About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Opyn, dYdX, and Mango Markets.

• Opyn is building DeFi-native derivatives and options infrastructure. At the time of writing, there is an all time high of $328m of collateral locked in Opyn contracts. The 3,465% YoY increase in TVL is primarily due to DeFi’s adoption of structured products using underlying option strategies. Structured products take options or complex derivatives and turn them into simple, automated positions that are easy for users to understand. Ribbon Finance and Stake DAO are the largest protocols built on Opyn.

• On January 14, 2022 Opyn launched Squeeth, the first-ever Power Perpetual. Squeeth functions similar to a perpetual swap, tracking the index of ETH² rather than ETH. There is currently 7,515.454 ETH (~$23.5M) locked in Squeeth contracts from 5,328 unique users.

• Since launch, cumulative volume for Squeeth has surpassed $116m. At the time of writing, there is around 1.32% of price impact + slippage for a 300k swap on Uniswap.

• dYdX launched its iOS beta on March 9 and quickly received over 200k signups. Users could join the waitlist to get access to the beta either by holding $DYDX/Hedgies or signing up and referring friends to the waitlist. The campaign has already led to a 40%+ increase in weekly active takers on the exchange. Head here to sign up for the waitlist.

• dYdX crossed $500b in cumulative volumes roughly 1 year after launching its Layer 2. Daily average trade volumes continue to be strong, typically ranging between $1.5b and $5b.

• Over 2,700 accounts hold stkDYDX. This number has grown 80%+ since the beginning of the year. On December 20, 2021, the DYDX token holders voted to include stkDYDX as an input to the liquidity mining program in an effort to increase DYDX ownership amongst the active traders on the exchange.

• Mango Markets is a decentralized platform built on Solana that offers a single place to lend, borrow, trade and leverage crypto assets. Even in a down market, Mango has continued adding new users, with almost 2,700 added in 2022 and a sustained peak of 100 daily new users arriving in mid-February.

• New users tend to try out the platform with small amounts first. Therefore, most made a deposit of less than 1 SOL. There were very few users who deposited more than 1000 SOL.

• Looking at the borrowed amount for LUNA, there was almost a 3x increase since March 9, 2022. This could be shorts setting up for a downturn in LUNA from its recent-highs.