Gate Research Institute: Hot Topics Summary (2025.4.11-2025.4.17)

Overview

This report focuses on the dynamics of the blockchain industry from April 11 to April 17, 2025. The Ethereum network experienced a significant drop in on-chain activity and Layer 2 diversion, causing the average Gas fees in March to plummet by 80%, reaching a historic low; Gate.io, on the occasion of its 12th anniversary, released its Q1 2025 report, showing a 31% increase in contract trading volume and an excess reserve ratio of 28.58%. Additionally, Gate.io became the official sponsor of the F1 Red Bull Racing team, and several public welfare activities significantly enhanced its brand influence; the RWA project MANTRA (OM) faced a flash crash of over 90% in a single day due to liquidity liquidation, exposing the risks of centralized exchanges and major players; TRON's first-quarter revenue reached $760 million, and the market capitalization of stablecoins surpassed $66.2 billion, maintaining a leading position globally; Solana upgraded through SIMD-0207, increasing the maximum single-block computational unit limit to 50 million, further enhancing transaction throughput capacity; while Sony-supported Soneium, in collaboration with EigenLayer and AltLayer, launched a "Fast Finality Layer," reducing the transaction finality time from 15 minutes to under 10 seconds, helping to raise L2 performance to new heights; the sUSD de-pegging incident led investors to re-evaluate stablecoin design and market confidence. These dynamics reflect the blockchain industry's ongoing exploration of performance optimization and scale growth, while highlighting the critical role of governance and security architecture across different tracks.

Project

Ethereum network Gas fees hit a record low, with the average transaction cost in March dropping 80% compared to the end of last year

The data shows that the average Gas fee on the Ethereum network reached a historical low at the end of March 2025, with a monthly average cost of only 2.71 Gwei, a sharp drop of 80% compared to 16.9 Gwei at the end of 2024.

The recent significant drop in Gas fees on the Ethereum network is mainly due to a notable decline in market activity. With the recent fluctuations in ETH prices weakening, on-chain trading heat continues to decrease, leading to a simultaneous decline in user activity and capital liquidity, which has resulted in a marked reduction in network usage and consequently driven Gas fees to continue to decrease. In addition, Layer 2 solutions such as Arbitrum and Optimism have also diverted a large number of mainnet transactions, causing mainnet Gas fees to remain at low levels. [1]

Gate.io Releases Q1 2025 Report, Trading Volume and Reserves Rise Together

Gate.io, the world's leading cryptocurrency trading platform, celebrates a major milestone in its 12th anniversary and delivers impressive results in the first quarter of 2025. The scale of platform users and contract trading volume continued to rise, increasing by about 31% compared with the previous quarter. LaunchPool has been fully upgraded, with more than $14 million in airdrop and mining prizes. In terms of security, Gate.io's total reserves reached US$10.328 billion, ranking fourth in the world, with a total reserve ratio of 128.58% and an excess reserve ratio of 28.58%; In terms of performance, the latency of institutional business has been reduced by 2x, the volume of quantitative copy trading has soared by 780%, the number of bot strategies has surged by 404%, and ETF leveraged tokens have supported more than 200 kinds. The GT ecosystem has also performed strongly, with prices hitting record highs, up nearly 70% year-to-date, and ongoing token burns. In terms of global layout, Gate.io became the official sponsor of F1 Red Bull Racing, and its brand influence has been significantly enhanced. The platform has also carried out a number of public welfare activities in Vietnam, Benin, Africa and other places, demonstrating corporate social responsibility.

Under the strategic guidance of "security as the foundation and innovation as the spear," Gate.io achieved a dual breakthrough in business and brand in Q1 2025. On one hand, Gate.io further solidified user asset security through transparent audits and excess reserves; on the other hand, Gate.io continued to enrich its product matrix, constructing a multi-level ecological closed loop from spot trading to contracts, and from quantitative trading to DeFi staking. Global compliance and top-tier sports sponsorship complement each other, significantly enhancing brand influence; at the same time, the layout of public welfare and education highlights corporate social responsibility. Looking ahead, Gate.io will maintain high growth while further optimizing risk control models and user experience, promoting technological innovation and compliance implementation, and setting a new benchmark for the digital asset industry.

Review of OM Price Crash, Maximum Drop Exceeds 90%

On April 13, the RWA sector's crypto project MANTRA (OM) experienced dramatic price fluctuations. The price of OM plummeted from $6 to $0.5 in a short period, a drop of over 90%, with a market cap evaporating by more than $5.5 billion. Subsequently, the price of OM rebounded to $1.2.

The MANTRA token, known as OM, experienced a sharp decline due to reckless liquidations by CEX during a period of low liquidity, not due to team sell-offs. The tokens are locked up, and the economic model remains unchanged, with no tokens sold by the team, core advisors, or associations. However, on-chain data shows that several whale addresses transferred large amounts of OM to exchanges prior to the drop, raising investor concerns about market manipulation. At the same time, some community members pointed out that MANTRA's TVL is only about 13 million USD, while its fully diluted valuation reaches as high as 9.5 billion USD, indicating a significant valuation discrepancy.

The recent crash not only severely impacted OM itself but also affected the entire RWA sector. Market confidence has been significantly shaken, and investors are beginning to reassess the sustainability and governance transparency of RWA projects. This incident has exposed the systemic risks associated with the project's dependence on centralized trading platforms, as well as the potential vulnerabilities under a token control structure. In the future, similar projects will struggle to attract long-term funding if they cannot improve transparency and distributed governance capabilities. RWA projects may need to enhance transparency and governance mechanisms to restore market confidence and promote the healthy development of the sector.

TRON's Q1 revenue reached 760 million USD, setting a new historical high

TRON continued to show growth in multiple key indicators in the first quarter of this year. The network's market capitalization increased by 3.5% quarter-on-quarter, reaching $22.7 billion, and platform revenue also hit a record high of $760 million. Despite a slight adjustment of 6.1% in the price of TRX, the total revenue measured in USD still maintained growth, indicating that its on-chain transaction activity remains strong.

The stablecoin ecosystem of TRON remains its core growth driver. By the end of the first quarter, the market capitalization of stablecoins on TRON reached 66.2 billion USD, an increase of 12.8% from the previous quarter, with Tether (USDT) having a market cap of 65.7 billion USD, accounting for 99.3% market share, and the daily transfer volume growing to 19 billion USD. It is worth mentioning that currently, 45.9% of the global USDT supply is deployed on the TRON network. In addition, during Q1, TRON launched the USDD 2.0 stablecoin upgrade and established strategic partnerships with several ecosystem partners, including Wintermute, Nansen, Kiln, Tap Protocol, and Eternal AI, expanding its capabilities in liquidity, security, AI, and cross-chain communication.

According to the 2025 roadmap, TRON will continue to promote ecosystem expansion and decentralization processes, with a focus on further developing the USDD 2.0 stablecoin system, introducing user-friendly technologies such as gasless transactions and smart wallets, strengthening collaborations with institutions, and enhancing the network's security and degree of decentralization through global nodes and super representatives mechanism. In addition, TRON also plans to attract more DeFi and Web3 applications to its ecosystem by improving infrastructure and expanding developer tools, consolidating its leading position in stablecoins and cross-chain transactions.

Solana's block computation limit has been raised, network performance upgraded again

The Solana blockchain has successfully implemented the network upgrade proposal SIMD-0207, increasing the computational unit limit per block to 50 million, an approximate growth of 4%. This move will enhance Solana's transaction throughput, enabling it to handle more transactions without compromising performance. The proposal was initially put forward by Anza engineer Andrew Fitzgerald in December 2024 and officially went live in April 2025.

Although some community members are concerned that larger blocks may increase the hardware requirements for validator nodes, thereby affecting the level of decentralization, there are also voices advocating for further expanding block limits to push the limits of network performance. Solana also plans to increase the block limit to 60 million compute units through the SIMD-0256 proposal and introduce the Firedancer validator client developed by Jump Crypto, which is expected to significantly enhance the network's throughput and security.

Solana is steadily advancing its scalability roadmap, enhancing its position as a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain. Higher transaction processing capacity is expected to attract more decentralized applications and users, increasing network activity and the prosperity of the ecosystem. However, with the continuous evolution of technology, maintaining decentralization and network security while improving performance will be an important goal that Solana needs to continuously weigh and optimize.

Sony Soneium partners with EigenLayer to shorten blockchain final confirmation time by 98%, reshaping L2 performance benchmarks

The Sony-supported blockchain network Soneium announced a strategic partnership with AltLayer and EigenLayer to launch the "Fast Finality Layer," reducing the transaction finalization time of its blockchain from the original 15 minutes to under 10 seconds, achieving an improvement in confirmation speed of over 98%. This breakthrough is expected to significantly enhance user experience and provide the high-performance support needed for mainstream blockchain applications, including payments, gaming, and real-time data processing.

In the blockchain field, the final confirmation time of a transaction determines when the network considers a transaction to be definitively valid, which is a key parameter for assessing usability and security. Soneium previously adopted the OP Stack architecture of Optimism, and due to the limitations of the sequencer and challenge period mechanism, its final confirmation usually required about 15 minutes of waiting. By introducing a decentralized validator network based on EigenLayer and integrating AltLayer's elastic execution layer, Soneium has built an L2 infrastructure that balances throughput and security, laying the technical foundation for subsequent performance optimization and ecological expansion.

Compared to mainstream L2 solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism, Soneium achieves a better balance between user interaction experience and security architecture through its "Fast Finality Layer," which is expected to attract more real-time demanding application scenarios (such as high-frequency DeFi strategies, Web3 games, payment systems) to deploy on its network, enhancing ecosystem stickiness and increasing developer activity【6】.

sUSD decoupling intensifies, causing market panic

Starting from April 10, 2025, the stablecoin sUSD in the Synthetix ecosystem has experienced a severe de-pegging, currently reported at 0.8107 USD, with a decline of 5.8% by April 17, bringing its market cap down to 25.76 million USD. This de-pegging is primarily due to the ongoing mechanism upgrade in Synthetix, where the old debt management system has been replaced by the new '420 liquidity pool' mechanism, leading to a lack of effective price adjustment tools in the short term. Synthetix founder Kain Warwick emphasized that this is not a systemic crisis, but a temporary fluctuation during the transition period.

The stability of sUSD relies on the high collateralization rate and debt adjustment mechanism of the SNX token in the long term. With the introduction of the new mechanism, the collateralization rate has been lowered to 200%, and there are plans to waive $62 million of historical debt within 12 months to enhance capital efficiency and system security. However, during the transition period between the old and new mechanisms, market confidence in sUSD has been affected, leading to increased price volatility. The Synthetix team has taken measures, including strengthening incentives for the Curve liquidity pool, extending the duration of Infinex deposit activities, and establishing a long-term price support system for sUSD.

The recent depegging incident of sUSD has tested investors' trust in stablecoins. Although the Synthetix team has taken countermeasures, the price of sUSD still fluctuates within a 5-10% decline range in the short term. With the gradual improvement of the new mechanism, sUSD may regain market trust and stability, but the seeds of unease have already been sown in investors' minds, and future attention needs to be paid to specific market performance. This incident also reminds market participants that the "stability" of stablecoins is not absolute, and the design of the mechanism and market confidence are equally critical factors.

Tip Users should participate with caution, be aware of the risks, and conduct thorough research before participating. Gate.io does not guarantee the subsequent development status of the project.

Reference:

1. X,https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1910462900344443243
2. Gate.io,[ https://www.gate.io/announcements/article/44362?ch=GM_Q1od_20250410&utm_campaign=TR_464ee7gU&utm_content=&utm_medium=Flash+News&utm_source=CH_mX1vZMFk&utm_term=] (https://www.gate.io/announcements/article/44362?ch=GM_Q1od_20250410&utm_campaign=TR_464ee7gU&utm_content=&utm_medium=Flash+News&utm_source=CH_ mX1vZMFk&utm_term=)
3. Mantrachain,[https://www.mantrachain.io/resources/announcements/community-update-14-april](https://www.mantrachain.io/resources/announcements/ community-update-14-april)
4. Messari,https://messari.io/report/state-of-tron-q1-2025?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=q1_quarterlies&destination=protocol_services_research#closing-summary
5. SolanaFloor,https://solanafloor.com/zh/news/solana-scales-higher-increasing-block-limit-by-4
6. Cointelegraph,https://cointelegraph.com/news/sony-soneium-eigenlayer-finality-under-10-seconds
7. Parsec,https://parsec.substack.com/p/parsec-weekly-113

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