Today we continue to look at Messari’s 2025 comprehensive report, and today we will look at the DEFI content!
DEFI - Decentralized Exchanges and Transactions
The trading volume of DEX has increased, almost doubling in 2024 compared to 2023, but it is only 10% of CEX's trading volume.
From January to November 2024, the total trading volume of spot DEXs increased by 171% year-on-year. In November, the trading volume reached a monthly high of approximately US$375 billion.
Sol’s trading surge has driven RAY’s growth, with Raydium currently the market leader in spot volume share at around 30%. Other Solana DEXs such as Orca’s Whirlpool, Lifinity, and Meteora have also increased their market share.
Among derivatives DEXs, the total trading volume of derivatives DEXs increased by 328% year-on-year from January to November 2024. In March, as the spot ETF was approved, Bitcoin hit a record high for the first time, with trading volume reaching a monthly high of approximately US$316 billion.
Prediction Market
The Polymarket trading market has surged. Polymarket runs a central limit order book (CLOB) of forecast shares on Polygon and has become a major destination for betting related to the 2024 election, with monthly trading volume exceeding $2 billion in October and November. Polymarket has not yet issued a coin, so it will definitely be issued in the future, and you can go to the airdrop.
Trading robots (Analysis of the potential of the money-making Telegram Bot-Maestro, analysis of the recently rising meme Ponke & GOAT & sharing of 5 pumpfun sniper robots)
We have talked a lot about trading robots before (here we mainly mention telegram BOT, such as Trojan, Bonkbot and Maestro)
The trading bots facilitated an average daily trading volume of over $180 million, and Trojan alone collected over $100 million in lifetime fees in 340 days.
RWA
Since the beginning of 2023, the total locked value (TVL) has increased from $2 billion to $9 billion. This growth was initially driven by MakerDAO's allocation to US Treasuries, and was later further expanded by the launch of tokenized treasury products by major financial institutions such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton. Today, treasuries account for 35% of the entire tokenized market. (From this point of view alone, our village is lagging behind again)
This article mainly discusses the problems and expectations of RWA growth:
1. Although future interest rate cuts may reduce the intensity of government bond conversion, the market is huge, and even a small part will grow significantly.
2. Another important opportunity is to position tokenized treasuries as the default collateral on trading venues, replacing stablecoins. Platforms like Bybit have already integrated yield-generating collateral, demonstrating the potential of this model. If this adoption expands to centralized and decentralized trading platforms, the current approximately $2.9 billion in stablecoins used as collateral could be transferred to tokenized treasuries.
3. As the appeal of tokenized treasuries wanes, some protocols may explore higher-yielding products, such as tokenized private credit. (Credit RWA leader - CFG potential analysis)
By extending their utility beyond treasuries and bridging the gap between traditional finance and cryptocurrencies, these protocols can play a key role in shaping the future of on-chain finance. Whether through idle capital, exchange collateral, or exporting yields, risk assets have the potential to sustain growth and diversify on-chain assets even as macroeconomic conditions change.
Income strategy
Points Market (Airdrop & Points Trading Market WhalesMarket-sol Ecosystem Another 100-fold Project?)
In 2024, points markets, led by whales market, gained traction in the cryptocurrency space. Points were designed to help protocols track and reward user activity and later evolved into a speculative asset traded over the counter. Whales market, built on Solana, facilitated this trading, allowing users to monetize points and pre-airdrop allocations. Early adoption drove growth, but activity dropped sharply after the juptier airdrop in January.
Income trading (download the bull market 100 times defi series-Pendle)
In 2024, Pendle became an important platform for interest rate derivatives, mainly due to the EigenLayer re-staking points program. At that time, the cooperation between ether.fi and Kelp DAO made Pendle's TVL grow rapidly.
Fighting MEV
Intent-based systems are a promising approach to not only mitigate MEV but also enhance liquidity acquisition and simplify user experience.
Protocols such as CoW Swap and UniswapX have introduced intent-centric MEV auctions, where market makers (or clearing houses) bid for the right to execute user trades. These systems transform MEV opportunities into competitive markets, redistributing value from validators and searchers to users and LPs, while ensuring a more balanced distribution of trading proceeds. By abstracting transaction paths, intent-based designs not only improve execution, but also protect users from exploitative practices such as sandwich attacks. This approach can optimize pricing, reduce MEV extraction, and foster a more user-friendly trading environment.
In addition to MEV mitigation, intent-based systems have other advantages. By aggregating liquidity from on-chain and off-chain venues, they can improve access to global liquidity, optimize cross-chain interactions, and simplify user workflows.
Outlook for 2025
It is expected that platforms such as Flashbots’ SUAVE and Anoma will launch decentralized intent markets where users’ intent can be broadcast to a network of solvers. These markets aim to establish open, permissionless auctions to promote competitive MEV mitigation.
Cross-chain interoperability
For cross-chain interoperability, chain abstraction is a key framework, although there are still issues with liquidity and user experience.
But it is also mentioned that the current focus is still on improving usability and liquidity aggregation rather than achieving complete abstraction of user preferences. Messaging protocols and solver networks will continue to play a foundational role, but their roles will change as bridging becomes less centralized and messaging becomes commoditized. At the same time, front-end applications and solvers will become key value drivers, attracting users with seamless experience and execution efficiency.
While the long-term vision of chain abstraction is to remove the complexity of chain and application selection, incremental progress will likely be achieved in the coming years. True abstraction will require broader token deployment and greater diversity in application design — milestones that are still further to achieve.
Wayfinder leverages AI agents to simplify multi-chain interactions by combining application discovery and intent execution through a graph-based structure. These agents identify and traverse optimal paths for tasks such as token swaps or bridging on behalf of users, demonstrating how intuitive systems can begin to close the gap between the current landscape and a completely abstract vision. Protocols like these highlight the incremental but critical steps being taken to transform the multi-chain experience, reduce friction, and enhance user accessibility.
To sum up, the DEFI sector is still growing and can be optimistic in the long term. The focus is on the RWA sector. There are more and more treasury projects. The United States is leading again. When can our village catch up? There are also two projects in the points market and the income market, which can be paid special attention to. Finally, for the optimization of DEFI, look at projects such as intention transactions and cross-chain interoperability. These are the key paths for whether DEX can surpass CEX in the future.
