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Welcome back to 0xResearch. Here's what we’ve got for you today:

• Sui vs. Aptos

• Chart: Solana DeFi growth

• Listen & Read: The AI creator takeover

The next Solana: Sui or Aptos?

As SOL reached new all-time highs yesterday, Crypto Twitter’s search for the “next Solana” is on.

There is no shortage of mega fast alt-L1s to pick from, but in the spotlight are two contenders: MoveVM-based chains Sui and Aptos. Both chains were born in the previous crypto cycle, and built by teams with backgrounds in Facebook, which developed the Move programming language as part of its Libra (later renamed Diem) project.

In terms of price action, SUI has outperformed APT by a large margin on a YTD basis, after overtaking Aptos in market cap in mid-September.

Despite suffering a brief two-hour outage yesterday, SUI’s price has bounced back above its pre-outage price levels, ironically reinforcing the mimetic perception of Sui as the next Solana due to the latter’s history of outages.

In terms of TVL, Sui and Aptos are running fairly neck to neck (see below chart), no doubt thanks to ongoing liquidity incentive campaigns. As far as active dapps on the L1s, both are also fairly even — Sui has 44, Aptos has 49 — based on DefiLlama’s numbers.

Zooming into onchain activity, Sui’s DEX trading volumes saw a 3x jump since September, overtaking Aptos by a long shot in the last month.

In terms of fees, Sui is also far outpacing Aptos, with $1.1 million generated in October alone, vs. $196k for Aptos.

In the TradFi arena, both chains are pursuing real-world assets. Ondo has deployed its USDY tokenized Treausurys product on both chains, with about $8.3 million on Sui and $15.7 million on Aptos. 

Aptos also announced last week BlackRock’s deployment of its tokenized RWA BUIDL fund, while Sui announced today a partnership with the digital assets arm of Franklin Templeton to support ecosystem growth.

Finally, both Sui and Aptos are attempting their own hardware plays. Sui is leaning hard into the gaming sector with its handheld console SuiPlay0x1, and earlier this month struck up a partnership with the global esports team Team Liquid, while Aptos has taken the route of a budget-priced JamboPhone smartphone.

— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)

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Solana DeFi surge:

The two charts highlight a $1 billion TVL surge for two leading Solana DeFi protocols, Kamino and Raydium. They have reached $2.44 billion and $2.66 billion, respectively.

SOL's 60% price increase to a new all-time high over the same period accounts for most of this growth: perhaps upwards of 80%, given that much of the protocols’ holdings are denominated in SOL. But organic growth — from onboarding stablecoins like PYUSD, USDS in the case of Kamino, and the memecoin mania spilling over from Pump.Fun to Raydium — accounts for about $300 million.

This dynamic reflects both growing user confidence in Solana’s DeFi ecosystem and the strong feedback loop between SOL's rising value and increased protocol adoption.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

Analyst Roundtable: The AI creator takeover

Boccaccio: AI agents make a lot of sense on the blockchain, not because it’s permissionless, but because people who are onchain have high risk tolerance thresholds and are willing to give it money. I don’t think regular users are willing to do so in such an experimental phase, even with 30 or 40 bucks.

Danny Knettel: There's a bunch of players trying to sell the picks and shovels of this meta — like Virtuals and Luna, just like pump.fun did with memecoins — that’s where the real innovation is, not the guy who's making the 10th copy of a Donald Trump AI agent and dropping it on Virtuals protocol. I think we're early because there aren't a lot of things to directly bet on this narrative in public markets yet.

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GLIF is the foundational DeFi primitive of Filecoin — enabling Filecoin token holders to earn sustainable rewards on their $FIL by lending it to a diverse pool of Filecoin Storage Providers. Storage Providers borrow FIL to store data and grow, and simultaneously improves the security of the Filecoin network.

Similar to liquid staking solutions for PoS networks like Lido or Jito, GLIF solves a major capital inefficiency for Filecoin, and is Filecoin's first and most popular DeFi protocol.

Geodnet is the world’s largest RTK network by both the number of base stations and coverage area, providing hyper-precise positioning data to Web2 customers. RTK networks are critical to enabling a world of ubiquitous autonomous drones, vehicles, and industrial robots.

In this unlocked research report, Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor explores why the GEOD token enables both a cost and product advantage for the GEODNET RTK network, which will allow it to out-compete multibillion-dollar incumbents Trimble and Hexagon.

• Solana's native token, SOL, reached a new all-time high of $263, at around 9 pm ET Thursday. The price action marks a 2,000% increase over two years. This surge is attributed to heightened demand for blockspace, driven by the growth of memecoin trading and speculation on a potential SOL ETF approval under the Trump Administration.

• The Aave DAO approved Chaos Labs' Edge Risk Oracles, marking the first non-Chainlink oracle integration. Chaos Labs, which replaced Gauntlet as Aave's primary risk manager, launched Edge in September, securing $74 billion in volume. Edge automates parameter updates via smart contracts, tailored to Aave's needs. This makes Aave the first major protocol to adopt this dynamic risk management system.

• Uniswap v4's address mining competition, which runs until Dec. 1, invites participants to find a salt value that deploys the protocol to the most "optimal" deterministic address using CREATE2. Scores are based on characteristics like leading zeroes, patterns of 4s and unique configurations. The highest-scoring address becomes the deployment address. So far, the current leading address is: 0x00000000004444d3cB22EA006470e100Eb014F2D.

• Bitcoin’s recent rally to near $100k has sparked a quirky theory: Binance co-founder CZ’s “gm” tweets predict price surges. Since his prison release, CZ tweeted “gm” thrice, each coinciding with Bitcoin’s 82% rise. With an 80% historical success rate, $1,000 investments timed with his tweets could now be worth $31,480! Though correlation isn’t causation, it is a fun superstition.