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This Week In DeFi – March 22

This Week In DeFi – March 22

Alex Miguel
March 22, 2024

Happy Friday, DeFi readers!

This week…

L2 Base sees 51% surge in volume
EtherFi announces airdrop
TON launches $100M+ incentives program
Solana continues to thrive

L2 Base sees 51% surge in volume

Ethereum Layer-2 network Base has become the latest platform to see a surge in activity, as daily trading volume surged 51% Tuesday to $356 million. Total value locked (TVL) has also reached a new all-time high of $745 million.

The boost has in part been assisted by Ethereum’s recent Dencun upgrade, making improvements to L2 transaction fees.

Despite the reductions to fees, Coinbase has warned users of high fees and slowdowns to the network due to congestion.

A lot of you are fading @base
A $65 billion dollar company is behind it
100 million users will be onboarded without even needing to write down/remember their seed phrase
Coinbase reported $1.7 trillion in trading volume in 2021… just image if even a small % of that migrated… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— borovik.eth (@3orovik)
Mar 21, 2024

EtherFi announces airdrop

Liquid staking platform EtherFi announced an airdrop for its active community members, allocating 6% of its total supply of 1 billion tokens.

The airdrop was targeted at eETH users, EtherFi points holders, EtherFans NFT holders, and solo Ethereum stakers.

EtherFi has also outlined its tokenomics plan, which includes 11% in total for airdrops, almost a third for investors, 23% allocated to core contributors, 27% to its treasury, and 6% to EtherFi Foundation partners.

We are happy to announce that the ETHFI token claim is open!
Go to claim.ether.fi to check your eligibility and claim✔️
The ETHFI token contract address is
0xFe0c30065B384F05761f15d0CC899D4F9F9Cc0eB
— ether.fi (@ether_fi)
Mar 18, 2024

TON launches $100M+ incentives program

The TON Foundation is launching a $124 million incentives program, distributing 30 million Toncoin tokens through its “Open League” campaign to boost development and user engagement on The Open Network.

The program aims to attract developers and dApp users with season-based rewards, including $15 million for developers and $22 million for dApp users, in an effort to enhance TON's ecosystem and show its potential for mass audience consumer products.

TON's Total Value Locked (TVL) has seen an increase of 133% over four weeks, while Toncoin's price has surged by 53% in two weeks, nearing its all-time high, as Telegram announced it will share ad revenue with channel owners via Toncoin.

🚀 April 1st. Open League S1. $115M in $TON for community rewards!
The pilot season was just a teaser – time to double down on fun & rewards with the first full season, starting Apr 1st.
Want to be part of one of the biggest Web3 events ever? This 🧵 is for you 👇 twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— TON 💎 (@ton_blockchain)
Mar 20, 2024

Solana continues to thrive

DeFi on Solana continues to shatter expectations, as DEXes Raydium and Jupiter dominate with market shares of 20.8% and 16.2% of the entire sector’s trading volume, respectively.

Most interestingly, Solana-based meme token Slerf managed to account for a larger trading volume than all DeFi on Ethereum on its first day of trading.

Daily transaction fees have soared on Solana this year, increasing ten-fold since January.

JUST IN: Solana memecoin $SLERF total DEX volume hits $4.65B.
— Whale Insider (@WhaleInsider)
Mar 21, 2024

Is Solana meme action heading to Ethereum Layer-2s?

Solana’s meme token season has rampaged through 2024, showing wildly impressive growth and momentum as its network not only came back from the dead, but has managed to outpace its largest competitor, Ethereum, in recent months.

However, with the introduction of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, it appears that users are remembering that Solana isn’t the only place that they can get cheaper transactions in DeFi – Ethereum Layer-2s are also in the game.

This realization has been illustrated in the recent explosions in TVL across several Layer-2 platforms, with an especially apparent increase in meme token activity on Coinbase-backed L2, Base.

Base TVL & volume, Jul 2023 – Mar 2024, via DeFiLlama.com

The excitement around meme tokens on Base, spurred by tokens like Normie (NORMIE), Briun Armstrong (BRIUN), and Brett (BRETT), mirrors the Solana meme token season, highlighting the major influence of retail investors and the viral nature of such tokens.

Looking deeper, however, what does meme token activity really mean?

Meme token trading volumes – and where they’re highest – often indicate two things:

Strong retail participation (from “new money” investors")
High general traffic, but affordable fees.

In previous years, Ethereum had greater meme token participation levels due to being highly accessible to retail participants (the easiest blockchain to access). Since then, however, fees have gotten out of control – leading to competing platforms becoming more greatly utilized.

Solana has become easy to on-board for retail traders, and during a certain period benefitted nicely from close ties to the then-popular exchange, FTX. With low fees, low barriers to accessibility, and an established presence, Solana has filled the space that Ethereum left with high fees.

But now, Ethereum L2s are becoming much more easily accessible – primarily thanks to withdrawal support directly to some of these platforms via exchanges.

With the backing of the well-established exchange Coinbase, Base has primed itself to be the retail DeFi platform of choice for the next wave of new money…

And where meme tokens go, money flows.