DefiLlama Research

Variational is bringing Swaps onchain. Dealer-backed liquidity, predictable funding, and access to TradFi markets. We break down how it works and why it matters. Read more here

What do 100 rated tokens reveal about Universal Token Ratings? → Only one token has reached AAA; this requires a D x P both near 7.7/10. → Disclosure is the common bottleneck, which lowered the score for 75% of tokens. → Exchange access carries more weight than token FDV; going from 0 to 3-4 listings adds 22 points. 🌐 Plus more sector patterns, full grade distribution, and why some of the lowest scores aren't what they look like.

FIP.16 passed with 98.06% of the vote in April, one of the strongest mandates in Flare Networks' governance history. Four months later, the onchain behavior has shifted to match it. Staked FLR nearly doubled, from ~16B to 21.5B, and its share of all staked-or-delegated supply jumped from 32% to 46%, most of that move landing within weeks of a July hard fork. The calculated Burn rate is now running at more than 10x the pre-fork baseline. 🌐 Full breakdown of the mechanics and the early revenue numbers detailed here.

The Flare Network Investor Relations dashboard is now live. Akin to what a traditional equity investor looks for, this dashboard tracks and organizes data across the Flare Network, including: → FAssets and FXRP activity → Protocol-level activity across 40 tracked deployments → FLR tokenomics (supply, inflation, value-accrual mechanics) → Staking & network security Plus one-click access to documentation, blockchain explorer, official websites, and social media accounts. https://investors.defillama.com/flare

Are prediction markets still hot? Monthly volumes increased 1900% from July 2025 to July 2026. And yet, they are in a bit of a slump right now. Polymarket weekly volume is down 49% from June highs, a 4x decrease compared to Kalshi (-13%). Our latest research piece details a "Battle of the Titans" between Polymarket and Kalshi, who combined account for ~95% of all prediction market volume.

THORChain in 2021: 6 chains, 10-20% slippage, barely usable. THORChain in H1 2026: 14 chains, ~0.2% slippage, $2.8B in swap volume, largest Bitcoin DEX by volume. DefiLlama Research revisits DeFi in 2021, not out of nostalgia, but to reflect on how five years of shipping and a confluence of events like "The Great CEX-odus" and the rise of PrivacyFi exorcised THORChain's onchain demons of yesterday. 🌐 Check out the full article here.

Bitcoin's late August rally saw some of the biggest candles in recent history. One might assume it was a classic leveraged comeback. However, our data found that spot volume and ETF liquidity led the charge, while open interest actually fell. 18 days before the breakout: → $6.02 in perp volume for every $ of spot volume → BTC traded between $62K and $66K After: → BTC gains ~27%, touches $81.5K → perp volume $/spot volume $ shrank 17.4% to $4.97 → spot volume grew 50% faster than perp volume If the move ran more on cash rather than leverage, which venues captured the flows? To answer, we turn to Binance, which alone absorbed inflows worth nearly the entire US spot Bitcoin ETF complex, and other major CEXs in this Spotlight.

Rumor has it that tomorrow is a big day for our friends at Variational. We're catching up with them tomorrow, live on X, at 8:30 AM EST. ⏰ Set that alarm.

Back in May, when SpaceX was pre-IPO, one Hyperliquid perp market fell -45% in under 30 minutes after an oracle misread a routine stock split as a price collapse. 400 traders liquidated, $1.5M in notional value up in smoke. Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework lets anyone launch a perp market on almost any asset, leaving the Deployer to choose the oracle. All it takes is one wrong configuration and an entire market gets microwaved. RedStone has been powering HIP-3 markets with a purpose-built oracle stack. Its primary/fallback price system is built to catch these mechanical misreads by separating price feeds from mechanical resets like stock splits. 🌐 More in this spotlight.

How does the new UTR dashboard by DefiLlama and Forgd assign scores to listed projects? 🌐 We break down the methodology in this article.

DeFi has no shortage of ways for projects to signal credibility. DefiLlama is the industry's go-to for open-source, verifiable onchain data. A live, continuously updated standard for scoring tokens by disclosure & performance is a natural next step. 🌐 More on the new Universal Token Ratings dashboard in this spotlight.

Our new Universal Token Ratings dashboard is live: the industry's first continuously updated token rating standard, built with Forgd. 100+ tokens now carry a single 0-100 score and AAA-CCC grade, live on DefiLlama. https://defillama.com/universal-token-rating

On May 4th, Tydro suspended every market after its price provider flagged a suspected attack. No funds were lost, but the incident raised a few considerations about white-label Aave deployments. A licensed Aave V3 instance doesn't get: → Aave DAO governance over listings and parameters → the DAO-run Umbrella loss backstop → an independent read on whether markets are priced correctly Two of the three are procurable, with Tydro adding: + Chainlink and RedStone as a 1st- and 2nd-price feed under a 48-hour timelock, respectively. + Hypernative Labs' Transaction Guard for multisig screening. The third item works differently: an independent read on pricing only has value if the assessor has no stake in the outcome, something no operator can build in-house no matter how much they spend. Tydro V2 enlisted Credora, which scores markets and assets on probability of loss and resolves it to a single A+ to D grade, where an 'A' sits in the same probability band as a BBB/BBB- corporate bond. 🌐 More on the incident and Credora's risk rating system here.

The Crecimiento team is on the ground this week for their LatAm Digital Assets Conference in Buenos Aires, putting DefiLlama Research's State of Argentina report directly into attendees' hands. Paper still has its uses, mostly as a segue into the onchain economy. Are you pro-paper? You can download and print DefiLlama Research's State of Argentina report. Bind it, llama-nate 🦙 it, frame it, whatever gets the job done, and show the world what a real crypto adoption blueprint looks like.

Do stocks on crypto rails have the good product-market fit that crypto has been led to believe? Where onchain tokenized equities grew their active mcap by 9x Y-o-Y, and their perpetuals counterpart by 20x since December alone, size isn't the story here. These tokenized spot markets move ~4.66x their mcap every 30 days. Stock perps move 32.39x, about seven times faster per day. It's no surprise that these onchain markets mirror their TradFi origins. Is that volume showing up every day? Are these two markets competing for the same dollar? 🌐 We pulled 150 days of volume across every DefiLlama-tracked venue to answer these questions and more.

What if we measured a project's disclosure (vesting schedules, tokenomics, legal structure) against its token's behavior and performance (liquidity depth, bid-ask spreads, volume, market coverage)? A new standard is on the way from DefiLlama and Forgd.

One of the more leveraged trading books in crypto is running on a reserve base worth taking a closer look. Gate's open interest sits at $12.5B, and derivatives make up +2x the share of trades that spot does. That much leverage raises the question: what's backing it? Disclosed onchain reserves: → BTC: $1.28B → ETH: $709M → USD1: $370.5M → USDT (spUSDT): $108.4M → Other stables: $312.2M → DOGE: $161.3M → stETH: $115.7M $GT, Gate's native token, totals $727.9M and is tracked separately. Overall, per Gate's July 27 Proof of Reserves report, the exchange has a 117% coverage ratio across ~500 asset types, totaling $4.61 billion in clean (non-own-token) reserves. 🌐 Read more about Gate in our latest spotlight.

Guess the country: → 105% average annual inflation, every year since 1944 → Capital controls capping USD purchases at $200/month → Informal FX market trading at up to 2x the official rate → A population that turned to crypto to protect its savings If you guessed 🇦🇷 Argentina 🇦🇷 you're right. What came next: a generation of builders who kept working without a legal framework, and a government that chose to formalize what they built instead of restricting it. Our new report with Crecimiento traces how that combination produced 8.6M crypto users and $91B in annual volume, the highest per capita in Latin America. Sponsored by Nexo. 🌐 Read the full report here.

The two-sided crypto coin: heads is MicroStrategy, tails is BitMine. One holds 4.2% of total $BTC supply; the other holds 4.7% of total $ETH supply (and 309.3 BTC). Strategy has a realized mNAV of 0.669 (33.1% discount to NAV). Bitmine's is 1.015 (a 1.5% premium to NAV). YTD, BitMine has bought and never sold. The company increased its 2026 net ETH holdings by $3.38B, funded by equity + ETH-native staking yield. Strategy added 169,640 BTC so far in 2026, funded through ATM equity issuance and debt offering. But the company has sold four times since June, offloading 5,258 BTC worth $323.2 M. That's all fine and well as a data dump, but you've heard this story before. So let's ask: with $MSTR down -4.5% over the last 30 days vs BMNR's +14.5%, is the market pricing in a "never sell" mentality? Or is it simply a premium/discount signal?

That token buyback path we flagged for Fake World Assets in this article activated four days after publishing. Daily fees are down 98% from their peak, yesterday earning ~$30k, and holder revenue is now 80.4% of FWA fees (~$340k/~$424k). Since launching, FWA has earned $10.26M worth of fees, $2.83M in revenue, and distributed $651K to holders. The Gamified Mining category (including FWA) generated another ~$5M in fees and ~$3M in revenue since July 31, down 33.2% and 13.2% week-over-week, respectively. To date, the category has generated $106M in fees and $78M worth of revenue.