The most common pitfalls in crypto product development include misidentifying user needs, incorrectly defining target market segments, delegating crucial functions like marketing to less experienced staff, haphazardly adapting Web2 ideas into Web3 without genuine innovation, overemphasizing the blockchain choice due to its existing user base, and blindly following industry trends without original thought. Each of these errors stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the market and the unique capabilities offered by crypto.
The situation involving Synapse (banking service provider), Evolve (banking partner), and numerous fintech startups highlights a significant problem in tracking and verifying the location of customer deposits. These issues could be solved by bringing funds onchain. Blockchain tech is a transparent and immutable ledger and could thus resolve uncertainties about the flow of funds and improve overall financial transparency and trust.
The number of mobile crypto wallet users has reached an all-time high of 28 million.
Friendtech has announced its plans to transition from the Base network to its new Friendchain network, developed in partnership with Conduit.
Since launching $notcoin (market cap of ~2.2.B after five months) on Telegram onchain activity has significantly increased, with over 35 million users participating in the TON ecosystem.
The Arbitrum Foundation has been approved to distribute 225 million ARB, worth $215 million, to the Gaming Catalyst Program.
Robinhood has announced Robinhood Crypto's worldwide expansion with the acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp. The U.K.-based exchange, one of the biggest in Europe, was sold for $200 million cash and is expected to close in the first half of 2025. Robinhood hopes this purchase will help them attract institutional customers.
Crypto exchange Kraken is looking to raise more than $100 million as part of plans to go public in the United States. Rumors have been circulating about Kraken's plans to go public for the past few years, but the firm has recently been fighting accusations from the SEC about operating an unregistered brokerage. The round could be completed by the end of the year.
MEV taxes allow apps to capture their MEV without sacrificing composability. By charging a fee as a function of the priority fee of a transaction, smart contracts can capture a variable percentage of MEV. This strategy can only be used on OP Stack L2s at the moment as it relies on a block building algorithm sorting by priority fee.
Infrastructure provider Alchemy has announced its Rollup platform, which offers developers a 99.999% uptime sequencer and all-in-one toolkit. It supports Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and Celestia DA modularity options.
Mountain Protocol has launched USDM, a stablecoin backed by US Treasuries. The protocol uses an auto-rebasing feature that accrues daily yield directly in users' wallets, differentiating it from competitors by sharing the yield generated from treasury assets, thus enhancing its appeal as a reliable and innovative financial tool in the stablecoin market.
Regan Bozman narrates his journey from exploring operator funds to co-founding Free Company, a syndicate that successfully invested in various crypto projects during the 2020-2021 bull market. Despite initial success, changes in member finances and the market led to the dissolution of the syndicate, prompting Bozman to co-found Lattice, a $20M fund that made significant investments in the crypto space.
Robinhood is aggressively expanding its cryptocurrency services and offerings. It most recently acquired BitStamp (daily volume of $196 million and 1.2 million monthly active users) for $200 million. This strategic move, along with Robinhood's 263% month-over-month growth in crypto volumes, positions Robinhood to potentially surpass its equity trading volumes with crypto. The acquisition also enables Robinhood to potentially increase its Assets Under Custody to approximately $30 billion and expand its trading options to match the token pairs offered by BitStamp.
ZK and verifiable compute is a new developer primitive that could introduce exciting new applications, much like how the iPhone's camera and GPS led to innovative applications like Instagram, Uber, and Doordash. DeFi protocols could integrate risk modeling in ZK and complex offchain pricing functions that are trustlessly verifiable onchain. Blockchain and ZK could enable ownable, censorship-resistant AI companions and agents or onchain ML.
Asset manager Franklin Templeton is considering a crypto-focused institutional investment fund.
Assuming all goes as planned, Ethereum's upcoming Pectra hardfork will be one of the largest ever.
TON Wallet Tonkeeper is currently #1 for finance on the Google Play Store.
Interoperability protocol Wormhole has introduced staking for governance.
Paxos has launched a new yield-generating stablecoin called Lift Dollar (USDL). The USDL is regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and offers a programmatic daily yield similar to U.S. Treasury bonds. Issued by Paxos International in the UAE, the USDL is designed to function like a savings product. It provides users with a yield of over 5% while democratizing access to a risk-free rate. The USDL will be initially distributed in Argentina through partners like Ripio and Buenbit.
Influenced by the ETF news, technological improvements, and onchain data, asset manager VanEck has raised its 2030 ETH price target to $22k. This is its base case, with a bull case of $154,000 and a bear case of $2,477. VanEck also reported on how ETH and BTC perform in traditional and crypto-specific portfolios, finding that a 6% allocation in a traditional portfolio can improve risk-adjusted returns.
Coinbase has launched a smart wallet designed to facilitate the onboarding of a billion users by enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of self-custodial wallets. These innovative wallets are positioned as a key element in expanding global access to blockchain networks.
Polymer Labs created Monomer SDK in partnership with Nethermind. Monomer SDK can take any Cosmos SDK app and make it deployable as an execution layer on the OP Stack. This approach allows the InterBlockchain Communication (IBC) protocol to be used for bridging alongside additional Cosmos tooling and tech.
The base case priced in by Wall Street this quarter is a 20% reduction in trading revenue and a 3% reduction in service revenue, with $1.35B in revenue and 87 cents of earnings per share. The optimistic case depends on the start of trading for the ETH ETF and would see $1.52B in revenue with $1.44 EPS.
This report explains the processes and entities behind Ethereum's decision-making process. Ethereum's decision-making process is primarily shaped by social norms, not formal rules or voting mechanisms. Forums serve as a place of discussion and research, with nine main client team GitHubs hosting the software changes. Though core developers are the main gatekeepers, the trend has been towards consistently upgrading and modifying the chain to optimize toward an ideal endgame.
Vitalik Buterin is unhappy with this cycle's celebrity entrants in the crypto space, criticizing their purely financial and speculative intentions. He cites Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis' Stoner Cats NFT project, which funded a cartoon based on the IP, as the best example of celebrity experimentation. In his view, a respectable project should have a public good goal, fun mechanics, and be long-lasting, with the token price being the last concern for its users.
If tokens are the product, they flip the traditional model of creating value without capturing it first. Tokens serve as a prediction market for investors' interest in a project's direction and the likelihood it will happen, making them a narrative discovery tool and creating tight feedback loops for teams. Since tokens immediately allow teams to receive more capital for a proposed product, they act as a more efficient and faster version of VC funding. Memes are necessary to ensure sufficient and consistent interest and liquidity, keeping the project relevant and with an army of supporters.
2024.06.06·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Crypto Stablecoins are in the midst of becoming a massive industry. We may see thousands and potentially the first $1T stablecoin this decade. Even though fiat currency worldwide is experiencing inflation, the current fifth technical revolution means that there will be significant demand for niche products in the digital age. Stablecoins, many with different designs and developer composability, enable a big-bang moment leading to greater capture of the “broad money M2” market.
Bybit, the third largest offshore exchange, has controversially opened up registration and authentication for users in China, despite its long-standing policy against Chinese user registration and a clear statement on its certification page that it does not offer services in Mainland China.
Friend Tech's daily active users (DAU) have plummeted to 177, raising doubts about the sustainability of hyper-financialized social apps.
Multiple ways exist to earn double-digit yields on stablecoins and ETH using strategies on Curve, Pendle, and Ethena.
Sanctum, a platform for aggregating Solana LSTs, has announced plans for a token.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino is concerned about the EU's MiCA regulation for stablecoins. He asserts that the new requirements complicate stablecoin operations and increase their vulnerability and risk. In other news, Binance has announced plans to restrict "unauthorized" stablecoins in Europe to comply with MiCA, potentially affecting other exchanges and the accessibility of stablecoins like USDT.
The US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has added Aptos founder Mo Shaikh to its Digital Assets Subcommittee. The subcommittee offers advice on regulating digital assets and comprises members from crypto-familiar companies like Blackrock, Uniswap, and Polygon.
Gauntlet has partnered with the NEAR Foundation to create a new governance framework and grow NEAR Protocol's ecosystem. The new structure will include stake-weighted voting, more efficient funding stream management, and grant analysis to optimize governance initiatives. The ecosystem growth framework will primarily analyze the flywheel effect and how to incentivize new users to NEAR, focusing on evaluating liquidity mining programs.
2024.06.05·links.tldrnewsletter.com·2 min read·TLDR Crypto EigenLayer introduces innovative blockchain solutions, including the EIGEN token, which tackles intersubjectively attributable faults, allowing for expanded security measures beyond traditional cryptographic proofs. By utilizing restaking mechanisms, EigenLayer enables staked ETH to support additional services while safeguarding network integrity with a unique token forking system, effectively separating staking and non-staking activities to mitigate risk and enhance application development.
2024.06.05·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Crypto Electric Capital's Annual Developer Report reveals trends around the increase in multichain development, the U.S. losing developer share, and the growth of new chains like Base and Bitcoin L2s. Infrastructure improvement has enabled the rise of social applications, which are in an experimental stage reminiscent of social media in 2003. NFTs are becoming multichain and are expected to serve as the foundation for various digital assets in the future.
2024.06.05·links.tldrnewsletter.com·9 min read·TLDR Crypto The biggest crypto conference of the year did not have many new themes, instead reinforcing growing narratives. Traditional finance institutions were very present and the future of regulation was the most discussed topic. Bitcoin's growing Runes and L2 ecosystem was given as much attention as any other ecosystem, even more than SOL memecoins. People are becoming skeptical about the AI x crypto narrative, though DePIN is becoming more legitimized.
Immutable received nearly $1 billion in funding to build an ecosystem with over 200 games, while Sorare received almost $750 million for crypto fantasy games and now has over 3 million users. Smaller studios have abandoned projects after raising over a billion dollars cumulatively. Other games are targeting specific niches, like Parallel's focus on AI, Off The Grid's console experience, or Mythical Games' Pudgy Penguin mobile app.
IOTA has launched its EVM Mainnet, marking a significant development for the network by introducing a fully EVM-compatible Layer 2 solution that promises enhanced scalability through parallel transaction processing, seamless deployment of Solidity smart contracts, and increased fairness with MEV resistance.
The decline in activity on FantasyTop was expected as it initially appealed to "novelty-seeking" users.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computations on encrypted data, allowing for private execution.
Liquid restaking protocol Renzo has launched staking for its REZ token.
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2024.06.04·links.tldrnewsletter.com·Sponsor·TLDR Crypto Beginning on June 30, Binance will implement phased restrictions on "Unauthorized Stablecoins" for European Economic Area (EEA) users to comply with new MiCA stablecoin regulations. Binance will transition these users towards "Regulated Stablecoins" as they become available to ensure compliance and to minimize market disruption.
About half a million tokens were launched on Solana in May, driven by the increasing popularity of memecoins and facilitated by intuitive, user-friendly platforms like Pump.fun. This surge is a reflection of Solana's high throughput and low transaction costs, thus positioning it as a leading blockchain for new token initiatives.
Coinbase Wallet has introduced a feature to send tokens via text to kick off its Onchain Summer initiative. Recipient phone numbers will receive a link to claim the tokens, which will be returned to the sender if not claimed in 2 weeks.
This website provides up-to-date information on Ethereum's roadmap. It breaks down the sections into the Merge, Surge, Scourge, Verge, and Purge categories, explaining each milestone with additional learning resources. Other valuable information is also available, including network health, key Ethereum organizations, and upcoming hard forks.
The Taiko, Blast, zkSync, and AO airdrops are confirmed to occur this month. Coinbase will release its smart wallet on June 5, and the FET, AGIX, and OCEAN tokens will merge into ASI on June 13. Macroeconomic news includes the unemployment rate on June 7, inflation numbers and an interest rate decision on June 12, and the presidential debate on June 27.