Here comes the next generation.
Even as Hyperliquid and Pump.fun have captured the imagination, and the deposits, of crypto users this year, a number of smaller, little known DeFi projects are charging ahead with eye-opening growth.
Agglayer, for instance, is a project built by the team at Polygon, the layer 2 blockchain.
Agglayer’s flagship product, the Vault Bridge protocol, takes bridged assets from one blockchain and routes them to Morpho vaults where they earn yield.
Blockchains can tap the yield to fund development and support projects. This replaces the traditional method of inflation to support growth with a model that allows for a revenue source that grows along with the growth of activity on the blockchain.
Launched on May 8, Vault Bridge has attracted more than $160 million in deposits.
Nucleus is a yield aggregation protocol that can function on multiple blockchains. Users can employ a variety of yield strategies while exploring new ecosystems.
The value of deposits have quintupled, to $110 million, in the last two weeks.
Katana, a DeFi blockchain backed by Polygon and GSR, launched its blockchain on June 30.
Its protocol, Katana Pre Launch, was live before the launch of the blockchain and it allows users to deposit into various yield-earning vaults and earn NFTs that contain Katana tokens.
In June, the value of deposits multiplied 22 times in June to $250 million. Since the launch of the chain, deposits have dropped to under $100 million as users chase rewards on the new blockchain.
Yala Finance allows users to borrow over-collateralised stablecoins in return for lending Bitcoin and other assets. Its stablecoin, YU, can be utilised across various DeFi protocols to enhance yield.
On June 1, the total value deposited into Yala was about $33 million. This jumped 300%, to about $135 million, over the month of June.
That all four of these protocols recorded significant growth in June shows investors’ appetite for classic DeFi propositions. Even the newer ones.
