Morpho incentives go live on Katana, expanding DeFi possibilities
Polygon Weekly Overview - July 18, 2025
Welcome back to the Polygon Weekly Overview. The best place for Polygon community members to get up to speed on the chain’s latest updates, metrics, releases, insights, ecosystem developments and more. All in one place.
By The Numbers
Polygon daily active users: 668.47K (+10.2%)
Polygon daily txns: 4.46M (+29.65%)
Polygon Total Volume Locked (TVL): $1.15B (+5.89%)
NFT weekly sales volume: $18.79M (+6.87%)
Top 3 NFT collections by sales volume:
Courtyard: $16.12M (+5.15%)
VIPSupport: $551K (+303.91%)
Crypt Social Club: $448.56K (+1264530%)
The percentages and metrics are based on a 7-day timeframe, unless noted otherwise.
Agglayer Spotlight
🟪What happened: Morpho incentives are now live for Katana users.
🟪Why does it matter: Token holders of Katana’s KAT can now earn rewards for borrowing and lending on Morpho’s platform. This strategic collaboration opens up opportunities for new entry points and greater DeFi incentives on the chain, while also growing the protocol.
“Reward rates are calculated based on an estimate of $0.1 per KAT and can be set at any price,” Morpho stated on X. These incentives expand the economic utility for KAT beyond governance voting or speculative holding, since users can earn yield by participating in Morpho’s lending market.
Morpho is one of the largest protocols for non-custodial lending across Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains. It has about $8.1 billion in total deposits and $2.7 billion in active loans, according to its website.
By integrating the protocol’s incentives on to Katana, it expands the DeFi-focused chain to new liquidity pools and a strong lending market. Katana users can also gain direct access to various deep liquidity markets across Polygon, Arbitrum, Binance Smart Chain and others, without needing to leave the Katana network. This is important because it reduces friction for a user as they don’t need to swap between different chains, thus crafting a more interconnected experience.
🟪The big picture: Incentive-driven integrations can often create a flywheel effect across liquidity, activity and user engagement.
Oftentimes, blockchain teams prefer for applications to be chain-specific, but not everything has to be. By providing cross-chain composability, networks like Katana can tap into protocols like Morpho without having to build everything from scratch. This can provide strong use cases like capital efficient lending across a broader, interoperable liquidity layer, without all the backend work.
Also as incentives grow for users, it could create more opportunities for builders and users to use that capital on Katana to engage with or launch new dApps, expanding the network’s growth. In turn, it positions the network as a hub for cross-chain use cases and creating an interconnected DeFi landscape.
Into the Agglayer
Spiko, which has $146M in tokenized assets on Polygon, raised $22M to scale its tokenized money market fund
Nomial went live on Katana, expanding cross-chain ability for faster onboarding
Polygon hit new 30-day high for daily transaction volume at 4.4M, Chainspect data shows
The network also hit a new high for max TPS per single block of 1,059 tx/s, Chainspect data shows
NodeOps has become a validator for the Polygon network to help coordinate centralized compute
Ecosystem Showcase
Spectra is expanding to Katana, bringing leveraged yield, fixed rates and more to its ecosystem
Polymarket support expanded to bankr, an AI-assisted crypto wallet
ICYMI:
Polygon Heimdall v2 upgrade went live on mainnet, bringing about 5 second fast finality to the chain
Agglayer v.03 is live on mainnet – here’s what it means
Tune in to Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron on Untangling Web3 podcast with GSR Head of DeFi Simran Singh, discussing how Katana is reshaping liquidity fragmentation
Join in the fun
Want to dive into the Polygon ecosystem full-time? Find the latest job postings here.
Listen back to the Agglayer v0.3 upgrade explained on X space
Dive into the Polygon developer community and join the Discord
Pre-registration for KENSEI, the official memecoin launchpad on Katana, went live
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This information is for entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial advice, nor should it be used to make investment decisions. Cryptocurrencies are high risk and you should consult a financial professional before making any financial decisions. Make sure you do your own research.