About the editor: Spencer Noon is co-founder of Variant Fund. Founders should reply to this email to get in touch.

Network Coverage: DeFi and ConstitutionDAO
This week our contributor analysts cover ConstitutionDAO, dYdX, BarnBridge, DeFi Kingdoms, and Paraswap.

• ConstitutionDAO was created to try and raise $20m to buy the U.S. constitution at the Sotheby's auction on November 18th. It took four days to raise 11,150ETH, with parabolic momentum. The first 2,500 ETH took 3 days, but after a whale donated 1000ETH the contributions started to pour in. There were a few large contributions of 50-500 ETH, but most contributions came in at 0.05-0.1 ETH. Although the DAO was not successful in its bid, narrowly losing the auction, there are reports that this was the largest crowdfund for a physical object ever!

• Average (<40 transactions in wallet) and first-time (first transaction in wallet) Ethereum users made over 50% of the number of contributions from start to finish! That's pretty amazing to see, and a lesson to learn for onboarding more users to Web3 (16000 unique addresses total).

• There was a reliance on mini-whales in this crowdfund, with 50% of total funds raised came from contributions of 33ETH less in size. The median contribution was 0.05 ETH (7000 users in this bucket), and they made up 12% of total funding.

• dYdX remains the top decentralized exchange by trading volume across the ecosystem. Compared to other perpetual trading protocols, dYdX is capturing 95%+ of the market on a daily basis. According to CoinMarketCap, dYdX captures roughly 12% of the daily total decentralized exchange volume.

• dYdX Trading Rewards continue to be extremely distributed, with no one address capturing more than 4.2% of the rewards during the current epoch. 3,835,616 DYDX are distributed via Trading Rewards per epoch, which at current prices translates into roughly $49M in USD terms.

• There is currently 816.6M USDC in the Liquidity Staking Pool across 1042 unique stakers. This USDC is used as a zero interest un-collateralized loan to whitelisted market makers controlled by dYdX governance. Liquidity on the protocol will continue to increase as the pool becomes more utilized.

• SMART Alpha has grown to $5M+ in TVL after 10 weeks. It allows users to speculate on the expected performance of an asset through staking their asset(s) in Junior or Senior tranches of liquidity. Junior positions (Juniors) receive levered outcomes while Senior positions (Seniors) receive absolute downside protection up to a certain decline in price. The largest SMART Alpha pool at the moment is WETH-USD on Ethereum. SMART Alpha Juniors, who’ve held their positions since launch, have earned an ETH-denominated return of 34% (~176% annualized).

• The WETH-USD pool is split 95%:5% between Seniors and Juniors. This means that Juniors are receiving 18.8x exposure to ETH while Seniors receive 3.85% of absolute downside protection. Next week's pool ratio is even more extreme with just 5% on the Junior side showcasing bearish market sentiment.

• Apart from ETH mainnet, SMART Alpha is also deployed on Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and Arbitrum with over $250k worth of assets in TVL. Further expansion to additional Layer 2 solutions will make it possible for more users to bet on the assets' prices and grow their portfolio’s value.

• Since its relatively quiet debut back in August, DeFi Kingdoms has seen an unprecedented rate of growth in the past month. Built on the L2 scaling solution Harmony, the GameFi platform combines DeFi elements (decentralized exchanges, liquidity pools and staking) with an elaborate NFT-based hero system. In a span of three months DFK's player base has grown from under 1k to 41k — including $904 million in total transaction volume and $2.12 billion in assets.

• Thanks to DFK's recent success, TVL on Harmony (including staked tokens) hit record highs of $550 million earlier this week. DFK's TVL, which grew by 47% to $310 million in the past week, now accounts for 55.19% of Harmony's TVL. For comparison, SushiSwap is the next largest protocol at $95 million TVL.

• JEWEL, which is DeFi Kingdom's governance token and in-game currency, rose over 230% since the start of November. With a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $4 billion, JEWEL is now more valuable than Harmony's governance token ONE – which currently trades at $3.28 billion FDV.