According to the terms of the deal, the tokens were sold at $0.4 with a 6-month lock-up period, but there was no enforced lock-up; these were more verbal agreements rather than vesting schedules or direct locks through smart contracts.

The transactions took place on August 1-2, 2023, when the market price was in the range of $0.58-0.616. As of the publication date, June 13, 2024, the price of $CRV is $0.299, with the minimum on June 13 being $0.228.

Note: In the following text, the movement of CRV to exchange wallets does not necessarily indicate sales, as in the case of Wintermute, it could have been used for market making. Therefore, the diagram below shows the relevant transactions and price movements. From this data, the following conclusions can be drawn:

1. Transfers of large amounts of $CRV from various participants did not lead to price drops; \

2. The sharp decline starting in April 2024 coincided with increased activity from Wintermute, involving a large number of transactions on CEXes.

• 0x3DdfA - the wallet belongs to Justin Sun, who has not sold any CRV and, moreover, has even made additional purchases:

• 0x4D3e45 - a wallet that is presumably owned by Wintermute, received 2.5 million CRV on August 1st. On November 1st, these tokens were directed to Voting Escrow, and on March 8, 2024, 2.5 million CRV were sent to Coinbase. Interestingly, after March 8th, there was a slight price increase (as seen in the chart at the beginning with the timestamps):

• 0xFa4FC4, a wallet belonging to DCF GOD, received 4.25 million $CRV on August 1st and currently holds a balance of 181k $CRV. On the same day, August 1st, 1.25 million $CRV were sent to wallet 0xa9c8E0, where they were immediately staked in Convex. Then, on August 3rd, 1.313 million $CVXCRV were sent from 0xa9c8E0 to wallet 0x8a6C24, where they were unwrapped into 1.144 million $CRV on March 3, 2024. Subsequently, 1.15 million CRV were transferred to the Wintermute OTC wallet on March 3rd. From there, 1.15 million CRV were moved to another Wintermute wallet, 0xDBF5E.

  Additionally, it is worth noting that Wintermute 0xDBF5E has been very actively selling $CRV over the past few days across various platforms, and there was a significant series of movements to exchange wallets from March 30th to April 12th:

Also interesting is that after receiving 1.15m $CRV the Wintermute 0xDBF5E wallet made 3 transfers on 4 March for 459k, 447k and 432k to Binance Deposit and 239k to Coinbase. In total, this wallet has 2.418m $CRV in its balance as of 13 June:

• 0xD4B69e DWF Labs received 2.5m $CRV (TXID 1) and shortly after, also on August 1st, another 10m $CRV (TXID 2). Currently, 0xD4B69e DWF Labs has a balance of 2m $CRV. Interestingly, on August 18, 2023, 12.5m $CRV were sent to the intermediary wallet 0x951E33, from which 2m $CRV were sent to Binance on August 19, 2023. As of now, 0x951E33 holds 10.5m $CRV:

• 0x6D5a75 Cream Finance Multisig received 2.5m $CRV on August 1, 2023, and as of June 13, 2024, has no $CRV remaining. On August 2, 2023, all 2.5m CRV were sent to creamcrvlocker. These tokens were unlocked on February 1, 2024, and on the same day were sold through CoW Protocol in exchange for USDC and USDT:

• 0x020cA6 Machi Big Brother (Jeffrey Huang) received 3.75 million $CRV and immediately sent them to Curve Voting Escrow. Like Cream Finance, these tokens were unlocked on February 1 and were then promptly sent to Binance.

• 0xf510Dc - this wallet received 7 transactions of 2.5m $CRV each, after which 17.5m $CRV were sent to wallet 0x23f79D, from which they were immediately sent on August 1, 2023, to 0x00fb4c.

  This last wallet, in turn, sent 7.5m $CRV on August 8 to 0x17a00A, from which all tokens were sent in two transactions on August 9 and 16 to 0x583921. This wallet, in turn, sent 5m $CRV on August 10, 2023, back to 0x00fb4c, which was mentioned earlier, and from which 15m $CRV were transferred to 0xce50eb, where they were sent to Curve Voting Escrow on August 15. On February 21, 2024, 15m $CRV were unlocked, with 10m returning to Curve Voting Escrow on February 22, and 5m sent to Binance on February 24.

  2.5m $CRV from 0x583921 were sent on August 17 to 0x993054, from which they were immediately locked in Curve Voting Escrow, where they remain to this day.

• 0xAAc0aa (c2tp) received 2.5m $CRV on August 1, 2023, and this wallet immediately sent them to Convex, periodically locking the received $CRV back in Convex. This wallet has not sold the received $CRV.

• 0xcb5a9d received 1.25m $CRV on August 1. On August 22, 2023, this wallet sent 2.5m $CRV to the LST-backed CDP Prisma Finance address.

• 0xb0b851 erwwer received 2.5m $CRV, but currently has no $CRV balance. On September 13, 2023, approximately 610k $CRV were sent to Binance, and immediately returned to the wallet—possibly for liquidity testing purposes. Then, like Cream Finance and Machi Big Brother, on February 1, 2024, the tokens were sent to the exchange - Binance:

Regarding the transactions and wallets that purchased $CRV over-the-counter (OTC), the observations are somewhat ambiguous. Some OTC buyers sold tokens immediately on February 1, exactly six months later, while others did so in March. Justin Sun not only refrains from selling but also continues to accumulate relatively small amounts. DWF currently holds the majority of tokens. Another interesting observation is that apparently, DCF GOD sold part of the tokens to Wintermute OTC. However, overall, all participants in these transactions adhered to verbal agreements.

Note: This material represents the author's thoughts, subjective opinions, and conclusions based on observations and does not reflect the position of any company on this issue.

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• Why retrospective analysis is important and how it can be applied to new narratives?

• What conclusions can be drawn from the trajectory of LSDFi development after a year?

• Differences in the restaking narrative compared to the LSDFi narrative

• Brief overview of the current landscape around restaking

• Aspects of ecosystem development around Curve Finance that may be applicable to restaking and LRTFi

• Conclusion

Why is retrospective analysis important and how can it be applied to new narratives?

The most obvious answer to this question lies in the development dynamics of LSDFi and LRTFi. Projects like Lido, Rocket Pool, Stader, and others once offered users the ability to maintain liquidity for assets staked in Ethereum. For a long time, LSTs were primarily used in DEXs, lending platforms, and other DeFi protocols in fairly limited scenarios. The term LSDFi itself emerged around the 2022-2023 transition period when protocols aimed at utilizing LST began to appear. Looking at EigenLayer in this context, it resembles Ethereum – the protocol itself doesn't offer liquid tokens, so LRT protocols quickly emerged in large numbers, following a model that had already been tested with LSTs.

Thus, analyzing the development frameworks of previous major narratives and ecosystems allows us to speculate on the development vector of the direction under consideration. In particular, I examined the LSDFi industry landscape in mid-2023 ("Global overview of the LSDFi ecosystem," "A Comparative Overview of LST-Backed CDP Stablecoin Protocols"). A possible framework for assessing the potential development prospects of LSDFi was the analysis of the ecosystem development around Curve Finance ("The Saga of Curve Finance 2: Curve Ecosystem as a Template for LSDFi").

What conclusions can be drawn from the trajectory of LSDFi development after a year?

As observed in the articles mentioned above and based on extensive observations, the peak of LSDFi occurred in the spring to early summer of 2023. Almost a year later, the following observations can be confirmed:

• Early projects such as unshETH, LSDx, 0xAcid, and Agility faded within a few months due to broken tokenomics, characterized by a strong bias towards native token mining. This led to continuous declines in these tokens' value and disillusionment within their communities.

• LST-backed CDP protocols like Raft, Gravita, and eventually Lybra (many of which were based on Liquidity) faced arbitrage mechanism imbalances. Borrowers encountered situations where they had to forfeit additional profits due to changes in the stablecoin's CDP protocol exchange rate and collateral redemption value. This also contributed to community disillusionment due to creditors being trapped in their positions.

• To cover operational expenses and maintain native tokens and reserve funds, CDP-backed protocols introduced a fee on earned yield, further diminishing incentives for liquidity provision.

• Coupled with high Collateral Ratio figures, the situation unfolded as follows: the protocol advertised users could earn 8–10% yield on staked LST, even just for holding the stablecoin, which seemed enticing. However, there was a catch: users deposited, say, $2000, at a CR of 150%, they received $1333 in protocol stablecoins, and at a CR of 200%, they received $1000. Essentially, the issue was that lenders deposited, say, $2000, for which the LSD protocol provided a 3.6% yield, while the LST protocol provided stablecoins worth $1000, on which the yield was derived from $2000, i.e., 7.2%. However, in reality, when looking at the actual yield in LST-backed CDPs and LSD protocols, CDPs yielded even less profit in quantitative terms on invested funds, but they attempted to compensate for this through various mechanics involving native tokens.

• Ultimately, if we look at the current state of these protocols, we can conclude that Raft, Gravita, and Lybra haven't gained significant traction. Even Prisma Finance, with broad support and intricate liquidity pool mechanics, as well as incentives from Curve and Yearn (and according to publications and tweets, Prisma is associated with the independent research group Llama Risk), shows less than stellar Total Value Locked (TVL) figures, partly due to security issues:

• Also, it's worth considering potential token pressure factors, similar to those investigated in the article "Analysis of suspicious Lybra Finance (LBR) transactions: fraud or intended use of funds?" which could also contribute to a negative sentiment.

Differences in the restaking narrative compared to the LSDFi narrative

When EigenLayer first emerged and EigenDA wasn't yet introduced as an example of practical AVS application, it was associated with LSDFi, as it was initially seen as just another way to utilize LST. However, a few months later, it became evident that this was a push towards the evolution of the crypto industry. The key lies in the delegation of crypto-economic security, allowing for a reevaluation of project launches, where there's no longer a need for hefty bootstrap costs or maintaining incentives within the network for infrastructure decentralization.

In essence, even at a basic level, the restaking narrative offers more sustainable use cases for LST utilization compared to LSDFi, primarily represented by LST-backed CDPs. This creates demand from multiple angles:

• From the perspective of projects aiming to utilize AVS, at least 25 projects are already being launched based on EigenLayer.

• From node providers, who can potentially earn higher yields through restaking and offer more favorable conditions to their users.

• From stakers and validators, who can both delegate and directly run AVS nodes, having their own nodes.

Thus, what was lacking in the LSDFi narrative and why its decline shouldn't be projected onto restaking:

• Lack of support from major players. This sector attracted weak interest from Tier-1 VCs, unlike EigenLayer, LRTFi, and the restaking theme in general.

• In the last months of 2023 and the first months of 2024, a significant amount of liquidity in the form of LST flowed into EigenLayer and LRT, as they offered better returns and retrodrops for their native tokens.

• The LSDFi sector was primarily represented only in the EVM, and in other ecosystems, it was in its infancy.

• Despite peaking at over $1 billion in capitalization, LSDFi's capacity is relatively small — in Lybra, a significant portion of the stake was held by Sifu, and the lack of TVL fluctuations in Gravita may indicate that there are a few large depositors who continue to hold its TVL.

At the same time, analogous to the emergence of LSD and LST, infrastructure around restaking began to take shape, termed LRTFi. These protocols include Renzo, Puffer, Ether.fi, Kelp, Swell, Restake, and others. Their functionality is similar to LST built on top of ETH staking, but in this case, there's layering — they offer derivatives on liquid staking derivatives, which can also be Reward-bearing. They emerged much faster than LST and in significantly larger numbers because the action algorithms and architectures were already tested.

However, it's worth noting that at the moment, restaking faces some issues, which can currently be seen in the case of EigenLayer, but will dissipate as the restaking primitive and its ecosystem develop:

• Uncertainty about profitability due to rapid TVL growth, and potential liquidity outflow from LRT protocols by farmers after airdrops.

• Unlaunched core features such as fee systems and slashing, which cast doubt on obtaining adequate returns at present. However, this is a temporary issue that will be resolved as protocols are further launched and the ecosystem is deployed.

• A large number of LRT derivative protocols on LST, carrying their separate risks, such as peg risks of LRT with LSD and ETH. Thus, the risk of LSD peg breakdown adds a double risk with the accumulation of LRT on top. However, it's worth noting that such cases have been quite rare — 2 cases with stETH Lido due to different reasons and the associated time-wise peg breakdown of rETH Rocket Pool. The key to preventing such incidents is maintaining deep liquidity to avoid price fluctuations.

Additionally, restaking protocols in other networks have an excellent framework for building their development — precisely EigenLayer, which works very quickly in terms of attracting integrations and various collaborations. This allows for continuous expansion, attracting new users, developers, and liquidity. However, a pause or stagnation is likely possible while projects in AVS fully deploy and test the first implementations of tokenomics according to new standards.

A Brief Overview of the Current Restaking Protocol Landscape

Just a few months ago, Eigen Layer was the only player in this field, along with projects that talked about restaking but essentially offered the use of LST in liquidity pools, stakes, etc., instead of "physical" restaking. However, as of mid-May 2024, we see rapid development in various ecosystems beyond EL in Ethereum:

• Cambrian — a restaking protocol in Solana, inspired by Eigen Layer and closely working in that direction, taking into account the specifics of SVM and the Solana ecosystem. According to the whitepaper and documentation, Cambrian is immediately focused on wide customizability and flexibility, even up to using different consensus mechanisms to cover as many use cases as possible, positioning itself as decentralized web services like Amazon in the restaking world.

• Babylon Chain — offers BTC restaking, the protocol is built on Cosmos, and it introduced some interesting mechanics during its creation, such as timestamping, coordinated in Cosmos and Bitcoin, which is an interesting implementation due to the significant difference between the technologies.

• Restaking Cloud — a restaking protocol aimed at infrastructure around ETH, compatible with DVT, solo stakers, and using its denomination for LRT — Restaked Staking Tokens. With just a few clicks, anyone can create RST tokens backed by ETH staking, which have a wide range of use cases, including testing, node networks, and DeFi. Solo stakers and node operators receive income in ETH and protocol tokens.

• Persistence One — building Cosmos infrastructure for restaking on top of the Terra Alliance module, allowing users to stake Liquid Staked tokens (ATOM, TIA, DYDX, etc.) using pSTAKE, Stride, Quicksilver, and Milkyway on Persistence One. This allows them to re-stake their assets and protect additional chains, starting with the Persistence Core-1 chain, while receiving additional rewards.

• BounceBit — BTC restaking, the PoS BounceBit mechanism presents a unique dual-token staking system, using built-in BTC security fully compatible with EVM.

• Exocore — a restaking protocol based on Layer Zero technology, assuming aggregation of LST across different chains and using this delegated liquidity to launch AVS.

• Solayer — another Solana restaking protocol, which instead of AVS, uses the term SVN (Shared Validator Network).

• Additionally, in the Solana ecosystem, the restaking direction is being developed by the major staking provider Jito.

• Picasso — provides LST Solana restaking based on Cosmos technologies.

• Karak Network — here, AVS is called Distributed Secure Service (DSS), Karak positions itself as a restaking layer that makes it easy to provide crypto-economic security for any asset, but currently, it works with Ethereum.

In addition to this, numerous projects similar to LSD protocols have emerged around Eigen Layer: they offer LRT for restaking LST through them in Eigen Layer (Renzo, Puffer, Ether.fi, Kelp, Swell, Restake, and others). And some projects from LSDFi now work with LRTs based on Eigen Layer (for example, Davos and PrismaLRT). Overall, Eigen Layer itself is an excellent framework for developing restaking protocols in other chains.

Aspects of Ecosystem Development Around Curve Finance That Can Be Applicable to Restaking and LRTFi

As mentioned earlier, I also conducted research on the development of the ecosystem around Curve to understand what projects might emerge around LSDFi in an optimistic scenario of capturing a large TVL and deploying wars with liquidity and community incentives. However, the situation turned out such that the LSDFi sector gave way to the restaking narrative. And despite the entire infrastructure around Curve being built on governance and liquidity pool management with gauges and bribes, this approach in a remote sense can be applicable to LRTFi as well.

1. Firstly, it's worth noting why Curve Wars emerged: various protocols and projects fought for liquidity pool depth and attracting LPs, for which they needed Curve governance tokens and its liquid version — Convex (in this context somewhat akin to LSDFi and LRTFi wrapped tokens). Projects incentivized holders of these tokens with bribes — increased yields and native token airdrops.

2. Secondly, it might be appropriate to draw an analogy between liquidity pools and AVS and LRT protocols. In the case of LSDFi, protocols assumed that LSD protocols would be the ones competing for token holder attention and would also buy LSDFi protocol tokens. But if you're essentially a resource provider used by end-users, why would you compete for intermediaries' attention, who should themselves offer the best conditions to all sides? Thus, it's likely that the Wars scenario in LSDFi didn't develop due to misaligned priorities.

3. Thirdly, the question arises: what's different in restaking and LRTFi? The answer to this question was slightly above: in the case of restaking, there are many more stakeholders interested, all of whom have applied interest. Accordingly, there are prerequisites for competing for user liquidity from the side of LRT protocols and, in the future, from the side of AVS, which can compete to offer the best conditions. In this case, bribes can be replaced simply by token yields from specific projects launched on AVS.

Some of the important aspects that can influence the landscape of the ecosystem around restaking and LRT are the mention that one restaker can delegate to different protocols. And this suggests the creation in the future of the following protocols based on the ecosystem development trajectory around Curve with the exclusion that the original goal of Curve Wars was to promote the CRV token, whereas in restaking, LSTs of different LSD protocols can play a major role:

• Aggregators, similar to Llama Airforce — for users who delegate to multiple AVSs and who don't want to manually collect all rewards and possibly automatically reinvest further into certain AVSs (pools in the case of Llama Airforce).

• Proxy protocols, either automatically distributing delegation to different AVSs in a passive mode or offering users aggregated information to choose appropriate AVSs — here, analogies can be drawn with Votium, which essentially was the next iteration of Bribe.crv. A remote example of this could be restaked.app for EigenLayer.

• With restaking, the LRT factor comes into play — in Curve, everything was built around CRV and its wrappers. And in restaking, different LRTFi protocols can offer different conditions, including improved ones, conditioned by partnerships and so forth. Therefore, protocols similar to Llama Airforce and Votium may emerge, but for LRT, not AVS.

• Protocols similar to CLever from Aladdin DAO — for the ability to obtain loans against both current assets and their future yields. This can also include the possibility of leverage protocols operating with mechanisms similar to EigenLayer farming points — such as Gearbox and looping strategies (except with real tokens instead of points).

• Considering the development of cross-chain technologies and Account Abstraction, it's possible to see the emergence of both aggregator protocols, allowing for the distribution of LST across different chains with optimal routing and cost minimization, and automated protocols that allow this with minimal user involvement. The first example from this category could be Layerless, which allows restaking in EigenLayer through an omni-chain protocol based on LayerZero and provides users with LRT based on omni-chain token technology.

• Due to the multitude of use cases for which AVSs can be used and the emergence of restaking in different chains, there may be something akin to gaming guilds, but specializing in different technology directions based on restaking. Among such directions, ZK, General decentralized networks, MEV, financial protocols, cloud computing, DePin can be highlighted.

Thus, even with a cursory examination of possible points for developing infrastructure solutions based on retrospective analysis, we already see several potential directions. And as the entire infrastructure unfolds, other use cases may emerge that cannot be predicted until bottlenecks or, conversely, new opportunities arise.

Moreover, one of the most obvious ways to use restaking is for launching DVT, Distributed Validator Technology, which allows running a single validator on multiple servers to increase its fault tolerance, and we are likely to see projects in this direction soon. At the moment, DVT protocols have weak tokenization incentives and are mainly used as client-paid services — for example, P2P recently merged with SSV and EigenLayer to launch a product offering DVT for decentralized restaking. ClayStack is also working in this direction. But perhaps the DVT technology will spread to other networks faster with restaking, and one of the closest candidates may be Solana.

Conclusion

Unlike LSDFi in its form as it was in 2023, where profitability was essentially generated by reshuffling the difference between invested liquidity and received assets, restaking offers the opportunity to earn "real" returns from protocols that will leverage AVS. However, whether projects launching on AVS will offer genuinely good returns and adopt the philosophy of delegating economic security is another question that will take time to answer. There's unlikely to be immediate high returns for restakers: first, time is needed for the distribution of value within EL itself, then time will be needed for the launch of projects with functioning tokenomics on AVS. Only after achieving a critical mass of activity in AVS will restakers be able to earn a steady, stable profit on top of the base staking returns. Similarly, protocols for restaking will develop in parallel in other networks.

As was evident in the quick overview of the landscape, there is room in the development of the ecosystem around restaking protocols for the emergence of yield optimizers, bribes, and so on, similar to what occurred in the ecosystem around Curve. Unlike LSDFi, there is room for Wars in the direction of restaking, both between protocols on top of restaking protocol infrastructures, which may compete for liquidity, and between projects launched on AWS clusters, which may compete for operators and locked LST volume. Moreover, teams working on restaking protocols can be compared to L1 developers in 2017–2020, especially considering that restaking is not about DeFi mechanics as it was with LSDFi. This is an area that requires truly deep research in applied development, understanding, and inventing new slashing mechanisms, incentives, customization possibilities for Middleware on AVS, and so on.

Therefore, with successful development, the direction of restaking could catalyze the emergence of even more projects not only by facilitating initial launches and avoiding huge expenditures on economic security for various projects but also by the emergence of supporting infrastructure around AVS and restakers with point optimizations similar to the ecosystem around Curve.

It is also worth noting that there are now many more developers in web3, a huge number of different strategies have been tested, and there are many open-box solutions. Therefore, the speed of implementation and development has significantly increased compared to 2019–2021. A vivid example of this is the emergence of a large number of LRTs on top of EigenLayer and the rapid influx of liquidity into them compared to the slow development of LSDFi. So, it's unlikely that the ecosystem and infrastructure around restaking will develop as slowly as around Curve, but at the same time, it will be a more concrete process than the trajectory of LSDFi.

Note: This material represents the author's thoughts, subjective opinions, and conclusions based on observations and does not reflect the position of any company on this issue.

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1) Introduction

Note: This material is the personal subjective opinion of the author and does not represent the position of any company of this matter. USD equivalent figures are very approximate and are based on approximate data about the token price in certain time periods, so this information cannot be considered accurate. There may also be some discrepancies in the transaction overview despite multiple verification, due to which the value of funds in USD equivalent may fluctuate in some range. The purpose of this research is not to establish absolute figures, but to understand the situation and build a general picture.

In the transactions involving the Lybra Finance token, LBR, some peculiarities have been observed. Numerous empty wallets have been mining LBR tokens and promptly transferring them to MEXC, Poloniex, and Kucoin. Interestingly, these wallets share a common trait - they were all funded ETH for transaction fees via the ChangeNOW exchange. However, is the situation as clear-cut as it appears? It's worth noting that deposits to exchanges did not consistently result in a decrease in the exchange rate, as can be seen in the graph at the end of this research. This may be a way of providing liquidity for marketmaking on exchanges. Let's consider when these transactions were made and what were the price movements during these movements of funds - it is possible that the project does not have its own MM and market-making is done manually.

A user on Lybra’s Discord asked a similar question to the team:

Response from team member, 0xMarketing: Spoke to team! The vesting schedules (for the allocations) are only set up on the v1 version of the contracts, so the team simply claim the correct and available amount of tokens from the ecosystem incentives and treasury, migrate them, and then move to another wallet for an added layer of security, of which some have been set aside on the exchanges you mentioned to account for some upcoming operation expenses, mostly with respect to v2, such as audits, hires, liquidity provisioning and other associated costs 🙂 hope that helps! TL;DR - the team were so focused on making sure everything worked appropriately for users, they forgot to pay themselves for the operational expenses!

Why this version is questioned: every few days, amounts of 10k to 50k tokens or more are withdrawn to exchanges, which depending on the exchange rate can range from $6k to $100+k or more, and that seems like a lot of money to "cover operating expenses".

2) What oddities in the process of quickly analysing wallets and transactions caught the eye for a more in-depth research:

Let's try to untangle this tangle. First of all, let's look at the first suspicious wallet 0x4045ee04f0609804f93906fB7aAb83f672F3A903: this wallet received 0.019 ETH from ChangeNOW, and then LBR tokens from Null address, which were then sent to Kucoin and MEXC, time - 25 July 2023, 12:50:

Another interesting address that started funds with ChangeNOW, branded LBR and immediately, within minutes, transferred tokens to an address called Token Unlocking - 0x7fdc573Bf4b28F689b25a4A77604019585836F3f:

Let's check the addresses to which LBR tokens are sent from the Token Unlocking address (to be fair - it should be noted that some addresses have a real history of use and there are no ETH inputs from ChangeNOW and the accrued LBR settles on the wallets:

Among these addresses, one of the interesting ones is 0x5B9B9A8bB4481e6A70A4230612db9bB88D2694bC - this wallet does not hold LBR, since receiving $200k $LBR via Gnosis Safe Proxy this wallet gets rid of Lybra tokens, including sending them to other addresses. But for example, one of the addresses, 0x6A50B55551203863a3649652eBE9AAC653C844db81, loads the received LBR tokens into liquidity on Uniswap.Another, 0x5B9B9B9A8bB4481e6A70A4230612db9bB88D2694bC - also receives LBRs from the Token Unlocking wallet but it sends them further into liquidity on Uniswap v3.Another strange wallet that only LBR received in large amounts is 0xE388FE4074Bf9d317cE40387D1D87C622d7C9537:

Let's take a closer look at this address. In the picture below we can see that the wallet does not store LBR, but transfers tokens either to Token Unlocking wallet or to another address, and after transferring all LBR to other wallets returned ETH to ChangeNOW:

Also we see on this wallet an incoming transaction of 0.2 ETH from wallet 0xae2517..., and if we go to this wallet - bingo! Again, the ETH is brought in from the ChangeNOW (the incoming ETH transaction is highlighted in green, and the outgoing transaction to wallet 0xE388F..., which we looked at above, is highlighted in red):

Further, from wallet 0xE388F... there is an outgoing transaction for 17,834k LBR to 0xfccf5..., which after receiving LBR also received ETH from ChangeNOW and sent all LBR to Poloniex, and returned the unspent ETH to ChangeNOW as well:

Another interesting transaction from wallet 0xE388FE... - 75.76k LBR to wallet 0x29773a... which received ETH from wallet 0x5Ec01... and then sent 75.5k LBR to wallet 0x96B64..., which also received ETH from address 0x5Ec01.... and then the last wallet sent LBR in smaller transactions to other wallets:

Next, wallet 0x96B64 ... sent LBR in instalments to several different wallets:

Wallet 0x325A9b... received 9.82k LBR that were sent to Poloniex, as well as 0.98 ETH from ChangeNOW that were distributed to other wallets to which LBR from wallet 0x96B64... was distributed (these addresses are marked in yellow... (these addresses are marked in yellow), and the rest of the ETH was sent out in small transactions to ChangeNOW most likely to confuse the trail and deposits to other wallets:

From all these wallets, which have no activity other than LBR deposits and withdrawals, LBR tokens were sent to Poloniex between 1 June and 2 June. And just on the 2nd of June the value of LBR token started to fall:

But on the other hand, for example, we see a transaction on Poloniex from a wallet that mined 70k LBR, received a deposit of ETH from ChangeNOW in advance and sent them to Poloniex on 15 June at 8:17 UTC, after which the token price started to grow:

3) Analyse transactions and movements of funds with the same patterns:

Let's consider a few more wallets that mined large LBR transactions (this is only a part of them, as there are a lot of transactions). Some transactions have minimal data as they were added later, and the patterns and patterns are similar to other transactions - empty wallet, receipt of minimum amount of ETH for payment from ChangeNOW, mined LBR and sent to Kucoin, Poloniex, Mexc or just sold on Uniswap before listing on CEX:

• 19 May - $16k$ + 17k$

• 20 May - 23k$ Uniswap

• 0xf339FfA947Feb8cA18D2eA7Bd08326b94b0705dD - received ETH through a sequence of wallets, of which wallet 0x2C8b25... ETH was deposited via ChangeNOW. The 21.5k LBR tokens that came in - were sold on Uniswap between the 20th and 21st of May.

  • Summary: 27k$

• 0x2b087d61b28c83D269dB9dEf4183313ac9EE184a - as with the 20 May transactions, received ETH through a sequence of wallets, of which wallet 0x2C8b25... ETH deposit was made via ChangeNOW. 21.9k LBR was received, which was sold on Uniswap for $33.19k at an exchange rate on 21 May from 05:30 to 06:48 UTC

• 21 May - 29k$ Uniswap

• 21-22 May - $32k Uniswap

• 22 May - $34k Uniswap

• 0x57B22C8d566aD1BBAB5379d4bB1225121A85EEC8 - as with the 20 May transactions, received ETH through a sequence of wallets, of which wallet 0x2C8b25... ETH was deposited via ChangeNOW. 20,193k LBR was received, which was sold between 22 May and 23 May.

  • Summary: 34k$

• 23-24 May - $35k$ Uniswap

• 24-25 May - $31k Uniswap

• 0x6Af85de8E8aEf04188BF5c3673034B2045109FB6 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 50k LBR that were sent to Poloniex in one tranche of 50k LBR on 7 June 03:05 UTC.

  • Summary: 358k$

• 0x0a9252f4B75822353be72a7187afBafDf44b817a - ETH input from ChangeNOW, mint 50k LBR, which were sent to Poloniex in one tranche of 50k on 17 June 10:45 UTC, and the remaining ETH were sent back to CahngeNOW.

  • Summary: 43k$

• 0x61ED207d71D70AB1a26b38Ca04B43355d5045A7E - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 56,515k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 30k LBR - 19 June 11:00 UTC

  • 26,151k LBR - 19 June 11:02 UTC

  • Summary: 73k$

• 22 June 13:12 UTC - 45k$

• 23 June 06:23 UTC - 31k$

• 0xb13364cE9af53898494911F111147f4148B46d24e5B7 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 25k LBR, which was sent to Poloniex in one tranche:

  • 25 June 08:15 UTC

  • Summary: 33k$

• 27 June 12:04 UTC - 30k$

• 0xC4397a0558E5EdAE89A6193395cDcC8ad9fd9e9c - Repeated entry of ETH from ChangeNOW, mint 20k, 40k 15.75k LBR that were sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches: 28 June 03:15 UTC to 03:16 UTC 29 June 08:48 UTC.

  • Summary: 50k$

• 0xd4c4706B0281fE62841Cb52aA7c11203b73fDeCD - ETH entry with ChangeNOW, mint $50k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 25k LBR - 30 June 4:10 UTC

  • 25k LBR - 30 June 04:12 UTC

  • Summary: 83k$

• 0x686f6C0009f031A4d35a05D7b8E9C9661db9802d - ETH input from ChangeNOW, mint 50k LBR that were sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 20k LBR - 1 July 3:39 UTC

  • 10k LBR - 1 July 3:40 UTC

  • 20k LBR - 1 July 3:42 UTC Summary: 96k$

• 0x9AA004F6D766175971BcCc09A4F5ad68CF3768E4 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 45k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 20k LBR - 1 July 17:46 UTC

  • 10k LBR - 1 July 17:48 UTC

  • 15k LBR - 1 July 17:49 UTC

  • Summary: 95k$

• 0x0c5026a508646aC7fCb04a6455dC9918DE1FFFC5 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 50k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 25k LBR - 2 July 14:00 UTC

  • 10k LBR 2 - July 14:01 UTC

  • 15k LBR 2 - July 14:02 UTC

  • Summary: 93k$

• 0x00D684B2A20f98f99Ace6E1d66b32f2DFF8c68F5 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 49.95k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 21k LBR - 3 July 10:30 UTC

  • 22k LBR - 3 July 10:31 UTC

  • 5k LBR - 3 July 10:34 UTC

  • 1.95k LBR - 3 July 10:37 UTC

  • Summary: 100k$

• 3 July 03:26 UTC - 54k$

• 0x4e75C454f5b74924e896Dade6862c64DE3651fcB - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 25.05k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 20k LBR - 4 July 14:30 UTC

  • 4.95k LBR - 4 July 14:37 UTC

  • Summary: 59k$

• 0x2F0Ce0311F28D020074FF20E1F3E4044C2926143 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 10k LBR that was sent to Kucoin in one tranche:

  • 5 July 15:44 UTC, 23,9k$

• 6 July 06:04 UTC - 24.4k$ Kucoin

• 6 July 06:13 UTC - $27.4k$ Kucoin

• 6 July 09:25 UTC - $26.4k$ Kucoin

• 6 July 17:03 UTC - 44.2k$ Kucoin

• 7 July 06:28 UTC - 57k$ Kucoin

• 7 July 14:18 UTC - 33k$ Kucoin

• 8 July - 22k$ Kucoin

• 0x1B4cabb230efC4aB8161cad54d327819f0D96559 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 20k, 17.5k and 12.45k LBR which were sent to Kucoin in multiple tranches:

  • 10,371k LBR - 11 July 04:48 UTC $23.23K

  • 9,355k LBR - 11 July 04:50 UTC $20.86K

  • 15.5k LBR - 11 July 04:53 UTC $34.57K

  • 10k LBR - 11 July 04:55 UTC $22.30K

• 11 July 01:48 UTC - $43.2k

• 11 July 01:56 UTC - 216k$

• 4,724k LBR - 12 July 08:00 UTC $9.83K

• 0x6AAA6D7023dFdE28f8C299186d0a119F54329A7F - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 23.55k LBR which was sent to Kucoin in 3 tranches:

  • 16 July 10:46 UTC

  • 16 July 13:39 UTC

  • 17 July 08:13 UTC

  • Summary: 50k$

• 18 July 07:55 UTC - 37k$ MEXC

• 0x1d8cF32a5017C9B704fd3d268a1fD511001c90CD - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 20k LBR that was sent to Poloniex in multiple tranches:

  • 10.31k LBR - 19 July 04:51 UTC

  • 9.69k LBR - 19 July 16:07 UTC

  • Summary: 36k$

• 0x05017464d60c8Fa309Ad167f7Ca75B8d91859c04 - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint $20.37k LBR that was sent to Kucoin in multiple tranches:

  • 9,935k LBR - 20 July 10:17 UTC

  • 10,435k LBR - 20 July 10:18 UTC

  • Summary: 37k$

• 0xA6393893A0e2C9D8C0A9CA9bA4D33cCd4CC5B629 - ETH input from ChangeNOW, mint 11.8k and 43k LBR that was sent to Kucoin in multiple tranches:

  • 11.8k LBR - 21 July 08:08 UTC

  • 23k LBR - 21 July 20:48 UTC

  • 20k LBR - 21 July 20:51 UTC

  • Summary: 90k$

• 22 July - 32k$ 23k$ Kucoin, MEXC

• 24 July 08:18 UTC 25k$ MEXC

• 25 July 09:39 UTC 22k$ Kucoin

• 0x7fdc573Bf4b28F689b25a4A7760401958585836F3f - ETH entry from ChangeNOW, mint 30k, 20k and 100k LBR which were immediately sent to TokenUnlock wallet. Also interesting is the fact that some of the wallets that received tokens from the TokenUnlock address sold them on Cowswap

4) Intermediate output and comparison of CEX withdrawals to a token price chart:

Only 200-250 first transactions were analysed here, which were ranked by the number of LBR tokens in the transactions. Based on this data, we can assume that:

• LBR tokens are mined and withdrawn to Kucoin, MEXC and Poloniex exchange wallets almost every day from wallets that are funded with ETH from addresses linked to ChangeNOW to make LBR withdrawals from the wallets.

• The above pattern is repeated with a large number of wallets, sometimes through intermediate transit addresses, some of which are linked by ETH transactions and almost all of these wallets are empty, with no other activity on them, which also suggests that actions with these wallets were done according to the same scheme and this suggests a common pattern of behaviour.

• The team in Discord claims that this is how the funds were transferred to finance the development of the project, but the problem is that the total amount of $2.5m, which is quite a significant amount, is obtained even only for selected transactions (and there are many more such transactions). And the team answers questions about these transactions directly that it is to cover operating expenses, and there is no talk about farmers. And even if the team claims that they are farmers - the same pattern of behaviour of a huge number of different wallets would not be in favour of this version. And most likely, the real amount of funds withdrawn in this way is closer to $5m, if we consider that we have considered only 40 days, and transactions go every day from may.

• Even if we assume that there are 6-10 people in the team, who get $10k per month, the sum of $60-100k per month will be obtained. And even if we assume that the project has been in development since December 2022, the maximum amount of operating expenses is $800-900k, but in reality the real figure for operating expenses is probably somewhere between $300-600k plus a maximum of $300k for audits. Considering that the project has still raised $480k on IDO - the team is clearly lying when claiming that these funds are needed to cover operating expenses.

• There is a possibility that the team may be using these funds for MM and liquidity maintenance, but then it looks strange to use a scheme with different empty wallets and sending ETH only for transactions with confusing traces.

Finally, we can compare the price chart and the outputs to the exchanges to try to trace the correlation between the minting large amounts of tokens and pressure on the token price. But it is also worth considering that it seems that the bulk of tokens in the circulate may be concentrated in the hands of the team or those close to the team (judging by the fact that the team does not deny transactions using ETH with ChangeNOW and the similarity of wallet patterns), and the concentration of tokens in the same hands allows drawing any chart due to direct liquidity management:

For comparison, below are charts that show the Mcap and Circulation Supply dynamics of the Lybra token:

5) Conclusion:

On the example of comparing the price chart and LBR transaction movement, we see that there is no obvious correlation between the price drop and token minutiae to disposable wallets with subsequent withdrawal to CEX. Moreover, in some cases, even on the contrary, the dynamics of the token price turned out to be positive. Therefore, we cannot confidently assert that there are any negative processes, especially considering that Lybra occupies almost 50% of TVL in LSDfi and is actively preparing for the launch of V2.

But nevertheless, it is also worth considering that the team's words that these transactions are needed to fund the development do not agree with the amounts of funds that were withdrawn to CEX through one-time wallets with the same patterns, as well as the fact that some transactions have clear signs of trail confusion. And it looks really strange considering that the project team is anonymised. Perhaps the Lybra Finance team can provide more detailed and detailed information about these funds and the use of this money realisation.

2) A brief overview of TON and a comparison with other networks

- Key takeaways

3) Overview of the TON Ecosystem

- Bridges - Dex’es - Ecosystem - Key takeaways

4) Grants, funds, hackathons and liquidity support

- Ecosystem funds - Grants - Applications for which grants have been awarded - Hackhathons - Key takeaways

5) Analysis of the possible development of DeFi in TON in relation to other networks

- Key takeaways

6) Where are the funds currently investing (to determine the possible vector for the development of TON)

- Key takeaways

7) Team

- Key takeaways

8) Tokenometrics

9) Roadmap

1) Introduction

Now, during the bear market is a good time to develop new ecosystems, as activity in the markets decreases and there is time to build applications and prepare an easy-to-use and user-friendly infrastructure. Ton, in particular, has good prospects with the possibility of forming a completely new idea of crypto-infrastructure. When considered in terms of the possibilities of integrating DeFi applications into the Telegram messenger, this will open up new opportunities for users as it will fundamentally change the way they interact with the crypto industry. Especially since companies from the traditional sector have long been able to migrate their online applications on iOs and Android to the Telegram chatbot format, and stores, exchanges, and file stores in the form of chatbots have been around for years. All the more so, there are moments that point to the merging of Telegram and TON functionality.

Specifically, back in the fall and spring of 2020, before TON's development and integration into Telegram was abandoned, code for integrating TON into Telegram was spotted in various versions of the Telegram app, and a separate Gram wallet module was integrated into the iOs app. TON's current stage of development and the indirect signs of further integration with the messenger mentioned along the way hint at a return to this path. And it opens up huge prospects for development involving Telegram's huge audience and building a powerful ecosystem, for which there are all the prerequisites.

2) A brief overview of TON and a comparison with other networks:

Right now, the TON network is showing more than 2m accounts, which is very good growth compared to 100+k accounts in early 2022. Total TVL of the network according to DeFilama is currently $691k. The closest benchmark can be considered Everscale, which was also initially developed based on the technology proposed by Nikolai Durov, with the first TVL target of $10m. If we take into account that TON has almost twice as many user accounts, the growth prospects become even higher compared to Everscale's 1m accounts. Based on token valuation and trading volume, we can see that Toncoin is attracting much more interest from investors, especially considering the ratio of token price to current and total supply, which also indicates good prospects for explosive growth of the ecosystem:

Transaction costs in TON are much lower even than in L2 solutions, not to mention most L1 solutions with serious TVL volumes, which speaks to the ability to attract users through low transaction costs coupled with fast finality:

Also, the potential of TON is great because, judging by indirect data, it will still be possible to use TON from the Telegram application and scale to the huge user base of the messenger. This is indicated by the prerequisites for combining TON and Telegram functionality - the list of development directions at the Hack-a-TONx w/ DoraHacks hackathon includes requests for: developing Telegram Web Applications (TWAs); finding new ways to use nicknames sold on Fragment with TON Payment; combining the Webawerse metaverse with Telegram and TON. It's also worth keeping in mind that nicknames and even phone numbers are implemented in the form of NFT, and the Telegram messenger application will need to implement functionality to work directly with NFT.

The TON blockchain documentation is written in a somewhat offbeat, simple language. Due to the fragmentation of resources there are variants of the documentation, where it is not written yet, some sections are not filled in yet. But the purely technical documentation in the repositories and manuals for developers is written intelligently and in detail. Links in some sections in The Open Network documentation lead to the original TON and Catchain Consensus whitepapers from Nikolai Durov, which may also indicate tight integration.

The TON blockchain supports asynchrony and sharding in the form of shardchains, somewhat similar to subnets, but not really. There is a masterchain that stores all the information about the network, validators, block hashes, and there are shardchains that process transactions. Transactions are packaged - it's similar to rollup technology. It is possible to scale up to 4,294,967,296 shardchains - in the long run this gives huge scalability. Depending on transaction load and improved scalability, the number of accounts in shards can be reduced down to 1 shardchain per account with more shardchains involved in transaction processing.

And there may be some conflict here, since it turns out that smartcontracts are also separate microservices that cannot read each other's data automatically as in Ethereum, but communicate with each other by asynchronous messages. It's all basically a different way of building a network than the usual EVM networks. And also the smart contracts code can be made modifiable instead of creating new ones if any changes are needed, so some projects on TON have a separate indication that their smart contracts are immutable. Wallets are also smart contracts (similar implemented in Starknet).

FunC is used as a native language, apparently derived from the C family of languages - in theory, this should simplify the entry threshold for developers as opposed to the heavyweight Rust and its derivatives in some networks.

The consensus mechanism is Catchain, on PoS. The consensus is implemented directly from the whitepaper provided by Nikolai Durov and optimized for working with shards and parallelizing transactions.

• There is an interesting point with DApp transactions, which significantly changes the structure of commissions. Each Dapp's contract contains a TON balance for paying rent. In essence, the developer is paying to rent space on the network, and can choose to either make commissions for users that are sewn into the body of the transaction fee, or use their resources (obtained through funding, for example) to reduce the transaction costs of users. (2)

The basic TON infrastructure consists of:

• TON Storage - a decentralized analog of CDN and Arweave, files can be accessed at http://storage.ton/ + ID of the stored file. It allows you to integrate with the .ton domain zone via TON Proxy (available through MyTonWallet) and store site data in TON. It is planned to use it as a file exchanger and download data for NFT from there. It seems that separate nodes will be responsible for data availability and checking hashes. They will charge microtransactions via Payment Network.

• Payment Network is a network of payment channels, intermediate independent proxy nodes will charge micropayments for packets of traffic. This lays a whole new foundation for forming an entire network with its own DNS, sites and proxies. This comes separately from transaction fees and will allow operators to get rewards for storing data.

• TON Connect - provides a link between wallets and applications in the TON ecosystem, it's an SDK that allows you to embed wallet functionality into applications.

• TON DNS - translates the addresses of accounts, smart contracts and network nodes into human-readable .ton addresses. Unlike DNS in other ecosystems, DNS Ton is a natively network-integrated technology. Also, domain names allow you to, for example, shorten the ID in the address for file access.

• TON Proxy - the code is in the main GitHub mono repository, used to connect to the native TON ecosystem in the .ton domain zone, which has its own file storage, sites and Dapp's (similar to .onion in TOR). Website with all TON applications: http://foundation.ton/ Website with all TON domain zone applications: https://ton.run/#/

• TON Services - allows developers to create new blockchain applications.

It is also worth noting that the infrastructure of the ecosystem is built consistently. There is a separate site with events - meetings, contests, and hackathons. A detailed resource with descriptions of ecosystem funds and development directions.

At the moment many new applications are being developed for blockchain TON (more about them in the Grants System section), and several major ecosystem-building applications and platforms have already been launched:

• Although some repositories of parts of the infrastructure are separate and not contributed to the TON GitHub (e.g., the TON Storage repository), references to their functionality are in the main TON repository (e.g., TON Storage Security Issues). This also points to the integration of all infrastructure components into TON itself.

• The latest version of TON has a mention of patches for TON Storage - it may have been moved from a separate ndatg repo to the main ton-blockchain distribution, all to the argument that the ecosystem is becoming more holistic.

• Another thing that may indirectly point to the future possibility of integrating TON ecosystem apps into Telegram: GitHub NewTon, which was previously worked on by current GitHub TON contributors, has a telegram repository that contains a third-party web version of the Telegram client, and there is active development with very interesting commits from January 16, 2023 with lots of code (this may indicate a test integration into a third-party client before it is launched into the official Telegram client):

• Judging by the repositories on GitHub, development is very active. This is especially evident in the main TON repository, where commits are uploaded every few hours.

• Also in the direction of convergence with the messenger indicates the appearance of the possibility of transferring funds by nickname (DNS) instead of the purse address in Tonkeeper.

• It is also worth mentioning, for example, the tight integration of the Tonstarter application into Telegram - you can access the site directly from the bot in which the tasks are performed. Such things certainly contribute to the future very tight integration of TON ecosystem sites with bots, channels and chats in Telegram.

Key Takeaways

• TON undoubtedly has great scalability coupled with low transaction costs, given that the network has a good decentralization - this is a good narrative to attract users

• So far, there are not enough SDKs and compilers to transfer dapps from other networks, but, on the other hand, simple application cloning only leads to a temporary overflow of liquidity and users. It is possible that native applications, with good multi-chain support, will be able to aggregate users and liquidity better and longer.

• For clarification: the questions are caused by the communication of contracts between themselves by asynchronous messages - will it not turn out in the end that most of the bandwidth will be occupied by these messages? Just like it was with Solana, in which 99% of transactions are messaging between nodes to synchronize their state in time. And the more nodes Solana has, the more users - the more traffic exchange between nodes grows, further reducing the useful bandwidth capacity.

3) Overview of the TON Ecosystem

https://ton.app/

Bridges

Bridges are an important point of liquidity inflow into the ecosystem due to the flow of both liquidity and users from other networks, so it is important to evaluate bridges and their liquidity in the first place.

• https://ton.org/bridge/, 1 asset only bridge (TON), very simple interface, allows transfer between ETH and BSC networks. By liquidity: the contract of the wrapped TON token on Ethereum indicates 19.5 million tokens, and the contract on BSC - 5.1 million. That is, the total amount of TON transferred through this bridge (deposited on its wallets at the moment) is $24.6 million. Interestingly, judging by the transactions, the funds first pass through the bridge oracle, then through the bridge's government address, and then they get to the user. The bridge to Polygon is planned only in q3 2023.

• Tonana - a bridge with a convenient familiar interface, but TVL shows only $1194. If you exchange ETH for TON, then it shows only 6 TON in the reserve. That is, the bridge works on the principle of providing liquidity. Position themselves as L0 and the first bridge between Solana, Near, Cosmos, and Ton.

• Orbit Bridge is a 3rd party bridge, so there are security risks as you have to rely on a third party. Judging by the fact that there are tokens on the dexes, the name of which is “Orbit Bridge”, it works on the principle of blocking liquidity from other networks and minting/burning tokens on the TON side. Bad UI, bad UX: if you choose networks and choose another token, then you have to choose networks again, plus the choice of assets is quite small. Strange choice of networks (half-dead Klaytn, for example). But at the same time, he has good TVL - $187M, of which $160M is in Ethereum.

DEX’es

• STOn.fi: AMM DEX, when exchanged, allows only slippage tuning. TVL according to DeFilama is $601k. Very few tokens to choose from, oddly chosen definitions in the interface: for example, not "token", "active", but "jetton". Twitter has 3,395 readers, no major followers. They offer to earn 0.2% from all trades, there is no talk about any more or less stable APY. There are problems in all areas.

• Megaton Finance - AMM DEX, which is promised to launch in January 2023. It promises airdrop for liquidity-provisioning with oTON (vrapped TON passed to other networks via Orbit Bridge), while doing so on other networks: Polygon (MeshSwap with TVL 27m$) and Klaytn (KlaySwap with TVL 127m$). There are announcements in social networks of these swap spots. But the vele from it is weak, it was possible to choose better sites. + intensives at the expense of swaps on Orbit Bridge.

• TonSwap - lame UI, tokens are called "tokens", rather atypical name. No settings for slippage, routing, etc.

• Tegro Finance - ecosystem builder,(it doesn't show on the Ton App page): TVL as of Jan 19 was $88k, as of Jan 23 has doubled to $164k, Price impact indicates low liquidity. Tegro ecosystem still has Uniton wallet, blockchain explorer, NFT marketplace Libermall and fiat payment gateway Tegro Money.

• DeDust - there is access to this dex via Tonkeeper. But it has too high commissions - it charges 5 TON for swap.

• Flex - AMM-DEX from ecosystem builder TonFactory, very little information, not launched yet

Ecosystem

• Tegro Money - fiat payment gateway from ecosystem integrator Tegro

• TonX Studio - also ecosystem builder, created: TonStake - service for steaking on TON, but it's not liquidity-stacking, just a third-party interface for steaking, anstaking also takes 36 hours (and you could play with giving users liquor, taking their funds after anstaking). TONDaddy is a service for managing DNS and their auctions. TonHow is an ecosystem forum whose site is no longer available. And there are a few more products - apparently for developers - that have only been announced so far.

• TonStarter is a native launchpad for Ton. Projects such as Fanzee, Megaton Finance and Ston.fi have been launched on it. Among the announced partnerships are Tonhub, Certik, Quantstamp, Trial of Bits. They are based in Dubai (but no confirmation could be found). Editors include Tal Kol, Justin Hyun, Anton Tsivarev and Darya Vasiljeva from FSL.

• Ton.place - a platform for content creators and their fans, you can pay not only with crypto, but also with bank cards. Nice interface, you can register just from google. A little strange content - a lot of photos of Asian models. There are a lot of likes on posts (100-2000), but nothing meaningful in the comments.

• Ton Play - gaming platform, it presents very simple games

• Ton DNS Platform - DNS addresses in TON network for wallets, smart contracts and sites (not for users like nicknames)

• SDK Ton Kotlin - allows to write for TON network in Kotlin language

• Tonhub - wallet, available on Android and iOs. Googleplay shows more than 10k downloads vs 100+k for TonKeeper.

• MyTonWallet - ecosystem wallet, extension for Chrome and supports TON Proxy.

• Libermall - Another NFT marketplace, with a nice interface but little trading volume. From Tegro Finance.

• GetGems - NFT-marketplace, trading volume for the 5 largest collections is $23.4m, but the main volume is on NFT with numbers and nicknames - $23.2m. That said, the site has a good native interface that scales well to mobile devices.

• Fanzee - received investment from TONCoin Fund, similar to Chillz in general terms.

Key Takeaways across the ecosystem:

• NFT infrastructure is well developed, you can think about launching pricing oracles for NFT marketplaces and solutions to provide liquidity and fractional NFT ownership.

• It may be noted that there are no solutions for KYC/AML. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the Telegram app itself has the option of full verification (Telegram Passport). Given Telegram Passport's ability to link to NFT in the form of nicknames, numbers and DNS, there's probably no need for such services. But there is a separate story with Souldbound - tokens that allow pulling in more data, such as resumes, portfolios, links to accounts on other social networks to form a full digital portrait (their functionality is already implemented).

Key Takeaways by bridges

• At the moment it looks as if there are no liquid bridges for different assets into the TON ecosystem, and most assets are either stepped through Orbit Bridge or are their own native and have little representation on other networks and centralized exchanges. This limits the flow of liquidity into the ecosystem. The issue of increasing the number of assets on the native bridge is acute, as there is usually more trust in such solutions because of the oracles controlled directly by the project itself.

• Another noteworthy point is that there are no prerequisites for NFT bridging yet, and this issue is likely to require a separate in-depth study to ensure compatibility of different NFT formats. Or this problem can be solved by giving NFT projects the tools to mint NFT in the TON network and mint in another network (as it is for example implemented with Bitcoin-NFT: the user can move the NFT from Ethereum, after which the NFT will be burned on the Ethereum blockchain and will be created on the Bitcoin blockchain)

4) Grants, funds, hackathons and liquidity support:

Ecosystem funds:

There are 4 ecosystem funds:

• TONcoin fund for $250M, which includes ORBS, Huobi Incubator, Kucoin Ventures, Cypher Capital, Kilo, DWF Labs. They invest in projects at different stages depending on the stage of product readiness. They distinguish 6 areas for ecosystem and startups:

  • Infrastructure - wallets, bridges, data solutions, analytics

  • DeFi - Dexes, Landings, Stablecoins, insurance protocols, pharming, derivatives

  • Games - lunchpads, metaverse, guilds

  • NFT - scoring, markets, new usecases

  • DAO

  • Social apps

• TAV Fund - $90M fund for development. Incubator, provide incubation support, with advice, in developing partnerships. No projects identified that have received investment and incubation from them. The Alphanonce and Vista Labs funds in this ecosystem fund have invested in projects on other blockchains.

• A $10M investment from DWF Labs to develop the TON ecosystem, with 50 sido rounds already scheduled to close within a year. But it is not very clear whether these 50 rounds are already distributed among the different 50 projects, or whether the $10 million is divided into $200 slots for each project that will appear during the year.

• Darley Technologies - Based on the article from Coinmarketcap, Clément Florentin, CEO of Darley Technologies, promised to allocate $15 million for the development of projects in the TON ecosystem. But we could not find any other confirmation of this.

• FS Labs - Andrey Rogozov is the CEO of FS Labs - the ecosystem foundation for TON. All Andrei's positions indicate very tight communication and integration of all elements of TON and Telegram ecosystem. He started back in 2007 in Durov's first project, Vkontakte. He started as head of development, and then became the CEO of Vkontakte (vk.com). First Stage Labs portfolio includes Getgems, StonFi, Tonstarter, TON Play, Tonkeeper, and Fanzee. FSLabs provides both investment and incubation support and is based in Dubai

In addition to these players, the ecosystem is being shaped by Theori, Ozys, TONDeFi.org - DAO, whose members have deposited many repositories for TON on their GitHub. The Orbs Network team is actively involved in the development of TON, both on the technical and community development side. In particular, Tal Kohl, the founder of Orbs, is one of the main developers of TONCoin Fund and writes articles for the blog.

There are periodic contests to write smart contracts and in FunC to encourage development in an ecosystem with enough participants for such events (70-180).

TOC Liquidity Rewards. There is more than 50m TON ($110-120m at current exchange rate) allocated to it, which is a good incentive for DeFi-ecosystem development. But judging by the fact that there haven't been any serious TVL numbers yet, it's likely that the program hasn't been launched yet since it was announced in August 2022.

Grants:

The conditions and process for getting grants described in great detail, there is a grading system with justifications. There is a clear definition of projects that can receive grants and a division of projects running natively on TON and others. In particular, there are separate programs from Getgems for NFT projects, and dApps that originally ran on other blockchains cannot qualify for a grant. This is a very good move, as it keeps grants from being atomized and rid the ecosystem of projects that are defector-grant-gatherers, traveling from one ecosystem to another without velo and a strong community.

Applications for which grants have been awarded:

• OpenMask - a browser-based cryptocurrency wallet, similar in structure to Metamask. But it has few downloads (399), the interface is not different from Metamask

• Rift (dBuilder) - service for automated creation of smart contracts in Phyton-based TON network

• Web3 Campus, an educational platform, including for developers and regular users

• Smart Sign - an application for signing smart contracts, with which you can sign NFTs, leaving a kind of autograph. Despite the somewhat simple usecase, the options for using such technology could be much broader, up to the semblance of a multisig to run a contract.

• Tonana (mentioned earlier).

• DataTON Analytics - have been working on a product that allows you to flag phishing and scamming wallets. The site is now inaccessible, with last postings in August 2022. They may have decided to build it natively into the Telegram infrastructure.

• TONDaddy - a service developed by ecosystem builder TonX Studio. A service for managing DNS and domain name auctions.

• TonFactory - also an ecosystem builder, they got a grant to develop a cross-chain wallet for developers with a console, and judging by their announcements - they're doing DEX Flex.

• Ton Run - search aggregator for TON.

• Ton Link - oracle, allows smart contracts to access data outside of the blockchain while maintaining data security.

• Ton Metaspace - There is very little information at this point. But from the looks of it, it will be a metaverse dedicated to TON.

Hackathons:

Hack-a-TONx w/ DoraHacks: hackathon launched by the TON organization itself, prize pool of $250k in TON tokens at a 30-day moving average price, plus bonus opportunity for investment from TONcoin fund. A list of participants is not yet available.

It is also worth noting that the ideas (goals) proposed for grants are aimed at building a sustainable infrastructure, for which there are already basic solutions (TON Payment, the possibility of creating TWA - Telegram Web Applications), which aim to combine Telegram, TON and Webawerse.

Of the proposed ideas for hackathon participants:

• Layer 0 (possibly for caching and communication between multiple shards/subnets)

• Creating DAOs that can redeem TON nicknames for commercial use

• Options for use with TON Payment

Key takeaways

• Unlike most cases where the conditions for receiving grants are very vague and non-transparent, in the TON ecosystem the conditions for receiving and evaluating grants are written very clearly, transparently, step-by-step, with evaluation criteria.

5) Analysis of the possible development of DeFi in TON in relation to other networks

If we take a retrospective look at the sequence in which the protocols appeared, we can distinguish the following stages of DeFi development in ecosystems:

That is, we can notice that the development went from simple to complex: first just DEXs, then AMM-DEXs. Further on, the protocols became more complicated, various options for using tokens, incentives, and liquidity management appeared. Then more and more products began to appear, protocol aggregators, profitability and routing optimizers began to appear. With more space, more users and more liquidity, derivatives began to appear, often in rather bizarre forms. And the icing on the cake was a massive trend towards leveraging everything: derivatives, options, futures, loans and farming.

In the case of TON, there is a good advantage: you do not need to build everything from scratch, since you can implement the latest developments and trends in various areas in DeFi. This can initially generate a lot of interest from users, which, together with the low base effect, can lead to the explosive growth of DeFi in the TON network, taking into account all the possibilities of ecosystem funds and the liquidity incentive program.

Key takeaways on DeFi development:

• The TON ecosystem currently lacks liquidity-stacking protocols to generate additional liquidity instead of withdrawing it into stacking

• On the other hand, small liquidity gives good prerequisites for vampirism formation - pumping liquidity from other networks and protocols due to low base effect and opportunities of good LP incentives by high APYs, and relative closedness due to TON Proxy and native smart contract language can complicate the entry of giants like Sushi and Uniswap, which are subjugating other protocols, taking the top spot in DeFi food chain.

• In the long run, liquidity will require stabelcoin exchanges that will both generate revenue for liquidity providers and allow users to make direct stable-to-stable swaps without extra routing and unnecessary costs.

• Return optimizers with different strategies for risk degrees emerge after the ecosystem is saturated with different protocols

6) Where are the funds currently investing (to determine the possible vector for the development of TON)

According to Messari, in the first half of 2022, the picture of cryptocurrency fund investments by sector was as follows:

In the context of this study, we are interested in DeFi-related areas, which include: Decentralized Exchanges (16%), Lending (9%), Derivatives (9%), Asset Management (4%), Currencies - Stablecoins etc (6%) and Tokenization (1%).

According to 4Q2022 PwC report, DeFi direction is in 2nd place after fundamental assets like BTC and LTC:

Key takeaways:

• In general, if we compare with the first half of 2022, we can see that the focus has become more on DeFi-infrastructure and infrastructure solutions in the form of wallets, analytical platforms, etc. There is less investment in global L1 and L2 platforms - but this is a cyclical phenomenon, as the life cycle of such projects and investments in them is much longer than that of DeFi projects.

• It is noticeable that there are very few mentions of insurance and credit scoring (identification) protocols

• Insurance protocols have little liquidity in principle - probably because no one wants to lose money on a hacked platform and the insurance payout of the same hacked platform (and they themselves are also subject to hacking, just think of Akropolis)

• Non-banks - they actively send pitches, but they don't invest in them, plus they usually invest in equity, hardly a good story for creating a product on TON at this stage

7) Team

In general, the emergence of TON (Gram) has long been shrouded in mystery to the point that neither Nikolai Durov nor Pavel Durov could confirm their relationship to one of the variations of their brainchild. Much has been written about how TON came to be, our goal at the moment is to look at the current team and their competencies.

It is known that TON is headquartered in Dubai and some of the team members, judging by their LinkedIn accounts, are based there. But not all TON representatives indicate their involvement in the project in their profiles, so we will try to find as much of the team as possible from open sources instead of just orienting to LinkedIn. It was not possible to find confirmation of TON registration in Dubai, but it is known that Telegram's head office is registered and located in Dubai.

The team is pretty big, some of it listed on Linkedin, some of it listed on the blogs, some of it listed on GitHub. So let's look at the main members of the team.

• Tal Kol LinkedIn Twitter GitHub despite the fact that TON is not listed on his social media profiles, Tal actively contributes to the TON github and writes many articles with a technical focus on the TON blog. Tal Kohl is a cofounder of Orbs and co-founder of Hexa.

• Andrew Rogozov LinkedIn Twitter Founding member of TON Foundation. Andrei is a very interesting person. He has come a long way together with Pavel Durov. He started back in 2007 in Durov's first project, Vkontakte. He started as head of development, and then became the CEO of Vkontakte (vk.com). Currently, besides being a Founding member of TON Foundation, Andrey is the CEO of FS Labs - the ecosystem foundation for TON. All Andrei's positions indicate very tight communication and integration of all elements of TON and Telegram ecosystem.

• Bill Qian LinkedIn Board Member of TON Foundation, Chairman of Cypher Capital. Previously, Bill was Global Head of Fundraising at Binance Labs and Global Head of M&A at Binance. Bill has a very good experience in the investment business and is going to assemble a web2 development team to accelerate the development of the TON ecosystem.

• Steve Yun Founding member of TON Foundation, There is little information about him, despite the fact that Steve is a public figure and speaks at the AMA.

• Manuel Stotz, LinkedIn Founding member of TON Foundation, Founder of Kingsway Capital. All in all, Manuel has a lot of experience in the investment field, including Liongate, Goldman Sachs.

• Daniel Yang LinkedIn BizDev Daniel has worked as a bizdev at Binance, and joined TON just recently, in November 2022. Before that, Daniel had extensive experience in marketing and business development positions.

• Justin Hyun, LinkedIn Twitter the Head of Incubation. The experience at BlockFi and Deloitte is noteworthy. He was also an adviser to Ozys, the company that was involved in the creation of KLAYswap, Belt.fi and Orbit Chain. This explains the choice of Orbit Bridge and Klayswap DEX for Megaton Finance DEX intensives.

• Kirill Emelyanenko CTO Twitter GitHub LinkedIn HackMD Very active GitHub, apparently an avid techie, weak information trail.

Key takeaways:

• While there is no direct evidence or company registration data, it is very clear that TON, Telegram, and ecosystem partners and funds are based in the same location - Dubai. This makes it much easier to network and work together to develop the ecosystem.

• The team and the Ambassadors are formed very competently, all have the necessary skills in their areas. Most of the team members have very strong competencies and connections in the crypto industry.

8) Tokenometrics

There is no exact data on metrics and prices of private rounds, and in the context of The Open Network we should not consider the sale of Gram tokens, so we turn to the dry facts that we have at the moment. It is worth separating investments in Gram and Toncoin. They are completely different lines of investment and completely different teams. Toncoin developed originally as one of Gram's open source implementations after Pavel Durov decided to cancel the Gram launch because of Sec.

It is known that Toncoin has attracted 2 rounds of investment:

• 06.04.2021 - $6M from Runa Capital and RTP Global source

• 17.11.2022 - $10M from DWF Labs source

The total supply is known to be 5bn TON tokens. The current price as of 03.02.2023 is $2.35 with a current capitalization of $2.87bn and a circulating TON of 1.221bn. The maximum price was at $4.5 on 13.11.2021 with ATH at market cap of $4.19bn.

It can also be noted that in Q2 2023 it is planned to activate deflationary tokenomics with token burning as part of network commissions.

There was also a recent vote on a proposal to block TONs on inactive addresses. On the one hand, this is a controversial decision, as it would negate the value of TON as a long term storage currency and introduce censorship. On the other hand, it would greatly reduce token supply in circulation, which could have a positive effect on token price.

9) Roadmap:

In early February 2023, the Toncoin team presented a roadmap for 2023. Previously, there were concerns about the official bridge, and judging by the roadmap - it will be developed further. Moreover, there are plans to launch a bridge to Polygon and Bitcoin - this will provide even more opportunities for liquidity to flow into the ecosystem. Also in the fourth quarter of 2023, nodes are expected to be separated into collators and validators. According to the team, this will allow the blockchain to handle more workloads and will likely reduce transaction costs even further as workloads grow on the network.

Used sources:

Tal Col “Six unique aspects of TON Blockchain that will surprise Solidity developers” Ton Blog 28.04.2022

Ton.org “Comparison of TON, Solana and Ethereum” 07.03.2022

Nikolai Durov “Catchain Consensus: An Outline” 19.02.2020

The Block Research “TON: Telegram Orphan Network” The Block 01.05.2020

Sandra Leow “TON Chain: Fork of the Original Telegram TON Project” Nansen 17.01.2023

PwC “4th Annual Global Crypto Hedge Fund Report 2022” PwC

Kaushik Guduru “Fund Analysis H1’22: Examining Portfolios of Crypto Funds” Messari 24.06.2022

TON Stage of DeFi 2023

jakub “What is a Vampire Attack? SushiSwap Saga Explained” 12.09.2020

DWF Labs “DWF Labs Invests $10M in the TON Ecosystem” 17.11.2022

Author: Soin Stepan TG: @stsoen stsoien@gmail.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stsoien/

Date: 02.02.2023

1) What are modular blockchains in general?

Recently, the concept of "modular blockchains" has been spreading. They include Celestia, Fuel, Polygon Avail, Solana Nitro. But what is meant by modular blockchains? And isn't it a marketing ploy? And how do they then differ from rollups, which separate the execution or calculation layer (L2) and the verification layer (L1)?

Rollups designed for vertical scaling simply add a new layer above L1, which takes over all the functionality of L1, while L1 itself is used essentially for anchoring (fixing data), so it's not correct to talk about any separation of functionality here. Subnets designed for horizontal scaling, like Cosmos or Avalanche, also do not fit the definition of modularity: despite extensive customization, they still use more or less common logic, rule sets and validators.

The idea of the need for modular blockchains is explained by the fact that in monolithic blockchains, the same nodes implement all BC functionality, so more power is required of them because they are responsible for consensus, data storage (blockchain history), execution of smart contracts, calculations (arguments in Arbitrum).

And in the case of modular blockchains, it is possible to provide separate choices for each of the execution levels. That is, the stack is divided into different modules:

• Consensus layer: checks blocks and blockchain state

• Data availability layer: manages the records in the blockchain and stores its data, so you can see the history of blocks and transactions. That is, it absolutely does not mean storing any files, data, pictures for NFT, etc. Data availability sampling is a mechanism for checking if a block is available, without having to load the whole block.

• Execution layer: executes transactions, smart contracts.

• Settlement layer: the meaning of this level is not quite clear, and it looks applicable only for optimistic rollups, when the probability of disputes for transactions from L2 to L1 is allowed. Some studies mention that Settlement level is needed for gas. And some studies don't mention it at all, as it is most likely applicable only for Optimistic rollups.

The documentation of modular blockchains makes a very controversial distinction between these levels, as they often point out that both consensus, data availability, and computation lie on the Ethereum side when compared to rollups. But this is completely incorrect, because L2 has its own consensus, since it's needed for transaction approval one way or another. Optimistic rollups have separate nodes for calculations in the key of contention, zk rollups also have separate nodes - verifiers - for controlling uploads to the Ethereum network. For data storage zkSync has zkPorter, Starkware has Validium and Volution, there is no shortage of these solutions.

The idea is that all this separation is needed in order to be able to use some layer with guaranteed security for consensus, some for data storage, so as not to load the network, which will be responsible for processing transactions and calculations. And so far, the only implementation of a modular blockchain with different modules is in the form of Cevmos - a joint project of Celestia and Evmos, which uses zk- and Optimistic- rollups for execution, Evmos for calculations, and Celestia for data availability. That said, this whole scheme lacks the consensus layer that runs Tendermint with 2k TPS throughput. So, in essence, different elements of the Cosmos ecosystem are being used. That said, all of Cevmos itself is Optimistic rollup, while Evmos Hub is responsible for interoperability, smart contracts, and overall security.

And this is how it all looks like from the other side (only here the data storage level is already skipped). It looks like modularity in all its glory: there are cubes, but for some reason some fall out:

2) What are the projects related to modular blockchains?

Fuel

Fuel can be considered the progenitor of the idea of modular blockchains, since Celestia was launched by Fuel cofounder John Adler, who was also one of the first proponents of Optimistic Rollup (perhaps this explains the level of settlement (Settlement), which is specific to Optimistic Rollups). Ekram Ahmed, director of communications at Celestia Labs, is also a strategic advisor to Fuel. Although Celestia and Fuel are two different teams, there are overlapping personalities in their management, and they are likely to complement each other in development, even though they can be positioned as competitors. But, again, the main difference with L1 from last cycle is that they are not really competitors, but rather work in synergy.

Development of Fuel is going on since 2019, there is its own virtual machine FuelVM, which, due to the use of UTXO accounting method, allows you to parallelize transactions. It uses its own language Sway, which is a mix of Solidity and Rust, and apparently, this feature is the reason why the SDK for Rust and Solidity is possible. Tendermint-BFT is offered as a consensus. Offers a full modularity stack, unlike Celestia, which makes it possible to use Fuel as a monolithic L1.

Fuel has no tokenomics at all, when asked about tokenomics, admins in discord threaten with ban. In the Verify branch in bold text it says: "All inquiries or discussion regarding tokens will be ignored, with violators subject to timeouts or bans". And in general, tokenomics in the case of modular blockchains raises very serious questions, because it is supposed to use different modules, different projects, and it looks rather silly to pay with several tokens at once. Moreover, the Fuel team considers PoS to be a suboptimal use of a token.

The whole ecosystem is in development, but at least it is there, unlike other modular blockchains. And it is not represented by individual networks, blockchains, etc., as one might think, but by dapps. Among them: the Orao oracle, which has already been released on Polkastarter and DAOMaker; DEX Elix Finance, an SDK for Poolsharks orderbooks; NFT marketplaces Thunder and Unic; file storage Webgum; and the NNS service Fuel Nomen. These are all L1 and L2 attributes, no modularity here.

From the redflags - the Alameda and FTX investment spreadsheet has information that they went in for $15M in Fuel token (for which there is no information at all yet). Total raised $80mn from Fenbushi, Spartan, Dialectic, Maven 11 Capital, CoinFund, Blockchain Capital, ZMT, Origin Capital, Stratos Technologies.

Celestia

Focuses on rollups, which can use Celestia as a data availability layer. It's up to other modules, rollups, to ensure reliability of transactions. This is supposed to speed up the validation of rollups. Unlike Fuel, Celestia is based entirely on Cosmos technologies, including the use of IBC.

Tokenomics is also not prescribed, it is not clear how the Celestia token will work, how payment for services provided by Celestia will happen, given that other networks and rollups have their own tokens - also unclear, not even a concept.

Ecosystem, unlike Fuel, is more about building infrastructure. Cevmos, which we mentioned earlier, is focused on building an EVM-compatible environment on Cosmos. Eclipse - making rollups based on VM Solana. Astria - another EVM-compatible layer. Baking Bad - indexer. Fractal - userfriendly zk rollups in terms of development.

FTX was put into them too, but for a smaller amount, $1.75mn with an estimate of $1bn. total raised $56.5mn, quite a few funds: Bain Capital Crypto, Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, FTX Ventures, Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Binance Labs, Maven 11, KR1, Signature Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Dokia Capital, P2P Capital, Tokonomy, Cryptium Labs.

Polygon Avail.

The idea is to get rid of the dapps from checking the onchain data in Polygon BC itself... Everything is described in a very vague way, one of Polygon products (among which there are also Hermez and Miden rollups). It's positioned as a level of data availability, they write about EVM compatibility, yet everything works on Polkadot and the explorer is also Polkadot, and yet it doesn't work. It's a very strange solution to build on Polkadot, which has no tools to connect even its own subnets.

They write that Avail will be able to use some dapps as a separate network, or Optimism and Validium will be able to connect to it. At the same time Validium is itself a layer of data availability from Starknet, a module for working with offchain data.

No ecosystem, no investors (it's one of the Polygon products), social networking is chaotic, there is no separate discord, the link leads to the Polygon discord, it is created as part of the Polygon Thesis, aimed at developing and studying ZK rollups in the Polygon network. Polygon Thesis has $1 billion in funding for several teams that are also making some not-so-comprehensive and unfinished products with weird justifications and documentation - Hermez and Miden. That is, it can't be considered a full-fledged product.

Solana Nitro.

It is created as a Cosmos-based Solana virtual machine and works as an optimistic rollup. It was supposed to be possible to use Solana smart contracts due to native compatibility with SVM using IBC Cosmos. Nitro is positioned as the Execution Layer, and SEI is responsible for computation and consensus. The plus side of using VM Solana Sealevel is that it allows the execution of smart contracts in parallel. The documentation indicates that it will be possible to run L3 on top of Nitro. No investors specified, no ecosystem yet.

UPD on Nitro: In 2 months, the number of Twitter followers has grown from 18k to 51.9k. On Discord, the number of participants has grown from 20k to 46+k.

3) Conclusion.

1) If you look at zk-rollups, the raison d'être of modular blockchains looks very questionable. They promise speed increase for rollups, with only optimistic rollups being slow (they have around 500TPS, which is what modular BCs are for). And for zk-rollups, which, unlike optimistic, are not compatible with EVM (but this has long been bypassed by compilers), speed increase solutions are not needed, because they have high speed (9000-100000TPS), and have their own solutions for Data Availability - Volution, zkPorter. And zk-rollups don't have calculation level like optimistic-rollups.

Quote from Vitalik Buterin's 2021 guide to rollups:

Overall, I think optimistic rollups will probably win for general purpose EVM computation in the short term, and zk rollups will probably win for simple payments, exchanges, and other application-specific use cases, but as ZK-SNARK technology improves, zk rollups will win for all use cases in the medium to long term.

Are these modular blockchains so necessary in the end?

2) It's completely unclear how tokenomics and token usage, payment for module use, can be built if using several different modules in different blockchains. Neither Fuel nor Celestia has any information about tokens and tokenomics. Polygon Avail and Solana Nitro can be seen purely as experimental solutions. And Celestia has a huge $1bn valuation with little established infrastructure and weak token prospects.

3) It is easier for developers to use some ready to use SDK stack, compilers in one network, rather than developing on hodgepodge of different proprietary languages and compilers for different VMs. It is unclear how to calculate economic models with different tokens, different gas costs, etc., since none of the modular blockchains have prescribed tokenomics yet.