Frontier Lab Crypto Market Weekly Report｜W46

Market Overview

Summary of Major Market Trends

• Overall Market Trend: This week, the cryptocurrency market exhibited an upward trend. The market sentiment index dropped to 60%. Despite the decline, the index remains in the “greed” zone, reflecting investors’ optimistic outlook on the market.
• Altcoin Performance: Against the backdrop of BTC reaching new price highs, Altcoins broadly rallied. Market participants displayed optimism about future developments, driving significant increases across various Altcoins and highlighting growing interest in diversified investment opportunities.
• DeFi Project Highlights: DeFi-related projects stood out this week, with notable growth fueled by the market’s increasing focus on enhancing baseline yields. This trend underscores investors’ growing confidence in the DeFi sector.
• Meme Sector Developments: Meme tokens led market gains this week, recording growth significantly higher than projects in other sectors. This surge not only attracted substantial capital inflows but also boosted overall market activity, reflecting strong user interest and engagement in this niche.
• BTCFi Sector Insights: While the BTCFi sector’s performance fell short of expectations, it still demonstrated investor optimism about BTC’s future trajectory. Liquidity in this segment continued to grow, with funds flowing steadily into DeFi projects, contributing to the broader market rally.
• Market Liquidity: Liquidity has been gradually increasing. The risk-free arbitrage rate in traditional markets has continued to decline amid interest rate cuts, while arbitrage rates in on-chain DeFi projects have risen due to the increasing value of crypto assets. This trend has made a return to DeFi an attractive option for investors.
• Long-Term Investment Confidence: Overall, the market remains positive about the long-term development of cryptocurrencies. Investors widely believe that BTC should be firmly held at this stage, with the hope of achieving additional yields while holding BTC.

Market Sentiment Index Analysis

• The market sentiment index dropped to 60% this week, a decline from last week’s 77%. Despite this drop, sentiment remains in the greed phase, indicating that optimism continues to dominate among investors.
• Altcoins experienced broad-based gains this week, closely following the overall market trend. The crypto market remains in a FOMO-driven rally, with users generally holding an optimistic outlook on future developments. This increased confidence has further fueled the widespread rise in Altcoins.
• While market prices are continually reaching new highs, the sentiment remains in the greed phase and is approaching neutral territory. This suggests that although the market may be undergoing a short-term adjustment, there is still substantial room for further price growth in the future.

Overall Market Trend Overview

• The cryptocurrency market was in an upward trend this week, with the sentiment index remaining in the greed phase.
• DeFi-related crypto projects delivered outstanding performance, reflecting the market’s continued focus on enhancing baseline yields.
• Meme sector projects led the market this week, achieving gains significantly higher than other sectors and attracting substantial capital inflows.
• In the DeFi sector, BTCFi projects saw their total value locked (TVL) rise alongside the broader market, indicating investor optimism about their future potential.

Hot Sectors

Sui Ecosystem

The Sui ecosystem garnered significant attention on the market this week, driven primarily by the rise of Meme token projects and the rapid development of DeFi initiatives on the Sui chain.

Meme Tokens

This week, the Sui chain’s Meme tokens, ACT and PNUT, gained traction after being listed on Binance, sparking a widespread rally in Meme tokens across the chain. Following these tokens, several other popular Meme projects emerged:

• urbos.Fun: A Meme token launch platform on the Sui chain, achieving over $5 million in trading volume within 24 hours and launching 1,300 projects.
• HIPPO: A hippo-themed Meme token with a market cap of approximately $1.36 billion.
• BLUB: The first Meme token on Sui, themed around marine fish, with a market cap of around $30 million.
• Uni: A token named after the founder of Sui’s dog, with a market cap of approximately $1.67 billion.
• SHORK: A shark-themed Meme token on Sui, with a market cap of about $5 million.

The success of these Meme tokens has created a wealth-generation effect within the Sui ecosystem, attracting more users and increasing on-chain activity.

DeFi Projects on Sui Chain

• TVL Growth: The total value locked (TVL) on the Sui chain has surged rapidly, growing from $892.98 million at the end of October to $1.304 billion now — a 46.18% increase — indicating a strong inflow of capital into the ecosystem.
• New Accounts: The number of new accounts on the Sui chain saw a significant uptick, reaching 1.312 million this week, a 59.13% increase from the previous week, highlighting the chain’s strong ability to attract new users.
• DEX Trading Volume: The primary DEXs on Sui — Cetus, Aftermath Finance, and BlueMove DEX — achieved 30-day trading volumes of $4.812 billion, $863 million, and $512 million, respectively, with growth rates of 195.23%, 112.87%, and 156.23%. These figures demonstrate the rapid expansion of trading activity on the Sui chain.

Based on these metrics, it is evident that the Sui chain is currently mirroring Solana’s growth model, using Meme tokens as a catalyst for ecosystem expansion. Simultaneously, the rapid development of DeFi projects on the Sui chain further underscores its potential for sustained growth.

DeFi Sector

TVL Growth Rankings

The top 5 projects by TVL growth over the past week (excluding projects with smaller TVL, with a minimum threshold of $30 million). Data source: DefiLlama.

Overnight Finance (OVN)

• Overview: Overnight Finance is an asset management protocol offering passive yield tools. It specializes in proprietary, delta-neutral on-chain yield strategies for stablecoins, utilizing high-quality protocols like Aave and Uni V3 to generate sustainable returns.
• Latest Developments: Recently, Overnight Finance approved a new buyback program, allocating 80% of project revenue to buy back OVN tokens. To enhance user APY, 9,000 OVN tokens are distributed weekly on top of the base APY.

DeSyn Protocol (Unreleased Token)

• Overview: DeSyn Protocol is a decentralized asset management platform on Ethereum, offering a suite of financial products, including synthetic assets, leveraged staking ETFs, yield funds, RWA funds, and customizable strategies.
• Latest Developments: DeSyn Protocol partnered with multiple chains, including Core and AILayer, to expand its ecosystem and improve accessibility. It optimized and deployed restaking products, integrated rewards and auto-airdrop features, and fixed key performance issues on its mainnet. Additionally, it collaborated with AtDawn to introduce high-yield opportunities.

Suilend Protocol (SEND)

• Overview: Suilend Protocol is a lending platform launched on the Sui chain, modeled after Solend.
• Latest Developments: The ongoing market momentum and the Binance listing of Sui-based Meme tokens have increased activity on the Sui chain. As Sui’s largest lending protocol, Suilend Protocol experienced significant growth in loan volume. Rising APY for lenders attracted more deposits, and the project announced plans to expand into swaps and bridging services. A new SEND token airdrop mechanism was introduced to reward long-term holders, alongside the launch of mSUI (SUI token LST), with the initial 100,000 tokens sold out instantly.

Haedal Protocol (Unreleased Token)

• Overview: Haedal Protocol is a liquid staking protocol on the Sui chain. It allows users to stake SUI tokens, contributing to governance and decentralization while receiving haSUI tokens to continue participating in DeFi.
• Latest Developments: The Meme token boom on the Sui chain attracted new users and funds, driving up SUI prices. Haedal Protocol benefited from this, seeing rapid TVL growth. This week, the Sui chain’s largest DEX, Cetus, announced an undisclosed investment in Haedal Protocol to support its growth and increase haSUI adoption and liquidity pools.

Solv Protocol (Unreleased Token)

• Overview: Solv Protocol is a decentralized yield platform enabling users to stake assets like BTC, ETH, and USDT into LST (Liquid Staked Tokens) to earn yields while maintaining liquidity.
• Latest Developments: With BTC’s significant price surge, Solv Protocol, a BTCFi project, experienced a substantial TVL increase. It partnered with Rooch Network to create new yield and liquidity opportunities for SolvBTC holders. Additionally, a collaboration with Binance Web3 offered a $300,000 airdrop and SolvBTC rewards for BTCB staking.

Overall Sector Performance

• Stablecoin Market Cap Growth: USDT market cap grew from $126.7 billion to $132.6 billion this week, a 4.65% increase, while USDC remained steady at $36.7 billion. USDT’s growth was predominantly driven by non-US markets, indicating a significant influx of funds from these regions.
• Liquidity Trends: Risk-free arbitrage rates in traditional markets continued to decline due to rate cuts, while arbitrage rates in on-chain DeFi projects rose, driven by the increasing value of crypto assets. This trend makes a return to DeFi an attractive choice for investors.
• New Growth Engines: Beyond traditional lending and DEX platforms, DeFi is seeing strong growth in BTC and ETH LSD (Liquid Staking Derivatives) and restaking projects, emerging as key drivers for the sector.

• DeFi TVL Analysis: The total value locked in DeFi rose from $34.2 billion last week to $43.3 billion, marking a 26.62% increase. This consistent upward trend demonstrates a steady influx of capital into DeFi projects.

In summary, the week saw rapid TVL growth concentrated in the BTCFi and lending sectors, highlighting their roles as pivotal areas for DeFi expansion.

In-Depth Analysis

Drivers of Growth

Market participants remain optimistic about the future price trends of BTC and ETH, the two foundational assets in the cryptocurrency space. This confidence has been bolstered by BTC’s rapid price increase this week, which has further enhanced investor returns. Consequently, investors are actively engaging with various DeFi projects to maximize yields on their held assets.

Growth Leaders

TVL (Total Value Locked) growth is a direct indicator of performance for DeFi projects. This week, Sui ecosystem projects and DeFi yield aggregators emerged as the top growth drivers. Yield aggregators help users maximize their returns while maintaining their asset holdings. Within the Sui ecosystem, lending and liquid staking projects have shown significant growth. This can be attributed to the price appreciation of the SUI token, combined with the ecosystem’s rising activity driven by the popularity of Meme tokens. These developments have bolstered the confidence of SUI holders in the ecosystem’s future potential.

Investors are advised to monitor yield aggregator projects closely as they aim to enhance returns for market participants.

BTCFi Sector Overview

Sector Update

The broader cryptocurrency market experienced a general upswing this week, and BTCFi projects followed suit. However, the BTCFi sector’s performance was not particularly outstanding. Liquid staking projects that mint wrapped assets (LSTs) using staked BTC showed mixed performance, with fluctuations in TVL across various projects. Despite this, these liquid staking projects remain a strong sub-sector within BTCFi.

Current Sector Status

BTC surged by 17.58% this week. Adjusting for this price rise, the TVL growth rates for BTCFi projects issuing LSTs were as follows:

• Bedrock: -2.37%
• Lombard: 0.23%
• Lorenzo: 0.78%
• Pell Network: 13.16%
• PumpBTC: 11.53%
• Solv Protocol: 7.33%
• Stakestone: -12.69%

Bedrock: This week, Bedrock launched a voting campaign on Mantle, offering users 500,000 Bedrock Diamonds as rewards. The uniBTC pool participants received an APY of 33.55%, 6,300 USDC rewards, and triple Bedrock Diamond points. Additionally, Bedrock initiated a ROCKBERA NFT Meme Lottery event.

Lombard: Partnered with Corn to launch the “Baby Corn” initiative. Users can deposit LBTC into Pendle’s Corn Vault, DeFi Vault, or Corn Silo to earn 69,420 Babylon points daily.

Solv Protocol: Benefited from BTC’s price surge as a BTC-centric BTCFi project. It partnered with Rooch Network to provide SolvBTC holders with enhanced yield opportunities and liquidity. Additionally, Solv collaborated with Binance Web3 for an event allowing BTCB staking, with $300,000 in airdrops and additional SolvBTC rewards available.

Lorenzo Protocol: Partnered with Avalon Labs to launch a new lending product offering a 7% fixed rate for Avalon’s USDa stablecoin. It also participated in the OKX Web3 Cryptopedia campaign, rewarding users with 2 million Lorenzo points and a 20% bonus. Lorenzo further collaborated with Wormhole to provide multi-chain liquidity for stBTC and enzoBTC.

PumpBTC: Launched on KiloEx, where users can deposit pumpBTC into KiloEx Hybrid Vaults to earn USDC returns and KiloEx points. PumpBTC was also featured in Arbitrum’s seasonal missions, offering participants 200,000 ARB and 15 million PumpBTC points.

Pell Network: Collaborated with Core to launch its testnet, rewarding participants with Core Ignition Sparks and Pell airdrop points. Its partnership with Babylon upgraded BTC restaking options, unlocking new earning and decentralized service opportunities for BTC holders.

Stakestone: Secured $22 million in funding, led by Polychain, with participation from Binance Labs and OKX Ventures.

Despite BTC’s rapid price increase, the BTCFi sector did not witness an equally significant rise. Instead, TVL growth in BTCFi projects remained subdued, with some projects even experiencing declines. This trend suggests that some users are reducing exposure by locking in profits early, possibly due to increased risk perception accompanying BTC’s price surge. This behavior warrants further tracking and analysis of BTCFi projects in the future.

Other Sector Performance

Public Chains

Top 5 Public Chains by TVL Growth Over the Past Week (Data Source: DefiLlama)

Bitlayer

This week, with BTC prices on the rise, Bitlayer, as a BTC-L2 solution, attracted significant market attention. Bitlayer developed a manual SNARK validator sharding solution, advancing the development of BitVM, which enables transactions on the Bitcoin mainnet by reducing the size of each transaction in the BitVM transaction graph. Its on-chain projects — DeSyn Protocol, Avalon Finance, and Pell Network — saw a rapid increase in TVL, with each rising over 20% this week, driving the overall TVL growth on Bitlayer. Avalon Finance introduced a new stablecoin, USDa, offering USDa users APY above 20% and a fixed borrowing rate of 8%, which encouraged users to convert USDT into USDa, further boosting on-chain TVL.

Cardano

This week, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, expressed willingness to cooperate with the Trump-led U.S. government on cryptocurrency legislation, leading to rumors of collaboration that contributed to a sharp price increase for Cardano. Previously classified by the SEC as an unregistered security, Cardano (ADA) experienced a rapid rally due to market expectations that the Trump administration would adopt a more open, lightly regulated stance on crypto. As a result, assets that were previously targeted by the SEC saw quick recoveries, including ADA, which was recently re-listed on Robinhood after being removed.

dYdX

This week, dYdX announced an upgrade with the launch of dYdX Unlimited, featuring permissionless markets, the MegaVault (which acquires liquidity from dYdX users to act as a market maker across all dYdX Chain markets), and the new Affiliates Program. The dYdX founder stated that the current market of perpetual decentralized exchanges (Perp DEX) is overly repetitive, and dYdX plans to innovate by rolling out new integrations with popular wallets and third-party services, permission keys, instant deposits, and other features in the coming months.

Core

This week, Core underwent a Fusion upgrade, which introduced Dual Staking to enhance network security and expanded the utility of CORE tokens by providing subsidies in CORE to increase Bitcoin yield. Core also launched the BitFlux BTCFi liquidity platform to improve liquidity for BTCFi assets. Its on-chain projects — DeSyn Protocol, Corelend, and Pell Network — experienced a rapid TVL increase of over 30%, contributing to the overall TVL growth on Core.

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid, a Perp DEX platform, offers leveraged trading across various assets. This week, the broader cryptocurrency market’s rise fueled an influx of users into leveraged contract trading, pushing Hyperliquid’s daily trading volume to a new high of $6 billion. Additionally, the popularity of Meme tokens led Hyperliquid to list several trending Meme coins, such as PUNT and PURR, further increasing user activity. Consequently, the platform experienced a surge in contract trading, driving an increase in TVL.

Top 5 Tokens by Growth in the Past Week

(Excluding tokens with low trading volume and meme coins. Data Source: CoinMarketCap)

This Week’s Top Gainers

This week, the top gainers are spread across various sectors, including GameFi, SocialFi, DEX, L1s, and L2s, showing no distinct sector concentration.

X Empire

X Empire is a Telegram-based click-to-earn game where players earn virtual currency by clicking on the screen, upgrading characters, and completing tasks to increase earnings. The game is themed around Elon Musk, and players accumulate in-game currency by clicking on a cartoon version of Musk. This week, X Empire launched an AI-generated avatar feature. Following Elon Musk’s involvement in helping Donald Trump secure victory in the U.S. presidential election, stocks and cryptocurrencies related to Musk saw significant increases, which contributed to X Empire’s rise.

DORA

Dora Factory is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure project built on the Substrate platform. It aims to provide a series of pluggable governance features for the next generation of decentralized organizations and developers. This week, Dora Factory did not have any major positive news to report.

DRIFT

Drift Protocol is a decentralized trading platform built on the Solana blockchain, focusing on efficient, low-cost perpetual contracts and spot trading services, primarily catering to futures traders. As Solana’s largest DEX, Jupiter offers spot trading with a daily trading volume around $1.5 billion, while Drift’s daily trading volume remains around $80 million. Jupiter’s FDV is $10.6 billion, and Drift’s FDV is $1.2 billion. Comparing the business volumes and FDV valuations, Drift Protocol appears to be overvalued compared to Jupiter at this stage.

CRO

Cronos is a public chain project designed to provide a high-performance, low-cost platform for decentralized applications and smart contracts. Recently, Cronos released a blueprint for an AI-driven ecosystem, enabling the chain to support AI agents that can autonomously interact and trade. This week, several AI and Meme-themed projects launched on Cronos, gaining significant traction and attracting some user participation.

DSYNC

Destra Network is an Ethereum Layer-2 project that aims to solve centralization, censorship, and privacy issues in traditional network infrastructures by offering secure, decentralized hosting solutions. This week, Destra Network launched the beta version of the Destra GPU Marketplace, aiming to democratize and decentralize GPU access in an unprecedented way.

Meme Token Gains Ranking

Data Sources: coinmarketcap.com

This week, Meme projects performed stronger than the overall market, particularly on the Solana blockchain. These Meme coins saw significant gains, dominating the growth charts and creating a wealth effect on-chain. This sparked more user participation in Solana’s Meme projects.

Social Media Hot Topics

According to data from LunarCrush’s daily top five growth tokens and Scopechat’s top five AI-scored projects for the week (November 9–15), the most frequently discussed topic was L1s. The tokens that made it to the top list are as follows (excluding those with small trading volumes and Meme coins):

Data Sources: Lunarcrush and Scopechat

Based on data analysis, the most discussed topic on social media this week was Layer 1 blockchain projects. These projects generally showed an upward trend and outperformed the broader market. Within these Layer 1 blockchains, Meme coin projects stood out with impressive gains, generating significant wealth effects and attracting substantial capital to various blockchains. Additionally, as the overall Crypto market price rose, DeFi projects on these blockchains saw a sharp increase in APY for investors, which led to growth in both TVL and transaction volume for many DeFi platforms. This phenomenon reflects an optimistic investor sentiment about future market prospects.

Overall Market Themes Overview

Data Sources: SoSoValue

According to weekly return rates, the Meme sector performed the best, while the DeFi sector performed the worst.

• Meme Sector: In the Meme sector, DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE have the largest market shares, accounting for 60.44%, 15.47%, and 10.13%, respectively, totaling 86.04%. This week, DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE showed very strong performance, increasing by 104.42%, 33.32%, and 120.23%, respectively. Although other Meme coins have smaller market shares, their growth was substantial, leading to an outstanding performance for the entire Meme sector.
• DeFi Sector: The DeFi sector includes numerous projects, and in the sample from SoSoValue, LINK, UNI, and AAVE have the largest shares, accounting for 33.78%, 25.58%, and 9.98%, respectively, totaling 69.34%. This week, LINK increased by 6.21%, while UNI and AAVE decreased by -7.93% and -11.24%, respectively, resulting in the smallest overall growth in the DeFi sector. However, due to the overall rise in the crypto market, users’ APYs have increased, which has led to more participants engaging in DeFi activities.

Upcoming Major Crypto Events

• Thursday (Nov 21): U.S. Initial Jobless Claims for the week ending Nov 16
• Friday (Nov 22): Crypto EXPO Milan; U.S. Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (final) for November

Outlook for Next Week

The Crypto market has experienced a broad rally this week, driven by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) due to BTC’s continuous price growth. Next week, the market is expected to maintain a trend of volatile upward movement. As BTC continues to hit new highs, investor interest in diversified investment opportunities will likely drive the performance of related projects. The strong performance of Meme projects is expected to continue, potentially attracting more capital and generating notable wealth effects.

DeFi projects, particularly lending and liquid staking protocols, will benefit from increased base yields, and are likely to continue attracting a large influx of investors. Given the arbitrage nature of DeFi, the rising yield rates due to the increase in crypto asset values will encourage investors to gravitate back toward DeFi in search of higher returns. We will continue to monitor and analyze DeFi projects in the coming weeks.