Unbound Finance: The Cross-Chain Aggregator Layer For AMMs 2026
Instant liquidity isn’t free, it shows up as lower deployment ratios, lower yields, stricter risk controls, and more active management of cash or liquid collateral. These mandates have clearly defined investment universes, liquidity parameters, and risk limits, and they operate with quasi-automatic execution, which makes them cheaper to operate. Deeper liquidity, more robust risk engines, chain-specific throughput, lower fees and more predictable execution collectively remove many of the historical barriers for funds, market makers and structured-product desks. Deterministic matching, deeper orderbooks, unified collateral and chain-specialised execution environments reduce operational risk to levels acceptable for institutional strategies. GMX-style isolated collateral constrained leverage and prevented risk from being netted across markets. This sustained uptrend confirms that onchain trading is not merely keeping pace with centralised venues, but steadily gaining market share.
Fast-claim distributions favor immediate liquidity, clearer price discovery, and rapid market formation. Higher premiums enable more capital raises, which fund more ETH purchases, which generate more yield. At its peak in early 2025, companies traded at 4x mNAV or sometimes even higher, meaning a dollar of Bitcoin on the balance sheet translated to four dollars of market capitalisation. An mNAV above 1 means the market assigns additional value beyond the coins themselves, effectively allowing companies to create leveraged Bitcoin exposure for shareholders.
This is not just more activity, it is a more integrated market system. Issuance rails functioned as the ignition layer of speculative cycles, onboarding users at scale and feeding downstream spot and derivatives activity. The key competitive axis moved from chain branding to performance, risk management, and capital efficiency. In practice, perps liquidity increasingly gravitated toward execution-first environments and hybrid architectures that prioritize throughput and predictable fills. 888Starz Bangladesh The market moved from manual venue selection, to aggregation, to intent-based execution, where users express an outcome and solver networks compete to deliver best execution across venues and across chains.
Convex Finance maintained a leading role but saw its relative position reshaped by the entrance of higher-growth competitors. Apollo Diversified Credit, Onchain Yield Coin, Digital Macro Fund and the Anemoy Tokenized Apollo Diversified fund rounded out a substantially larger and more diversified institutional set. Institutional fund RWAs grew from $0.17B to $2.77B over 2024 to 2025, with the top ten funds expanding from $0.17B to $2.56B and their share of segment TVL easing from 99.8% to 92.2%. By 2025, its share had fallen to 12.9% as BlackRock’s BUIDL took the lead at 2.33B and 25.5% share. Tokenised US Treasuries and money-market products expanded from $3.87B at the end of 2024 to $9.12B by late 2025, a 135.3% increase. Platforms that can demonstrate durability across credit cycles are likely to capture the next leg of institutional inflows.
Looking ahead, the next stage of evolution is likely to centre on collateral mobility, cross-chain margining and the unification of liquidity across execution environments. Spreads widened sharply in volatile markets, LP inventories destabilised during liquidations and capital efficiency lagged meaningfully behind CeFi. The early generation of platforms, including GMX and vAMM-based protocols, relied on vault models where LPs absorbed directional risk and execution quality was limited by AMM curves, oracle cadence and block-level latency.
Circle’s CCTP: Native Stablecoin Interoperability
Its PT markets provided predictable fixed returns, while YT markets enabled leveraged exposure to funding rates and restaking-linked rewards. Their rise reflected growing user preference for structured stablecoin yields and more modular rate exposure. Yield markets became more distributed in 2025 as new fixed-income platforms scaled and Pendle’s dominance eased. Growth slowed in 2025, but the structure of the market changed materially as duration trading matured and competition increased.
Aave remained the anchor, capturing close to half of all fees and strengthening its position through a clearer institutional and RWA-focused roadmap. Platforms such as Meteora, PumpSwap, Aerodrome and Hyperliquid Spot have reshaped routing dynamics and fee structures, forcing incumbents to compete on execution quality, cost efficiency and overall user experience. Pump’s dominance began to soften as new platforms entered the market, including Four.Meme, Binance Alpha and LetsBonk.fun. From that point onward, issuance rails consistently generated around $100 million in monthly revenue throughout 2025.
Whether through mass-market rails like Pump.fun or more curated venues like Echo, issuance now acts as the ignition point of speculative cycles. At the top of the stack, issuance platforms supply an unprecedented flow of new assets, attention and users. The crypto trading stack is evolving into a more complete, interconnected and continuous system than at any point in its development. Election-linked positions on Polymarket were followed by shifts in funding rates on ETH and SOL perpetuals, as traders hedged or amplified directional bets based on changing probabilities. During the US presidential debates, for example, Polymarket odds moved within seconds of key moments, long before polling aggregators or news desks updated their models.
Protocols like Morpho V1 and Kamino Lend illustrate how utilisation falls as platforms scale and attract more passive liquidity, while mid-range lenders such as Compound V3 and Venus stabilised at around 47–50%. Utilisation levels in 2025 varied widely across lenders, largely due to differences in market architecture rather than demand alone. Morpho V1 moved into second place, growing from 7.30% to 10.67%, as capital shifted toward more efficient, modular lending.
Aave V3 strengthened its leadership position, expanding its share from 50% to 57%. Capital remains highly concentrated, with the top ten protocols holding $57.00 billion, or 89.0% of total lending TVL. They should also include ongoing, automated monitoring, so that risk is not merely evaluated at inception but continuously supervised throughout the life of the asset.
LayerZero and Stargate: Omnichain Liquidity
The market is getting better execution, but it is doing so by routing a growing share of economically sensitive flow through narrower, more industrial rails. Across major ecosystems, value extraction became more mediated by builders, private routing, RFQ layers, solver markets, and auctions. Real-world assets moved from niche to core yield and collateral infrastructure. Liquid staking held up as a durable capital base, with gradual share shifts away from early incumbents and toward exchange-linked or more institutionally packaged wrappers. That shift improved composability and predictability for allocators, while also creating new forms of concentration risk around a narrow set of stablecoin and synthetic-yield ecosystems. Lending expanded and remained concentrated in a small number of dominant venues, with market share shifting toward platforms perceived as operationally strongest and most institutionally legible.
Falling infrastructure costs allowed applications to scale further than previous cycles, reinforcing the shift from base-layer value capture toward application-layer economics. Primary issuance rails emerged as a major standalone category, monetizing attention, distribution, and entertainment rather than traditional liquidity provision. This concentration is not a failure of competition, it is a reflection of how reserve-based monetary models scale and how sticky liquidity and distribution advantages can be. Revenue growth broadened across major DeFi verticals in 2025, but value capture remained concentrated. The market became broader at the edges, yet the core stayed dominated by the largest reserve-backed issuers. Tron continued to function as a high-throughput transfer rail, with stablecoin usage shaped more by exchange and payment flows than DeFi composition.
Data Used to Track You
Compared to Ethereum, where MEV revenue is split across searchers, builders, relays, and proposers, and to BNB Chain, where MEV is internalised by a small builder oligopoly and redistributed to validators. There is no persistent builder layer extracting structural rents, and no relay layer interposed between bidders and proposers. The distribution of MEV revenue on Solana is, therefore, validator-centric by construction. The combination of falling tip revenue and persistently high bundle submission shows that MEV competition on Solana intensified throughout the year. Over the year, 6.45 billion Jito bundles were submitted to validators for execution.
Most activity flowed through KYC-gated pools, tokenised yield platforms, and structured notes. The institutional story in 2025 was less about institutions “aping into DeFi” and more about a gradual, deliberate build-out of access rails that fit within existing compliance and risk frameworks. It was a year when top-line growth and tokenholder yield began to correlate.
While campaigns reached large numbers of addresses, onchain evidence shows that economic ownership was never broadly dispersed. Slower claim schedules reduce the pace at which supply enters circulation and can moderate short-term market dynamics. The distinction reflects different priorities rather than execution quality. Broad address-level distribution expands reach and awareness, while allocation size remains closely tied to contribution, usage, or capital intensity. This section focuses on what can be observed directly onchain, including distribution structure, claim timing, and early post-claim token movement, to illustrate how modern airdrop design works in practice.
Perps liquidity is set to remain concentrated among a few execution-first venues, with competition focused on fee compression, capital efficiency, and cross-venue margining rather than chain distribution. Their growth was driven by a combination of low-latency infrastructure, tightly controlled risk engines, and points-based incentive programs that temporarily reduced effective trading costs. This dynamic pulled onchain rates closer to traditional money-market benchmarks and moved the sector away from incentive-driven growth toward genuine rate formation. This spread explains why capital continued to flow into yield protocols even as restaking unwound. With SUSDE and related tranches now representing a substantial share of Pendle’s total collateral, the protocol is more exposed than ever to the performance and stability of a single synthetic-yield infrastructure.
- Goldfinch; Maple often offer 9–13% yields for diversified senior or senior-secured pools, with higher rates for mezzanine or emerging-market exposure.
- Nearly all Ethereum blocks now contain at least some DEX activity, but the fraction that includes an actual sandwich no longer trends upward.
- Lido combines ~33% native exposure with over 50% in non-native assets and a double-digit stablecoin allocation.
LayerZero’s Stargate protocol represents another approach to unified liquidity through its omnichain model. As research indicates, transferring $50 million USDC from Ethereum to Avalanche becomes practically impossible with traditional liquidity-pool-based bridges due to insufficient liquidity. By enabling USDC to burn on source chains and mint on destination chains, CCTP eliminates the liquidity pool requirements that constrain traditional bridges. CCTP represents a paradigm shift toward native stablecoin interoperability.
While BTC deployed into DeFi increased materially in 2025, most BTC-aligned Layer 2s and sidechains were not able to retain that capital on their own execution environments. Instead, the market is converging toward a barbell structure in which Ethereum services the high-value settlement layer, while external DA providers service high-throughput and cost-optimised data workloads. EigenDA and Celestia are positioned to absorb a growing share of bandwidth-intensive, cost-sensitive workloads, particularly from consumer, gaming, and emerging financial protocols.
Its average share rose from 5.08% in 2024 to 7.73% in 2025, while peak share increased from 8.33% to 9.82%. Solana’s share of total DeFi TVL also increased in 2025 and, more importantly, became structurally more stable. The timing of these peaks aligns with the most intense token issuance and perpetual trading cycles of the year, when Solana became the primary venue for speculative flow across DeFi. Peak daily fees and peak daily revenue more than doubled year over year, rising to $28.89 million and $14.44 million in early 2025. Between 2024 and 2025, Solana saw a large increase in base network activity and monetisation alongside a pullback in peak retail usage. Between 2024 and 2025, Solana shifted from being a general-purpose smart contract chain to a chain primarily optimised for trading.
Governance rights, liquidity depth, counterparty risk, and value-capture mechanisms dominated allocation decisions. In practice, permissionless markets became gated by custody integration roadmaps. Custodians, banks, and asset managers became the effective approval layer deciding which assets and applications institutions could use. Dealers such as Marex reported increasing demand for notes with coupons tied to baskets of BTC, ETH, or systematic onchain yield strategies. Horizon required KYC for collateral providers but allowed a broader base of liquidity on the lending side.
