📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork’s latest on decentralized exchanges. 

Leading off, we have our friends at Token Terminal providing an overview. Oğuz covers Velodrome's by chain dynamics, Jelena digs into DragonSwap, Sei's leading DEX, and Oluwole checks out Shadow Exchange and its token mechanics. Last but not least, Alex checks out Ekubo's surprising momentum facilitating trades of on the USDC-USDT pairs.

The chains never sleep. Let's get to it.

– ON Editorial Team

Sector Update | Velodrome | DragonSwap | Shadow Exchange | Ekubo

• DEX activity is at an all-time high as quarterly trading volume surpassed $1 trillion in Q2 2025. DEX trading volume is up ~100% year-over-year.

• BNB Chain is the top venue for onchain trading. The top three chains, based on Q2 DEX trading volume, are BNB Chain, Solana, and Ethereum. BNB Chain accounted for ~50% of the market sector's volume during Q2.

• PancakeSwap is the top DEX by volume. The top three DEXs, based on Q2 trading volume, are PancakeSwap, Uniswap, and Raydium. These three exchanges accounted for ~80% of the market sector's volume during Q2.

• Velodrome spans 11 superstack chains, but due to Dune data limits, five are analyzed below. The DEX's TVL stabilized in May, with Optimism leading at between $50M and $123M, hitting a peak of $123.8M in January. Q1 saw TVL dips. Ink holds between $5M and $7M, Unichain between $0.5M and $2.5M, Celo is at $1.2M and $2.6M, and Superseed is at $0.15M and $1M.

• The graph shows volume by chain in bar format and quarterly cumulative volume. Unichain’s volume has the highest volume to TVL ratio so far in Q3, reflecting efficient use of liquidity. Q3 volume nearly matches Q2’s $3.3B with 30 days still remaining in the quarter.

• Velodrome launched 'superswaps' feature on June 20, this feature enables users to between superchains without effort. Velodrome is using Hyperlane for the feature. To the date, there's been $901k in superswap volume, between the five selected chains.

• DragonSwap has surpassed $3.2B in cumulative trading volume, making it the largest spot trading protocol on Sei. It took DragonSwap 5 months to reach $200M in total trading volume, then just 19 days to double that. The platfrom crossed $2B in under a year and has ranked among DefiLlama’s top 50 DEXs multiple times.

• According to DefiLlama, DragonSwap ranks first in fees on Sei, reaching $8.41M in cumulative fees. Over the past year, trading generated $8.25M in fees, $959,515 in the last 30 days, reflecting DragonSwap’s strong user trust and activity on Sei.

• With 260k+ users and 10M+ transactions, DragonSwap stands among the most active platforms on Sei.

• Shadow Exchange is a concentrated-liquidity DEX built natively on the Sonic blockchain. Designed for capital efficiency and deep liquidity, it adopts an organic growth model funded through protocol-generated fees and community incentives. After an impressive run in Q1 2025, the Sonic ecosystem (including Shadow) has seen waning metrics, but Shadow remains the leader in volume, swaps, and user base. It commands over 65% of Sonic’s DEX volume.

• Shadow’s native token, which has lost 63% in value over 90 days, has now seen an increased number of holders (200%). This has led to more holders and increased supply of the DEX's governance token xSHADOW, and x33, its liquid staked, yield-bearing version.

• Over the past 30 days, fees have surged by 32%, with revenue maintaining a steady range. With its unique fee-split model, 100% of fees earned on liquidity pairs voted into the xSHADOW rewards system go to xSHADOW holders.

• Ekubo Protocol is an automated market maker deployed on Ethereum and Starknet, designed for capital efficiency and modularity. With liquidity ticks 100 times smaller than Uniswap v3, a singleton “till” design that minimizes gas, and extensible pools for features like TWAMM or oracles, Ekubo enables $1k to perform like $100k elsewhere. In just six months it has surpassed $27B in cumulative volume and 1.06M trades, making it one of the fastest-scaling DEXs.

• Over 90% of Ekubo’s volume runs through the stablecoin pair USDC-USDT. In recent weeks Ekubo has surged to become the leading DEX in this pair, capturing over 30% of volume and surpassing Uniswap and Fluid, highlighting how Ekubo turned stablecoin swaps into its core growth driver.

• Ekubo’s volume is highly concentrated: over 80% comes from just a handful of MEV bots, while aggregators like 1inch and CoW account for barely 1%. On CoW Swap, nearly all flow is routed through the Barter solver, showing liquidity driven by a narrow set of actors.