For the re.al ecosystem, October truly was Uptober.

Across all of the key protocols within the ecosystem, new products and updates were deployed during October aimed at bringing stability and new liquidity to the re.al. This work has been an unequivocal success, boosting TVL and new users on the chain, propelling re.al to the #16 spot in the L2Beat rankings.

Let’s have a look back at some of the key successes from the month of October.

re.al

October was a massive month of overall growth for re.al.

Per L2Beat, TVL on the chain jumped $83MM, an increase of 2.7x in just over one month.

This coincided with a jump in cumulative revenue, $RWA APY and new accounts on the chain.

During the month of October, cumulative revenue surpassed the $1MM milestone, a total generated over just six months through nearly all organic growth. And despite the general volatility in $RWA over the month, the APY saw a significant lift, driven largely by increases in fees generated from Caviar and Stack, Pearl volumes and improved performance from Arcana’s strategies.

Beyond the numbers, October included major milestones in tokenomics, partnerships and improvements to chain infrastructure.

stRWA was deployed, giving users a liquid wrapper option to veRWA. Users no longer need to hold locked veRWA positions to accrue the native yields generated on re.al, stRWA is a fully liquid option that returns yields back to holders as incremental stRWA tokens (via reabse). stRWA also brings $RWA yields cross-chain as the new, natively cross-chain version of the re.al governance token.

New partners Impermax deployed to re.al, offering users their first opportunity to leverage farm liquidity pools on the chain’s native liquidity layer, Pearl.

Arbitrum’s major update “Fast Withdrawals” also deployed, bringing with it faster finality and transaction settlement on the L1. For re.al users, the key benefit to this is accelerated settlement on canonical bridge transactions, which has been reduced from seven days down to just six hours. Faster finality also creates new efficiencies for 3rd-party bridging solutions, opening the door to the adoption of intents-based transactions, cross-chain transactions and even fast bridging services that seamlessly connect re.​al to the rest of the crypto economy.

And the proprietary “Speed Bridge” was updated to add instant bridging of USDC between the Ethereum L1 and re.al, adding to the existing bridged between Arbitrum, Base and Polygon.

Pearl

October was an equally strong month for Pearl, which experienced its most significant growth since the deployment to re.al in May ‘24.

Pearl now boasts a multitude of new pools for tokenized RWAs and other premium digital assets. Users also now have the chance to deploy liquidity into traditional constant product or stable swap pools, in addition to the concentrated liquidity pools Pearl v2 initially deployed with. For users providing capital in the CL pools, they’ll have their choice of both Pearl’s proprietary ALM “Trident” as well as various vaults offered by ICHI, one of DeFi’s leading providers of automated liquidity management.

Major updates to Caviar bring new features and opportunities for the community on re.al. The Caviar staking design was updated, removing the historic staking chef in favor of an sCVR staking token. sCVR can be deposited into the compounding csCVR ERC-4626 vault, which collects CVR rewards and uses them to purchase new CVR for stakers. The Beluga vault on Stack gives users a chance to leverage their csCVR for even larger rewards.

Boosted by optimizations to the flywheel, driven by the csCVR deployment, Pearl saw a massive jump in emissions value over the course of October. This lift in emissions value nearly translated 1:1 with the growth to TVL. Pearl added $17MM in new capital over the course of October, a 3.5x growth in total size, positioning Pearl as the fourth largest Solidly fork in DeFi.

With emissions value at an all time high, it’s never been a better time to provide liquidity on Pearl, helping expand the visibility of re.al and attract new protocols to the chain.

Stack

Like Pearl, Stack saw significant growth during the month of October, jumping from $2MM in TVL to nearly $57MM in TVL over the course of the month. The launch of the Beluga vault and compounding of sCVR in Stack was chiefly responsible for this boost to TVL. While TVL has exploded, $MORE issuance has maintained its measured, even pace to ensure borrowing demand is matched with deep enough liquidity and demand for $MORE to maintain peg.

Peg stability has been a critical focus for Stack over October. The new Peg Stability Module and AMO both launched during the month, providing better systems and tools to support the price of $MORE and mitigate future depegs.

In fact, $MORE did suffer a brief depeg at the end of October. Contagion from the collapse of a project on Scroll spread to Stack, driving panic selling of $MORE. The team acted quickly imposing emergency rate hikes to force the closure of open positions (increasing $MORE demand and reducing supply) while also boosting staking rates which was a secondary means to driving demand. Within a few days, peg had been fully restored and nearly $3MM had been added to the PSM/AMO.

The team’s response during the crisis was well-received by the community and the team has seen a new influx of users to the ecosystem as a result of their management during the crisis. The team will continue to build liquidity for $MORE, looking at cross-chain solutions to drive demand. Pools on Base and Arbitrum launched in October, there’s now nearly $2MM in cross-chain liquidity for $MORE.

As liquidity deepens and demand increases, expect borrowing capacity to continue to increase, allowing the community to continue stacking.

Arcana and Tangible

Both protocols saw significant growth during the month of October.

Arcana’s $arcUSD token, re.al’s native basis trade/delta-neutral yield token saw a huge boost in TVL, growing from just under $4MM to nearly $6.5MM in October alone, a 1.65x jump in AUM. Despite the increased TVL, Arcana’s arcUSD continued to lead all basis trade tokens in performance, at times delivering well over 20% rebasing yield, with no staking and no lock-ups required. $arcUSD remains one of the top performing basis trade assets in DeFi and a powerful tool in the liquidity generation strategy on re.al.

Tangible has also made major gains in its business goals during October. USDR redemptions opened in October, the first step to making USDR holders 100% whole. By the end of the month, $3.5MM in USDC had been returned to users, permanently burning nearly 10% of total supply. Meanwhile, the UKRE Baskets TVL continued steady growth over the month, topping out at $4.5MM at the time of posting.

Coming soon…

There’s plenty more to get excited about in the coming weeks. Be sure to follow along for all the updates on re.al.