About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund. Founders should reply to this email to get in touch.

Network Coverage
This week our contributor analysts cover Hop, Connext, Ren, and Fei Protocol.

• Hop Exchange is a cross-L2 bridging protocol. The project uses “bonders” (essentially LPs) to front liquidity on a cross-chain AMM for trading fees; L2 canonical tokens are exchanged for Hop Bridge Tokens, which can be swapped for the underlying asset on L1 or a different L2 token. It supports Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, xDai, Optimism, and Arbitrum. Total Hop users recently grew to 35k+. The exchange saw ~$23m in volume over the past week and over $300m total since its launch in late June.

• Hop volume continues to grow as DeFi users bridge assets to L2s. Unsurprisingly, most of the volume is between Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon. Hop only allows swaps between ETH, stablecoins, and MATIC; approximately 50% of the volume is ETH, 45% is stablecoins, and 5% is MATIC.

• Hop TVL is now tracking around $120m across multiple chains. Polygon and Optimism TVL are around $11.5m; Optimism’s TVL exploded over the past few months, along with Polygon whose TVL passed its previous ATH in October. xDai saw some traction as well with 7D volume jumping ~2x, but TVL still trails behind major L2s.

• Connext is a cross-chain liquidity bridge, currently connecting nine EVM-based chains with each other. It is a non-custodial and very capital-efficient way to bridge assets from one chain to another. Since the launch of their liquidity bridge in early October, Connext has facilitated over $350 million in volume, spread across 305k transactions. In the last 30 days alone Connext facilitated $153 million in volume across 135k transactions, averaging a daily volume of $4.9 million.

• An interesting observation is the in- and out-going number of transactions — Over the last 30 days the majority of outflows facilitated via Connext came from Binance Smart Chain. The highest number of incoming transactions was observed on the xDAI network, followed by Polygon and Fantom.

• There are currently 22 routers active on Connext, providing $19 million in liquidity. Rebalancing liquidity between chains is a constant task for routers, as the chains with a lot of outflows concentrate liquidity while it becomes scarce at chains with a lot of incoming transactions.

• Fei has partnered with Ondo to launch Liquidity as a Service (Laa$). Laa$ allows protocols to create liquidity in a manner that is significantly less expensive than traditional liquidity mining. The initial launch group has generated $100M TVL across Uniswap pools for Gro, Synapse, UMA, Kylin, Near, PoolTogether, Shapeshift, and mStable.

• The Fei DAO Fuse pool is one of the largest pools on Rari — with the aggregate TVL reaching $155M. A large portion of this is single-sided TRIBE staking. Farms in the FEI ecosystem currently have more than $550M TVL earning yield with an overall rate of 22.6%.

• FEI’s activity on DEX’s is continually increasing. It regularly reaches levels above $100M in daily volume and occasionally surpasses $200M. Partnering with Gelato has led to significant increases of concentrated liquidity and volume on Uniswap V3. A dashboard can be found here.

• Ren is an inter-blockchain liquidity protocol. Total value minted across all integrated chains stands at $1.02B, -36% from its ATH in in late October. This is the result of both asset price movement and net outflows of token from RenVM. Continued chain integrations for RenVM has translated into diversified minting from Ethereum, with Solana leading at $118m in total mint value. Ethereum’s 'mint value' dominance has now climbed to 76% with other chains not achieving the same level of product-market-fit.

• Cumulative volume transacted via RenVM has reached $8.76B. Ren charges mint and burn fees on this volume so, while mint value has fallen in recent weeks, Ren can still capture value. Revenue composition shows ~98% of protocol income is associated with users minting/burning a single asset — BTC.

• Darknodes bond REN to secure the network. 186m REN ($94m or 18.6% total supply) is bonded today. Fluctuations appear to be loosely driven by wider market dynamics. As the network decentralizes, bond value will have to be 3x minted value. Towards this goal, delegation infrastructure could be a potential catalyst for such an increase in REN bonding.