Gate Decentralized Finance Daily (10 October 21 ): PancakeSwap opens SIGMA subscription; Polygon co-founder criticizes Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin busy calming down.

On October 21, as BTC fell below $108,000 and ETH dropped below $3,900, the overall crypto market entered a short-term pullback phase. The total DeFi TVL across the network decreased to $150.309 billion, a 1.18% decline in 24 hours. Despite the increased pressure of capital outflow, the Solana ecosystem remains active, with the dark pool protocol HumidiFi's trading volume surpassing $34 billion, becoming the market focus.

Decentralized Finance Market Overview

(Source: DeFiLlama)

Total DeFi TVL across the network: Today (October 21), the crypto market has pulled back again, BTC has fallen below $108,000, and ETH has dropped below $3,900; the current total DeFi TVL is $150.309 billion, down 1.18% in the last 24 hours.

DEX 24-hour trading volume: approximately $15.979 billion, a week-on-week decrease of 24.16%; the top three are: Uniswap ($5.021 billion), PancakeSwap ($2.29 billion), HumidiFi ($1.079 billion).

Popular Protocols and On-Chain Performance

Based on TVL, the data for the top ten DeFi protocols is as follows:

(Source: DeFiLlama)

Among them, the top-ranked protocol data performances are as follows:

Aave: TVL approximately 39.002 billion USD, 24-hour fall 2.38%;

Lido: TVL approximately 33.084 billion USD, 24-hour fall 4.11%;

EigenLayer: TVL approximately 16.382 billion USD, 24-hour fall of 4.41%;

Ethena: TVL approximately 11.743 billion USD, 24-hour fall of 3.56%;

ETH. fi: TVL approximately 9.703 billion USD, 24-hour fall 4.35%.

In addition, the top ten projects by protocol fees in the past 24 hours are as follows:

(Source: DeFiLlama)

Among them, Uniswap's protocol fees in the past 24 hours reached $9 million, ranking second only to Tether ($23.16 million); Hyperliquid's protocol fees in the past 24 hours reached $3.23 million, ranking fourth; Pump ranked fifth with $2.9 million.

Project News Summary

1. The Solana ecosystem DEX aggregator Titan announced that since its launch one month ago, its app transaction volume has approached $3 billion (excluding API). Titan is a DEX aggregator based on Solana, focusing on optimizing liquidity, enhancing user experience, and security.

Public information shows that Titan has completed two rounds of financing, raising a total of 10.5 million USD, with participating institutions and angel investors including Galaxy Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Anatoly Yakovenko, among others.

2. Vitalik Buterin highly praised Polygon and its co-founder Sandeep Nailwal in a post on platform X, stating that they played a key role in the Ethereum ecosystem. Vitalik noted that Polygon invested heavily in the development of ZK-EVM early on, promoted the technical landing of the Jordi team, and built infrastructure such as AggLayer. He also commended Sandeep for his contributions to public health in India through the CryptoRelief project and voluntarily returning $190 million in SHIB donations, which allowed the Balvi open-source epidemic prevention project to advance. Vitalik expressed hope that Polygon could directly adopt mature ZK technology in the future to provide complete security for its PoS chain.

Previously, Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal responded to Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi's open letter, bluntly stating that he began to “question his loyalty to Ethereum.” He indicated that Polygon has never received support from the Ethereum Foundation or the core team, but has instead been marginalized for a long time, saying, “The Ethereum community has long been in chaos.” Sandeep pointed out that if Polygon announced itself as an L1 chain, its valuation could increase by 2–5 times, but the Ethereum community neither acknowledges Polygon as L2 nor is willing to include it in the “Ethereum Beta” narrative. Nevertheless, he stated that he would still make a “final effort,” hoping to revitalize the L2 narrative, and emphasized that “Ethereum remains the only long-term viable democratic system.”

Meanwhile, Sonic Labs founder Andre Cronje also posted, "I'm confused. Who exactly is the Ethereum Foundation (EF) funding or supporting? When I was developing on Ethereum, just deploying and infrastructure burned over 700 ETH. I tried to contact EF but never received any response - no business connections, no grants, no support at all, not even a retweet.

Later, when I started participating in the Sonic ecosystem, I was really confused because most teams there had BD support, fund sponsorship, TVL guidance, auditing, and ongoing marketing. I thought the EF was doing the same. But if they are neither supporting core developers (like Peter and the geth team) nor nurturing the most active Layer 2 camps (like Sandeep and Polygon), where exactly is their money being spent?

3. ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin tweeted that he will launch a new token economy platform and startup platform on Linea. “If we can accelerate the global adoption of prediction markets like Polymarket and MYRIAD, we can bring collective intelligence and market power into governance and decision-making at all levels of society. Before Futarchy can truly take hold, we need deep liquidity and widespread application of prediction markets. Once we achieve this goal, we can begin to replace the subjective and centralized control of platforms that have rent-seeking and de-platforming powers with more objective market-based decision-making involving a broader range of stakeholders.”

4. According to the official announcement, Sky Protocol repurchased 11.25 million SKY using 680,000 USDS last week. As of now, the project team has spent over 79 million USDS on buybacks.

5. It was reported the day before that Anatoly Yakovenko, the CEO of Solana Labs, seems to be designing a high-performance decentralized perpetual contract trading platform protocol named Percolator, which will be natively built on the Solana blockchain.

According to the GitHub documentation released on October 19, the project has entered the “implementation phase”. Percolator, as a self-hosted on-chain perpetual contract DEX, features an on-chain routing program that supports users in tracking positions, managing margin, and calculating combined collateral ratios. The protocol also introduces the innovative design of “Slabs”—seemingly independent order books established for different tokens. As a unique feature of Percolator, Slabs aim to enhance the competitive efficiency among liquidity providers through the “sharded matching engine”: splitting the DEX order book into multiple independently operating micro-engines.

Although the project's GitHub shows that the development progress is quite advanced, the official launch time is still not clear. Its “core data structures” (including key modules such as routing programs, Slab, memory pool, and order book system) are all marked as “completed,” while components like the clearing engine are still listed on the development checklist. At least two developers have submitted code merge requests for the project.

In response, Solana co-founder Toly posted on social media saying “may launch a new Perp Dex”.

“I can now understand Andre Cronje's pain. I'm purely just messing around with Claude (AI under Anthropic), trying to see if it can generate a prototype, and then use surfpool for testing. I urge you all to quickly copy this idea—I want to see if the competitive frenzy sparked by the spot market makers back then can be replayed in the perpetual contract field:”

· Develop a perpetual contract DEX program that integrates all functionalities within a single account memory segment, equipped with LP/risk/matching engine.

· Act as a routing coordinator that can automatically adjust positions among any number of DEXes.

Really, I just accidentally opened source a code repository, and the whole world seems to have gone crazy.

6. Guy Young, the founder of Ethena Labs, stated on social media that the number of team members at Ethena has remained stable at around 20-25 people over the past two years. We are now initiating our first large-scale team expansion since our establishment—recruiting 10 new members in engineering and product fields for two new business lines and products that will launch in the next three months, both of which have development potential on par with USDe.

7. Solana's official social media announced the project's Chinese name “索拉拉”. It is reported that this “Soliciting a Chinese Name for Solana” event is organized by Trends.fun, and the name “索拉拉” was provided by X user muper (@easytopredict), who drew inspiration from a post by Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu. muper stated that he received a prize in the Solana Chinese name event and promised to donate the prize to his friends in China.

8. According to official news, the on-chain liquidity distribution protocol Turtle has announced the completion of a new round of financing of 5.5 million USD, bringing the total financing amount to 11.7 million USD. This round of financing was participated by Bitscale VC, Theia, Trident Digital, SNZ HOLDING, GSR, FalconX, Anchorage VC, Fasanara Capital, NRD, Tower 18 Capital, Varys Capital, Relayer, Coinix, Flowdesk, Wise3, JPEG, Reflexive, Amber, Gami Capital, Wise3 Ventures, and others.

9. Ethena Labs announced on social media that the PT tokens of USDe and sUSDe have been launched on the Aave Plasma platform, with a supply limit of 200 million USD for each token. Given that the borrowing rate for USDT remains around 4%, Plasma has now become the best on-chain venue for users to obtain leveraged PT positions through Aave. Multiple rounds of limit increases are expected in the near future.

10. According to official news, the ETF issuer VanEck has submitted an S-1 registration application for the “VanEck Lido Staked ETH ETF” fund to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This fund aims to allow investors to earn Ethereum staking rewards through the staked ETH tokens (stETH) staked via the Lido protocol. Kean Gilbert, Head of Institutional Relations at the Lido Ecosystem Foundation, stated: “This application marks a recognition of liquid staking as an essential component of Ethereum infrastructure. The stETH of the Lido protocol proves that decentralization and institutional standards can coexist, laying the foundation for broader market development.”

The ETF will hold stETH, benefiting from its thoroughly audited smart contracts, deep secondary market liquidity, and integration with leading custodians and exchanges. If approved, the ETF will provide institutional investors with a compliant and tax-efficient avenue to participate in Ethereum staking within a regulated investment framework.

11. According to official data, the DEX (ve3,3) project THENA on the BNB Chain has seen total revenue exceed 40 million USD since the launch of its token THE, with nearly 100% being returned to veTHE and theNFT holders.

In the past three months, during market volatility, THENA has allocated an average of over $250,000 to the community each week. In the last Epoch (from October 9 to October 16), the allocated amount exceeded $370,000, setting a new stage record.

12. The dark pool trading platform HumidiFi has become the largest trading platform on the Solana chain, processing a record trading volume of 34 billion dollars in the past month.

DefiLlama data shows that HumidiFi has surpassed the liquidity protocol Meteora with a trading volume of 31 billion USD, and has also outperformed the established DEX Raydium on Solana (trading volume of 21 billion USD), while just three months ago, the platform's daily trading volume often struggled to exceed 100 million USD.

Dark pool trading platforms (also known as dark pool automated market makers or proprietary market makers) are a type of trading platform on the Solana blockchain that has seen a surge in popularity in recent months. Unlike the largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap, dark pool market makers operate in the background. They typically do not have an official website and do not allow users to provide liquidity to earn trading fees. These platforms often rely entirely on the liquidity provided by their creators (usually anonymous) and only accept trades routed through trading aggregators like Jupiter.

Although dark pool market makers are more transparent than centralized trading platforms since all transactions are publicly traceable on the blockchain, their transparency is lower in other aspects. Dark pool operators typically choose to remain anonymous as they only interface with aggregators and do not directly engage with traders. The HumidiFi development team remains anonymous to this day, although their X account dynamics suggest that they may disclose their identities soon.

13. According to official news, PancakeSwap announced that the community-driven DeFi platform Sigma.Money will open token subscriptions through CAKE.PAD, becoming the first DeFi project on the platform. Sigma.Money supports users to trade assets like BNB with up to 7x leverage, using a partial liquidation mechanism to reduce liquidation risks. Its stablecoin bnbUSD is collateralized by BNB and related assets, and maintains its peg through a stability pool and redemption mechanism.

The subscription event will be held from October 21, 02:00 to 07:00 UTC, where users can subscribe to SIGMA tokens using CAKE. After the event ends, 100% of the tokens will be available for immediate trading. This CAKE.PAD will provide 15 million SIGMA (accounting for 1.5% of the total supply), with a fundraising target of 150,000 USD.

Overview of Major Ecological Leading DeFi Projects

Ethereum DEX has the highest 24-hour trading volume, approximately 4.172 billion USD, with the top three projects being:

Uniswap ($3.113 billion), Fluid ($514.54 million), Curve Finance ($305.98 million);

Solana DEX's 24-hour trading volume ranks first, at approximately 4.101 billion USD, with the top three projects being:

HumidiFi ($1.079 billion), Meteora ($1.069 billion), Raydium ($537.11 million);

BNB Chain DEX ranks third in 24-hour trading volume, approximately $2.893 billion, a week-on-week decrease of 37.44%; among them, the top three projects are:

PancakeSwap ($1.901 billion), Uniswap ($790.29 million), four.meme ($143.86 million).

Gate DeFi Sector Token Market Data

According to the data from Gate's market page, the price performance of the top ten tokens in the DeFi sector is as follows:

(Source: Gate DeFi market行情)

As of October 21, the cryptocurrency market is overall declining, with DeFi sector tokens experiencing more falls than rises, specifically:

UNI is currently reported at 6.14 USD, with a 24-hour fall of 4.90%;

AAVE is currently priced at 220.85 USD, with a 24-hour fall of 5.61%;

WLFI is currently reported at 0.127 USD, with a 24-hour fall of 4.79%;

MORPHO is currently reported at 1.87 USD, with a 24-hour fall of 3.25%;

INJ is currently priced at 8.35 USD, with a 24-hour fall of 5.5%;

MYX is currently reported at 2.87 USD, with a 24-hour increase of 4.69%;

CRV is currently priced at 0.5729 USD, with a 24-hour increase of 4.77%;

SYRUP is currently reported at 0.3509 USD, with a 24-hour fall of 8.23%;

FF is currently reported at 0.138 USD, with a 24-hour increase of 4.09%.

Market Trend Interpretation

The DeFi market continued its weak pullback trend on October 21, with the prices of mainstream assets falling, directly dragging down the overall TVL performance. According to DeFiLlama data, the total DeFi TVL is $150.309 billion, a decrease of 1.18% in 24 hours, marking a new low in nearly two weeks.

From the perspective of capital flow structure, liquidity staking and lending protocols generally recorded significant falls, with Lido and Aave declining by 4.11% and 2.38% respectively, indicating that capital is temporarily withdrawing from high-risk yield assets. Meanwhile, re-staking protocols such as EigenLayer and Ethena also experienced daily declines of over 3%, indicating a clear decrease in market risk appetite.

On the trading level, the decentralized trading volume has shown significant shrinkage. The 24-hour trading volume of DEX has dropped to 15.979 billion USD, a week-on-week decrease of 24.16%, indicating a decline in short-term trading activity and a cautious market sentiment. Uniswap still maintains market dominance (5.021 billion USD), but the active performance of PancakeSwap and HumidiFi reflects the local heat of the BNB Chain and Solana ecosystems.

Especially the dark pool protocol HumidiFi on the Solana chain, with a cumulative trading volume of 34 billion USD this month, has surpassed Meteora and Raydium, demonstrating the potential of new trading mechanisms in the field of on-chain high-frequency trading.

On the other hand, tokens in the DeFi sector generally fell. UNI fell by 4.90%, AAVE fell by 5.61%, and INJ fell by 5.5%, indicating that the market is cautiously optimistic about blue-chip DeFi projects in the short term. However, CRV and MYX rose by 4.77% and 4.69% respectively, showing that there is still structural capital inflow in some mid-cap and small-cap tokens.

Overall, the market is currently in a stage of “mainstream capital pullback and localized innovation activity”: the pullback in mainstream asset prices has led to capital outflow, but some emerging protocols (such as HumidiFi, Sigma.Money, Ethena, etc.) have attracted market attention through technological or model innovation, providing certain structural support for the Decentralized Finance market.

Analyst Opinions

Analysts believe that this round of pullback is mainly due to macro market adjustments and price fluctuations of mainstream coins, rather than a deterioration of the DeFi fundamentals.

Liquidity Aspect: The fall of BTC and ETH has triggered a risk-off sentiment in overall risk assets, with funds temporarily withdrawing from high-volatility protocols, but on-chain funds have not experienced a large-scale redemption wave, indicating that the market still maintains a healthy structure.

Ecological Development: The rapid growth and diverse innovation of the Solana ecosystem are redefining the competitive landscape of DEX. HumidiFi's dark pool model shows that on-chain trading is evolving towards higher efficiency and lower slippage.

Token Performance: Analysts point out that the current valuation of DeFi blue-chip projects has entered a technical support zone. If BTC and ETH stop falling and stabilize, the DeFi sector is expected to rebound first, especially projects with real revenue distribution mechanisms (such as THENA and Ethena).

Medium-term outlook: It is expected that the DeFi market will continue to fluctuate and consolidate with mainstream coins in the short term, but funds may gradually concentrate on protocols with “high returns + high practicality.” Some analysis institutions point out that if BTC stabilizes above the 105,000 USD range in the next 1–2 weeks, the DeFi sector is likely to restart its upward momentum.

Conclusion

Overall, on October 21, the DeFi market was under short-term pressure due to macro fluctuations, but the activity level of the underlying ecosystem remained high. The flow of funds from traditional blue-chip protocols to innovative protocols indicates that the market is entering a structural rotation phase. Cautious in the short term, yet still promising in the long term — this is the current main theme of the DeFi market.