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THE DAILY INDEX

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TLDR Crypto

NEXUS TESTNET II RECAP: BUILDING THE LAYER 1 SUPERCOMPUTER

Nexus has completed its second testnet for its upcoming blockchain, demonstrating scale with 2.1 million unique users and 3.6 million total nodes over a 4.5-day period. The testnet integrated blockchain functionality with its distributed supercomputer network. Nexus is working toward its vision of a “Verifiable Internet” powered by its zkVM, with the platform now transitioning to devnet mode for continued development.

CORK: THE TOKENIZED RISK PRIMITIVE

Cork Protocol has launched its public beta on Ethereum Mainnet, introducing a new DeFi primitive for pricing, hedging, and trading risk in the $30B onchain credit market. Depeg Swaps are a new asset class allowing users to price and hedge against depeg events in stablecoins and liquid staking tokens. The beta features capped liquidity vaults for the next 3-6 months, aiming to enable risk-free leveraged farming strategies and prevent systemic risks like Terra.

ARE STABLECOINS A NEW FINANCIAL SYSTEM OR WILL THEY BE REPLACED?

Stablecoins account for two-thirds of all onchain transactions and are increasingly growing with institutional and retail interest alike. Initially popularized by Tether for arbitrage, they've grown into a fast, low-cost alternative for transfers, payments, and yield generation, outpacing traditional wires and processors like Western Union. In regions plagued by capital controls and inefficient banking, stablecoins offer financial freedom and the potential to transform global money movement.

FRANKLIN TEMPLETON: SOLANA VS ETHEREUM DEFI

Solana's DEX volume surpassed all EVM DEX volumes for the first time in January 2025. Despite this achievement and higher growth profiles, Solana DeFi continues to trade at lower valuation multiples compared to Ethereum counterparts, potentially presenting a market asymmetry. This shift, combined with Solana's milestone of one year without outages and the migration of Ethereum activity to Layer 2s, suggests a potential transition from EVM to SVM dominance in DeFi, while also validating Ethereum's modular scaling approach.

WALLET-CENTRISM

As crypto moves toward AI agents as the primary point of interaction, users will increasingly delegate complex tasks to their agents, requiring a secure and universal way to manage identity and permissions. Self-custody wallets will become the primary interface for both onchain and offchain activities, serving as a cryptographically-secure “autonomous extension” of users that can generate attestations and manage permissions on their behalf.

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