While the impact of inscriptions on most networks may have been short-lived, they proved profoundly consequential on Solana.

When FTX and Alameda collapsed, many worried about the fate of the Solana blockchain and how the event might impact the DeFi ecosystem, and indeed the general mayhem that ensued during that week pushed everything to the limit.

As the FTX situation was unraveling, the Solana community quickly realized that a core piece of infrastructure might be at risk. Despite Serum being run by its own DAO, the program update key was actually in the hands of someone connected to FTX, but no one knew who that was. Even more concerning is that on Nov 13, FTX itself was the subject of an apparent exploit, casting even more doubt over the security of the protocol, which could put at risk everyone interacting with Serum.

Solana has been extremely busy this week trying to contain the mayhem created by the fall of FTX and Alameda, two of the largest entities with a stake in the Solana blockchain and ecosystem. One of the greatest threats posed by a sudden and dramatic decrease in the price of $SOL is that locked tokens will be unstaked and leave the Proof of Stake network a lot less secure and descentralized. But while regularly those staked tokens have to go through a cooldown period until the end of their staking epoch, liquid staked tokens through staking pools can be either unlocked instantly for a fee or swapped on the open market.

Alameda, the sister company of the FTX crypto exchange, was an early investor into Solana and held around $1B worth of $SOL, although around 80% of it is supposedly locked one way or another, as well as a variety of other tokens of projects built on the blockchain. This week however, as rumors about FTX and Alameda having serious financial issues transformed into more than just rumors, the Solana ecosystem braced for impact.

Much of the value proposition of smart contract blockchains during the 2021 bull market was based on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) DAPPS, but after a long period of retracing value and several hacks later, that category does not incite as much excitement anymore. Some call DeFi dead. But what’s not dead and actually was born during that market cycle was the need for reliable scaling solutions that would allow users to avoid the frequent gas surges of the Ethereum Mainnet and allow projects to explore use cases that would have been inaccessible otherwise.

The Near ecosystem continues to grow and with it a longer list of tokens is available for users to swap their $NEAR to. In this report we will have a closer look at the swapping activity using the native token of the blockchain and try to uncover what the outflow of $NEAR is and what other tokens all that value goes to.

Although anyone can quickly be onboarded to Optimism using a CEX or a credit card, the main road to the Ethereum scaling solution is over a bridge. After all, the reason for it to exists is for Mainnet users to access a faster and less expensive network while maintaining a familiar experience and therefore their main audience are people already on the blockchain. But once they get to Optimism, where do they go?

One of the backbones of any DeFi ecosystem is having a place where you can quickly access liquidity and exchange assets in a trustless, decentralized way. In other words, any smart contract blockchain needs a Decentralized Exchange. In this report we will have a look at three of the largest DEXs on the Optimism Layer 2 network and compare their performance over the last month.