Manifold Finance Gains Traction As The Merge Approaches

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📊 Manifold Finance Gains Traction As The Merge Approaches

Daily active users on Manifold Finance have spiked since the beginning of August, indicating that users are staking FOLD tokens to earn a portion of the platform’s revenue. Following the Merge, the platform’s revenue is expected to increase as their router integrations become operational.
Manifold Finance is a middleware protocol that provides access to high-value transaction pools on EVM-compatible chains. The protocol aggregates multiple endpoints such as Flashbots and Eden Network, while maintaining direct access to disparate mining pools or validator nodes.
After the Merge, Ethereum will use a modular approach that will separate block building and block validation into two distinct activities, introducing a new stakeholder known as the block builder.
OpenMEV will potentially allow Manifold Finance to become one of the largest block builders, once the Merge goes through. The protocol’s router is already connected to SushiSwap and is in the process of on-boarding Balancer and three top on-chain market makers.
Additionally, the strategy lead for Flashbots, a competitor to Manifold, indicated on August 18 that they will comply with OFAC sanctions, making them susceptible to censorship. This likely aided the recent surge in users as the platform’s OpenMEV provides a credibly neutral platform for censorship resistance.
For more on the state of Ethereum, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

⚡ Arbitrum Nitro: Building On Year 1

Arbitrum launched about a year ago near the end of August 2021, getting close to $2B TVL due to a Nyan Cat Farm (not a typo) before dying down a couple days later.
Ecosystems like Avalanche for EVM and Solana for non-EVM had momentum during this time and Arbitrum took a bit of a backseat. This lull in activity continued until TreasureDAO started driving activity to Arbitrum in Q1 ‘22 along with the perps exchange GMX, and then Arbitrum’s Odyssey campaign more recently.
But the recent momentum for L2s is not limited to Arbitrum, as Optimism has seen a pick-up as well, albeit for a different reason.
Optimism launched their “OP” token on June 1st, leading to a rush of users from L1 to claim these tokens and use the chain for the first time. Both have seen steady increases MoM since the beginning of the year and continue to trend up.

More recently, Optimism has overtaken Arbitrum in DeFi TVL, the two main drivers being Velodrome, a Solidly fork (Andre Cronje creation) and Aave, the well-known lending platform.
One of the hardest challenges L2s have is competing with larger ecosystems on developer incentives (go get paid more at Solana, Near, Avalanche, etc.). Optimism’s solution to this has been using their token as currency, given as grants to protocols to incentivize building on Optimism.
Velodrome uses their grant as bribes for VELO lockers and Aave for depositing on the platform. Velodrome TVL went from ~$10M mid-June to ~$130M today, offering double digit yields on ETH pools. Aave launched incentives on August 4th and their TVL shot up by ~$400M in less than 24 hours.
For more on L2s, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

🐣 Notable Tweets

Quick Guide to the Aptos Ecosystem

1/
This is a thread about Aptos and the early-stage projects in the Aptos ecosystem.

Thread Timeline:
Tweet 2-6: Some details and facts about Aptos.
Tweet 7-27: 20 early-stage projects on $Aptos

— Airdrop Official🍥 (@its_airdrop) Aug 22, 2022

How To Maximize Arbitrage Profit

DEX Arbitrage, Mathematical Optimisations & Me

If you’re a scholar of MEV, understanding how to maximise arbitrage profit is something you should be interested in

Lucky for you that’s what we’ll be diving into today

— noxx (@noxx3xxon) Aug 22, 2022

Deep Dive into Optimism

✨ We just released a new guest lecture ✨

The wonderful @ori_pomerantz from @optimismFND does an in-depth analysis of Optimistic rollups and how they function on a fundamental level.

🧵 Check out more details below:

— Macro (@0xMacroDAO) Aug 23, 2022

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