however, faced some criticism due to non-transferable tokens at launch and restrictions excluding users from certain countries.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎: Monthly Market Insights - May 2024

One of the least discussed parts of the modular chain thesis is the Data Availability ("DA") Layer.
Our new #Binance report explores the basics of DA, the impact of EIP-4844, before providing a deep technical dive into Celestia, EigenDA, and Avail.
Read the full report here.
The data availability (“DA”) problem asks this question: how can we ensure that all network participants can access the data of a newly proposed block? It emerged as a necessity alongside rollups and the modular blockchain paradigm.Dedicated DA layers have largely emerged in response to the increasing costs of posting data directly to major Layer-1s (“L1s”), especially Ethereum.This report is part of our technical series. We feature major DA players and explain the technical primitives underpinning their solutions and their anticipated impacts on products and future positioning. Celestia and Avail (and likely Danksharding) rely on data availability sampling (“DAS”). With DAS, light clients contribute to security very efficiently. A dozen or so DAS operations give over 99.9% confidence that all data is available. This results in very high security, where data availability is guaranteed as long as 1-of-n or even 0-of-n full nodes are honest. Among the protocols discussed in this report, EigenDA is unique in its use of a dispersal protocol. This may enable better scalability as individual nodes’ storage requirements drop as more nodes join the network. The downside is that security requires a majority or supermajority of honest nodes.Avail and EiganDA (and Danksharding) use Kate-Zaverucha-Goldberg (“KZG”), which has useful properties that allow validity proofs to be generated. Avail uses this for faster DA finality and potentially better integration with zk-rollups.All the above projects use erasure codes extensively. This technique allows protocols to achieve better (often optimal) trade-offs.In designing these protocols, tradeoffs include scalability, security, and finality speed. The different protocols featured in this report made different design decisions regarding these trade-offs. This will likely result in persistent differences in cost, security, and finality speed, which may be deciding factors for project teams (although KPI comparisons will likely fluctuate in the short term).  
Read the full report here.

Time to look at this month's market insights!
Our research team analyzed the state of the crypto market and provided insights on Bitcoin ETF inflows, Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, Solana's DEX volumes, and more.
Check out the full report here.
The crypto market saw a modest uptrend in March, ending the month with a 16% increase in total market capitalization. Notably, Bitcoin reached an all-time high, touching US$73,000 twice before experiencing a sharp retracement, with the lowest point at US$60,000. In the latter half of March, capital inflows into spot BTC ETFs slowed, especially during the week of March 18. However, with over US$12B in net inflows since their inception, periodic outflows don’t necessarily indicate a market reversal; longer-term observations are needed to establish trends.Average daily net flows for the spot Bitcoin ETFs were US$98M in January, US$287M in February, and US$231M in March. March also saw two of the highest inflow days recorded so far, with over US$1B and US$680M in inflows on March 12 and 13. This has helped bring total net flows to over US$12B. This has also coincided with Bitcoin breaking its all-time high and trading as high as US$73K earlier in March. With the Bitcoin halving coming up in April, it will be interesting to see how ETF flows and prices evolve from here. Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade went live on March 13. The introduction of EIP-4844 (a.k.a. proto-danksharding) has resulted in a dramatic decrease in transaction fees on layer-2s (“L2s”). Median L2 gas fees have fallen by as much as 96.8% post-Dencun.Trading volumes on Solana’s Decentralized Exchanges (“DEXes”) increased by more than 224% month-over-month (“MoM”), at times even outpacing Ethereum to become the highest-volume network on several days in March. The significant uptick in activity has been driven by the rising popularity of meme coins on the network.  Stablecoin yield opportunities have been on the rise. In response, MakerDAO increased the Dai Savings Rate (“DSR”) from 5% to a high of 15%, cushioning against potential DAI demand shocks. Following the rate hike, DAI deposits have grown past US$1.6B, reflecting a 39.6% increase and reversing much of their previous decline.
Read the full report here.

In our latest #Binance Research report, we provide an overview of the crypto industry by highlighting projects across multiple sectors.
We spotlight themes from DePIN, Artificial Intelligence, Restaking and others in this report.
Check it out: Full report

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ Spot BTC ETFs have consistently seen strong net inflows over recent weeks, with US$1.21B in the past week alone, indicating robust investor demand. Additionally, spot BTC ETFs achieved a record-high trading volume of US$10B on March 5 — a staggering figure for newly launched ETFs. On that same day, Bitcoin surpassed its previous ATH of $69,000, followed by a rapid decline to $59,000 and a swift recovery to above $65,000, showcasing notable strength. Many consider the drop to be a healthy correction, as it led to the normalization of the funding rate, a metric that indicates the market’s bullish bias.
2/ Notable news include Grayscale's introduction of a crypto staking fund that stakes tokens to earn rewards. It aims to distribute the rewards in US Dollars on a quarterly basis. Tokens that were selected include $SOL, $APT, $ATOM, $OSMO, $SEI, $TIA, $NEAR, and $DOT. In other news, Revolut has partnered with MetaMask to launch a new feature that allows users to buy and deposit crypto directly into the MetaMask wallet.
3/ Wormhole has announced its $W airdrop, distributing 617M tokens to past users. Separately, SafePal, a Singaporean fintech firm, has made an investment into Swiss back Fiat24 and jointly launched a USDC-powered VISA card.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎: Monthly Market Insights - March 2024

Time to look at this month's market insights!
Our research team analyzed the state of the crypto market and provided insights on crypto adoption, EigenLayer, Ethena's TVL growth, and more.
Check out the full report here.
The crypto market experienced strong upward momentum in February, ending the month with a 40% increase in total market capitalization – a level of performance not seen since October 2021. Additionally, the spot BTC ETFs saw a net inflow of over US$4.9B in February, with Grayscale’s outflow showing a notable decrease compared to January’s. Overall, the launch of spot BTC ETFs has proven to be a huge success so far, continuing to attract capital to the crypto market.March 8, 2024, celebrates International Women’s Day, embracing the theme “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress.” Currently, women represent approximately 37% of global cryptocurrency owners — a figure that might seem low compared to males, yet it signifies a substantial upswing from 21% in 2021.EigenLayer, the restaking primitive on Ethereum, has seen explosive growth in TVL recently, growing by over 800% year-to-date. EigenLayer has taken a phased approach to launching, spanning three stages and restaking deposit caps. Its most recent deposit cap increase was a temporary removal of all caps from February 5 to 9, with TVL rising by over 180%. Liquid restaking protocols, which allow users to participate in restaking while maintaining liquidity through a token, have been important for the growth of EigenLayer. These protocols grew over 300% in February, from US$1B in TVL to over US$5B. The Uniswap Foundation has proposed a governance upgrade to distribute protocol fees to UNI stakers and delegators. The aim of the proposal is to incentivize active delegation and a more engaged governance community. With Uniswap regularly making above US$50M in fees per month, this could be a fairly significant source of yield for stakers, depending on the exact specifics of the fee-sharing agreement. Since its public launch on February 19, Ethena’s USDe has witnessed a rapid influx of capital, with its supply skyrocketing to over US$565M, while its user base has grown to more than 31K. The remarkable growth of USDe can be attributed to two key drivers: the launch of its points program Shards and, more significantly, the allure of high advertised yields.

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ In February, the monthly DeFi derivatives volume reached an all-time high of US$208B, nearly double the highest monthly derivatives volume recorded during the bull market of 2021. This indicates significant growth in DeFi derivatives infrastructure over the years, with more users trading on-chain. The surge in volume can also be attributed to increased speculative activity due to the market resurgence and volume farming activities across derivatives protocols like Aevo, Hyperliquid, and others.
2/ Noteworthy headlines include the Ethereum Foundation announcing the activation of the Dencun Upgrade on March 13th. Telegram also announced that it will begin sharing advertising revenue with channel owners through the TON blockchain starting in March. Channel owners are set to receive 50% of the ad revenue, with payments settled on the TON blockchain.
3/ VanEck launched SegMint, an NFT marketplace and digital assets platform initially focusing on users in Europe and Asia, excluding U.S. citizens. Blast, an Ethereum Layer 2 solution that attracted over US$2B in deposits, also launched its Mainnet.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎: Scaling Blockchains: Embracing Modularity

The modular ecosystem is fast growing and set to push the frontier of blockchain scaling this year.
Our new #Binance report explores these developments among the wider scaling landscape, featuring Celestia, Eclipse, Manta Pacific, and Monad.
Read the full report here.
Highlights:
The crux of the modular blockchain thesis is a concept related to the separation of roles. Modular blockchains seek to optimize one or more of the four core functions - Execution, Settlement, Data Availability (“DA”), and Consensus - by delegating responsibility to a separate layer.One of the critical bottlenecks in realizing the full potential of Layer-2s (“L2s”) for scaling lies in the DA layer, prompting a strong focus on advancing DA capabilities. The developments in the DA space introduce new opportunities for the broader modular ecosystem.EIP-4844 is set to enhance Ethereum's DA capabilities by drastically reducing DA costs, which presently constitute a major portion of the L2 overhead. However, there is growing demand towards the adoption of alt-DA layers, driven by the need for greater scalability.Celestia is the first public network that is designed to be optimized for DA. Celestia’s approach to scalability centers on the decoupling of execution from consensus, and the introduction of key technologies such as Data Availability Sampling (“DAS”) and Namespace Merkle Trees (“NMTs”).Eclipse is Ethereum's first Solana Virtual Machine (“SVM”) L2. Specifically, Eclipse takes advantage of the parallel-processing design of the SVM to run a L2 with settlement on Ethereum and DA on Celestia.Manta Pacific is a modular L2 that became the first to migrate to Celestia DA. Manta Pacific has grown to become the third largest L2 by TVL, boasting an impressive US$1.9B.It’s not all about modularity, with scalability improvements also occurring within monolithic Layer-1s (“L1”). Notably, Monad is bringing parallel execution to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (“EVM”).
Read the full report here.

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ Ethena, a synthetic dollar protocol, has seen rapid growth in the supply of its stablecoin, USDe. Total supply has reached US$415M following the launch of its public mainnet on Feb 19. USDe is a synthetic dollar backed by LST and ETH collateral, hedged by a short ETH perpetual position. Its yield is derived from ETH staking yields and funding rate of its derivatives position. Potential risks of USDe include prolonged negative funding rate on ETH perpetuals, counterparty risk, LST depeg risk, among others.
2/ Notable news include Valkyrie’s introduction of its second BTC futures ETF, offering 2x leveraged exposure to the performance of the CME BTC futures market. Additionally, Andreessen Horowitz has invested US$100M in EigenLayer, the leading restaking protocol by TVL.
3/ In response to community feedback, which raised concerns that the initial plan may have favored early investors unfairly, StarkWare has revised the $STRK lockup schedule to allow for a more gradual release. Meanwhile, Optimism has unveiled Airdrop #4, allocating 10M+ $OP to over 22K unique addresses.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎:
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Restaking

Restaking is one of the hottest topics of the year, with EigenLayer's TVL rising by over 600% in 2024.
Our new #Binance report explores the restaking market, EigenLayer, restaking on other chains, liquid restaking protocols, and tokens.
Read the full report here.
Highlights:
Restaking protocols provide a set of smart contracts that allow staked tokens to be repurposed and staked again (i.e., restaked) to provide security to applications beyond the primary blockchain.Restaking seeks to solve the problem of fragmented blockchain security. Generating sufficient crypto-economic security can be a time-consuming and expensive process, but pooling existing security from a large chain such as Ethereum can help solve this issue.EigenLayer is the originator of this sub-sector and can be thought of as providing “security-as-a-service” through Ethereum. With over US$7B in total value locked (“TVL”), this is the largest restaking project in the market. EigenLayer operates a three-pronged marketplace consisting of restakers, node operators, and actively validated services (“AVSs”). EigenLayer has taken a phased approach to its launch, utilizing restaking deposit caps to manage the growth of the protocol. They are currently in the middle of Stage 2, with a full mainnet launch expected after Stage 3 in the second half of this year.EigenDA, a data availability layer, will be the first AVS to launch using EigenLayer’s pooled security model. A number of other teams, including Espresso, AltLayer, Lagrange, Hyperlane, and more, are working on their own AVSs. Babylon, a Bitcoin staking protocol, and Picasso, an interoperability-focused infrastructure layer,  are working on similar shared security protocols for Bitcoin and Solana, respectively.Liquid restaking protocols allow users to participate in restaking while maintaining liquidity through a token (“LRT”). These LRTs can then be used across the DeFi space to generate incremental yield. The liquid restaking market is growing fast, boasting over US$3.5B in TVL. Ether.fi, Puffer Finance, Kelp DAO, and Renzo Protocol have emerged at the top of the rankings for now, while many other teams are also innovating rapidly and seeking to enter the market in the foreseeable future.
Read the full report here.

Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is a weekly initiative by our Research team for a quick industry round-up.

Highlights 🧵:
1/ Over the last week, Bitcoin has seen a 8.5% WoW increase to a value of US$46.6K. The total crypto market cap has also risen by 4.6% on a WoW basis. This uptick follows the net positive inflows into spot BTC ETFs, and comes as the anticipated Bitcoin Halving approaches, now just 66 days away.
2/ Farcaster has gained widespread attention after the release of its new "Frames" feature, which enables users to interact with mini-apps directly from social feeds. Following the introduction of Frames, daily active users on Farcaster-based apps like Warpcast have leaped more than 15x from 2.4K to 39.7K.
3/ In other news, Ethereum's Dencun upgrade has successfully rolled out on the Holesky testnet, marking the last testnet upgrade before mainnet deployment. Ethereum core developers have pinpointed March 13 as the target date for this highly anticipated mainnet upgrade. Meanwhile, a new unofficial, experimental token standard, ERC404, has sparked the interest of many in the past week.
Check out our latest publications from this week 🔎:
Navigating the Inscriptions LandscapeMonthly Market Insights - February 2024

Inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens have impacted the Bitcoin ecosystem beyond transaction metrics and block demand, serving as catalysts for ecosystem developments.

In our new report, we examine their impact and latest developments.

Read the full report here.
Inscriptions and BRC-20s have served as significant catalysts for activity in the Bitcoin ecosystem over the past year. They have also invigorated developer communities by drawing in new talent, accelerating the pace of project updates, and generating innovations within the Bitcoin ecosystem.Despite being in its infancy, the landscape of Bitcoin Ordinals has branched out into various sectors, such as DeFi, NFTs, and tooling, fostering a small yet growing ecosystem.Inscriptions have also expanded beyond Bitcoin to a range of other EVM-compatible chains. Trading activity initially surged, causing network outages in some instances, but has since subsided significantly. Considering that these EVM-compatible chains possess native smart contract functionality and the trade-offs associated with using off-chain indexers, it remains to be seen if inscription activity on EVM-compatible chains will experience a resurgence. In this report, we also shine light on a few platforms through which users can participate in inscriptions. These include trading, inscribing, and storing inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens, among other actions.