DeFi Sectors
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StablecoinsPlasma: Taking Aim at a Trillion Dollar Opportunity
By
Anil Lulla•
Stablecoins have quietly become one of the largest payment rails in the world, settling more than $18 trillion in 2025, surpassing both Visa and Mastercard. What started as collateral for crypto trading has evolved into flows serving remittances, merchant settlement, and B2B payments. Particularly in markets where local currency instability makes dollars on-chain both more functional and a store of value.
Despite processing trillions in volume, stablecoins remain second-class citizens on the chains that host them. Ethereum, Tron, Solana, and others were designed as general-purpose smart contract platforms, not dedicated monetary rails. This fundamental mismatch subjects stablecoin transfers to volatile gas pricing, MEV predation, and fee models denominated in speculative native tokens, creating billions in inefficient user fees for what are essentially simple ledger updates.
Plasma flips this model by positioning stablecoins as the network's primary workload rather than just another application. Through its zero-fee USDT transfer model and split-block architecture, Plasma eliminates the computational overhead that plagues other chains.
This mirrors how internet companies like Google and PayPal gave away core services to capture downstream value – Plasma uses free transfers as a customer acquisition wedge to attract high-frequency participants like market makers, CEX off-ramps, and remittance operators.
Plasma’s flagship product, Plasma One, their stablecoin-native neobank, captures value via card interchange, FX spreads, and yield generation while maintaining full EVM compatibility. With native USDT integration, a Bitcoin bridge, and partnerships spanning from Aave to Binance Earn's $1 billion commitment, Plasma is positioning itself as the purpose-built settlement layer for the global dollar economy. A trillion dollar opportunity.

DeFiParadex: Reimagining On-Chain Markets from First Principles
By
Anil Lulla•
Paradex represents a high-conviction bet on a fundamentally different approach to building an exchange. It’s not the easiest path and is far from consensus. Ultimately, my thesis is that we see a zero-to-one improvement in on-chain exchange design. If we analogize to the evolution of exchanges: first-gen DeFi (Uniswap, etc.) was an innovation (AMMs vs order books), second-gen (dYdX, GMX, etc.) tried to bring more pro features but still lacked certain elements, and now Paradex is the third-gen that combines the best of CeFi and DeFi

DeFiZora: Can't Stop Coining
By
Anil Lulla•
This report has everything you need to know about Zora, the most polarizing project of the cycle. Zora is the latest attempt at Web3 Social, delivering a polished consumer app and strong support from Base. This post will explain Zora, its vision, and its flywheel. We’ll discuss the broken creator economy and compare Zora to previous SocialFi experiments like Friend.tech.

Layer 1 / L1Sui’s Q2: On-Chain UX Primitives, BTCFi Expansion, Scaling Production
By
Anil Lulla•
Sui’s Q2 focused on turning past infrastructure upgrades into tools developers can actually use. Frameworks like SEAL, Passkeys, and Remora began to surface in SDKs and product flows, aimed at fixing real gaps around privacy, authentication, and scalability.
On the ecosystem side, BTCfi kept growing, DeFi protocols like Suilend and Momentum DEX gained traction, and the Claynosaurz Popkins launch showed what Sui’s core architecture can handle under real demand. Just as the internet went mainstream when complexity became invisible, Sui is quietly doing the same for blockchain.

InfrastructureInside Avalanche L1s – The Avax Ecosystem
By
Anil Lulla•
The past few months have made one thing clear: Avalanche’s appchain model is working.
- Daily transactions have grown 6x since January
- Contract deployments are hitting 250k+ per day
- Interchain Messaging volume is up 25x from earlier this year
From high-performance games like MapleStory N and Off The Grid to consumer platforms like FIFA Collect, more projects are launching sovereign chains tailored to their needs. These L1s plug into Avalanche’s fast base layer and interop tooling while giving teams full control over execution, fees, and economics.
Avalanche is also quietly becoming a hub for real world use cases. J.P. Morgan and Balcony are launching live deployments using Avalanche’s infra for everything from asset-backed securities to property deeds.
With over 75 active L1s and more to come, Avalanche is making a strong case for appchains as the future.

Spot ExchangeThe Rise of Prop AMMs on Solana
By
Anil Lulla•
The concept of a "prop AMM" may seem like a contradiction. AMMs by design are open, deterministic systems. Their role is to offer clear pricing curves, transparent pool balances, and trustless access to liquidity. Prop AMMs operate completely opposite. They quote prices privately, don’t operate frontends, rely on vault-based liquidity, and only execute through aggregators. We can basically refer to them as onchain market makers.
The irony of all of this is that even on a permissionless chain, liquidity provision is trending toward centralization, not in terms of access, but in terms of operational control and execution quality. I don’t necessarily think this violates decentralization per say, but rather reshapes what “participation” looks like. And that’s ultimately the direction the market has decided on.
In the next ~6-12 months I could very well see this trend continue, with the long-tail of prop AMMs all competing to capture that same asymmetric upside currently held by the select handful today.
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