This past quarter marked the beginning of the long-awaited ecosystem wars. As crypto markets continue to gain mainstream popularity, newfound retail adoption pushed Ethereum’s fees to all-time highs. The surge in demand, while good for the overall industry, rendered Ethereum unusable for most retail users prompting them to look outside for alternatives options. This exodus in conjunction with the growth of the application ecosystems on adjacent Layer-1s such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Solana, Cosmos, and Polkadot have become important factors affecting Ethereum’s dominance in the space.
In this weekly recap report, we explore assets in these new chains and dive into the weekly performance of the most popular protocols across different Layer-1s.
Notable Messari Intel Updates
Cardano Node v1.26.2 was released by IOHK over the weekend.
The Matic Foundation commenced the final stage of Phase 3 of Matic’s mainnet rollout, shutting down Matic Foundation’s validator nodes.
Uniswap v3 core and periphery contracts have been deployed to all major Ethereum testnets.
The Solana Foundation released Mainnet Beta v1.5.19 this week.
Ecosystem Performance Review
Ethereum
As is the case with the majority of the charts in this report, most assets in the Ethereum ecosystem ended the week with negative returns. DeFi blue chips, the ones with longevity on their side, were more resilient during the bumpy market. MakerDAO showed the greatest resilience during the week ending with a 58% return. Compound was the second best-performing asset and the only other token that finished the week in positive territory ending with a 7% return. The remaining assets ended the week in the red with 0x and SushiSwap lagging the rest with returns of -22% and -28%, respectively.
Cosmos
All assets in the Cosmos ecosystem ended the week in negative territory. Although half of the assets had positive returns at the end of last week, all tokens experienced a sharp decline during the weekend setting the pace for the rest of the week. Among Cosmo’s assets, Mirror and Rune had the highest volatility of the group. Rune was on track to finish last week with close to a 30% return which was quickly erased during the weekend sending the token down to end the week with a -12% return. Mirror suffered the least across the board. The token had a boost following the weekend but slowly gave away the returns to end the week with a -4% return. At the bottom of the pack was the chain’s native token ATOM which ended the week with a -27% return.
Polkadot
Polkadot’s assets as a whole were the worst-performing during the week. After the widespread decline during the weekend, Polkadot’s assets continue to plummet. By the end of the week, all of them suffered two-digit declines. Sora and Polymath experience the least decline ending the week with -14% and -15% respectively. The rest of the assets ended the week in the -19% to -27% performance range. Darwinia Network was the clear laggard of the group finishing the week with a 30% decline.
Binance
Assets in the Binance ecosystem had a mixed week. The majority of the asset quickly rebounded following the weekend drawdown. Three of the five assets tracked in the chart below moved into the positive territory starting Tuesday, April 20th. PancakeSwap (CAKE) was the clear leader of the group ending the week with a double-digit return of 17%. Binance Coin (BNB) and Venus (XVS) also rallied following PancakeSwap’s steps but ended the week with muted performance after giving back some of their return late Wednesday, April 21st. Alpha Finance (ALPHA) was among the worst-performing assets of the group losing close to 30% by the middle of the week but quickly rebounded regaining some footing to end the week with a small loss of -2%. Cream (CREAM) had a similar trajectory as Alpha Finance losing more than 30% by mid-week but unlike ALPHA the token wasn’t able to rebound ending at the bottom of the pack with a -26% loss.
Solana
The Solana ecosystem had the widest dispersion of the returns during the week. Most of the assets moved in a similar fashion from April 15th to April 18th. However, Solana’s native token SOL rebounded sharply after the weekend, ending the week deep in the green with a weekly return of 29%. Hxro (HXRO) was slightly affected by the weekend market shock, never dipping into negative territory throughout the week. The remaining assets in the ecosystem were not able to rebound after the weekend drawdown ending the week with a two-digit loss. Kin and Audius were the clear underperformers of the group, with weekly returns of -26% and -28%, respectively.
