KRAKEN

Kraken’s Ethereum Layer 2 network, Ink, has witnessed an extraordinary surge in total locked value (TVL) — soaring nearly 3,800% in just two weeks. The network’s TVL jumped from around $6.4 million on October 15 to nearly $249 million, marking one of the fastest growth spurts in the 2025 DeFi landscape.

The catalyst behind this explosive rise is Tydro, a non-custodial lending protocol introduced by the Ink Foundation. Tydro went live on October 15 and has since accounted for over 97% of Ink’s total liquidity growth, according to data from DefiLlama.

Tydro is essentially a white-label version of Aave’s open-source lending infrastructure, but tailored as Ink’s native liquidity engine — deeply integrated with both Kraken’s exchange infrastructure and the network’s validator framework. This integration gives Tydro a unique dual advantage: the credibility of a centralized exchange and the composability of DeFi, a combination that appears to be driving both institutional and retail adoption.

Unlike many new L2 launches that rely on incentives or airdrops to boost metrics, Ink’s liquidity inflow seems organic and utility-driven, with users attracted by the non-custodial nature of Tydro’s lending system, Kraken’s backing, and low-friction settlement layers optimized for real-world DeFi use cases.

Industry analysts suggest that this sudden growth signals a new wave of exchange-linked Layer 2 ecosystems — where centralized exchanges are beginning to deploy decentralized extensions to expand liquidity control and ecosystem stickiness. Kraken’s Ink may soon join the ranks of Coinbase’s Base and Binance’s opBNB, but its early data suggests it’s carving a different path — one focused on DeFi-native financial primitives, not just transaction scalability.

If Tydro sustains momentum, it could establish Ink as a serious contender in the L2 race, bringing Kraken deeper into the modular DeFi architecture of 2025.

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