Dedollarization could lead to reindustrialization by reducing the U.S.' reliance on printing dollars and emphasizing domestic manufacturing. The U.S. must shift from printing money to building factories to compete globally, particularly with China, which has developed a robust industrial base (low-skilled to high-skilled labor) over the past 45 years. This might require an improvement in robotics, and resistance from regulatory bodies could pose challenges.
After many recent complaints about “low float, high FDV” projects, Binance invited new projects to apply for listing on the site.
The settlement also effectively prohibits Genesis from operating in New York.
The SEC must approve two forms for the ETH ETFs to begin trading.
Peter Mintzberg, head of strategy in Goldman's asset management division, will replace Michael Sonnenshein in August of this year.
2024.05.21·links.tldrnewsletter.com·1 min read·TLDR Crypto Prominent Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has taken an advisory role at the EigenLayer Foundation in exchange for millions of dollars in EIGEN tokens vesting over three years.
There are many complaints about new coins launching at the highest possible fully diluted valuation and immediately listing on a tier-1 CEX, providing exit liquidity for VCs. Over 80% of tokens listed on Binance in the past six months are down, with the only exceptions being two Solana ecosystem coins and two memecoins. The average FDV of a Binance listing is $4.2 billion. These projects have no organic community or positive retail sentiment, causing their tokens to perform poorly.
This thread scrutinizes the significant downturn of "low float, high FDV" cryptocurrencies listed on Binance, debunking prevalent theories about market manipulation by VCs or shifts in retail investor interest towards meme coins. None of the popular narratives convincingly explain the broad price declines. A combination of factors in a complex market environment, rather than a single culprit, is responsible for the observed trends. Free markets will eventually adjust these mispricings on their own.
Ethereum's transition to Verkle trees, a more efficient data structure, will provide various scalability and node operation benefits. It will allow for a 10x increase in mainnet gas, simplify the node architecture, and reduce node sync time to a few seconds. Consequently, the path for smartphone-based and light nodes will become possible, helping to improve Ethereum decentralization.
PureDai is a proposed stablecoin that aims to deliver cypherpunk ideals. It prioritizes extreme decentralization and resilience by leveraging decentralized collateral, maximally decentralized oracles, and minimal governance. The stablecoin will have a free-floating target price, permanent emissions to incentivize supply-side growth, and a governance token. It will interact with Maker SubDAOs, particularly the Spark lending protocol, to ensure efficient markets. It is not expected to be released for several years and will likely change significantly before then.
Ethereum has underperformed in 2024, with many questioning its role when L2s and competing L1s like Solana take market share. Coinbase still believes in Ethereum's long-term potential and its advantages surrounding the developer ecosystem, the proliferation of the EVM, ETH's utility as DeFi collateral, and its decentralization. ETH is uniquely positioned as a store-of-value and technology token and could outperform in the second half of 2024.
The liquid restaking token sector continues to grow, but ETH has been down since the EIGEN airdrop, leading to speculation that ETH was overbought or leveraged to farm the token. EtherFi and Renzo are leaders in the LRT market, with a 73% market share. Still, Renzo's ezETH has been trading at a 2-3% discount since a depeg event a few weeks ago, making Puffer's pufETH the second-most liquid LRT behind eETH. 56% of EigenLayer's TVL is used in a yield generation protocol.
A report from Binance Research reveals a substantial shift in the crypto market, with the circulating supply of tokens at launch decreasing significantly over the past three years, from about 41% to 12.7%. With $155 billion in token supply scheduled to unlock from 2024 to 2030, the study underscores the challenges and potential volatility facing projects with low float and high fully diluted valuations, highlighting the need for real utility to support such high initial valuations.
Vitalik Buterin reflects on Ethereum's progress and the need to prioritize decentralization and permissionlessness as the network scales. He mentions concerns about MEV, liquid staking, and node hardware requirements and suggests potential solutions like inclusion lists, reduced withdrawal periods for stakers, single-slot finality, and peer-to-peer networks for storing historical data. While Ethereum has moved away from its 2021-era ideas about offloading responsibilities to centralized actors, there is still room for improvement to make Ethereum a strong base layer for L2s.
This thread criticizes the reliance on Layer 2 (L2) solutions for blockchain scaling, arguing that it leads to worse user experience due to ecosystem fragmentation, poor economics, and encourages centralization, which compromises trust and security. It advocates for scaling at the Layer 1 (L1) level, contending that L2 solutions often remain centralized, introduce significant security risks including potential theft by administrators, and ultimately do not solve the inherent problems but merely shift them onto a weaker model.
Lido's co-founders and Paradigm are secretly backing a new "restaking" company, Symbiotic, poised to challenge EigenLayer and potentially reshape the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape.
The Runes protocol launch experienced a "sell-the-news" reaction, but the community remains robust and development continues, with potential catalysts such as listings on major exchanges like Kraken and Binance poised to rekindle interest.
The Venezuelan government claims this measure will stabilize the national power supply, which has suffered frequent blackouts since 2019.
Eigenlayer enables users to leverage their staked ETH to obtain additional staking rewards while supporting new Actively Validated Services (AVS).
Rollups scale better than fast L1s due to a smaller replication factor, reducing communication overhead and enabling faster performance.
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The Senate has joined the House of Representatives in overturning the SEC's SAB 121 in a 60-38 vote. SAB 121 requires crypto custodians to hold customer assets on their balance sheet, which has significant consequences and makes the process much more complex. President Biden previously warned that he would veto this resolution if it passed in Congress, stating that he would side with Gensler and the SEC. The vote passed with support of most Republicans and 12 Democrats.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange intends to offer spot Bitcoin trading to its clients as demand for the product increases. As a global derivatives powerhouse, it hosts the top Bitcoin futures exchange by open interest, while Binance leads in spot trading volume. A spot market would allow for complex spot and futures strategies to be executed in the same place.
Chainlink recently shared the results of the Smart NAV (Net Asset Value) industry pilot, which involved Chainlink, DTCC, and ten major financial institutions. In the pilot, the team successfully delivered mutual fund data onchain, which demonstrated DTCC's capability to provide NAV data across various blockchains (private/public). This pilot illustrates how Chainlink's CCIP can be used as an open blockchain interoperability standard to prevent fragmentation and improve automated data dissemination and access for fund tokenization.
DeFi is a complex user experience, with various chains and protocols that become overwhelming for new users. Veda is creating the “bedrock of an entire yield ecosystem” with black box yield optimization, a modular architecture, and secure cross-chain communication. It takes the concept of native yield popularized by Blast and Ethena and extends it to any protocol and DeFi product.
Maker's DAI stablecoin has been in an awkward position, unable to commit fully to the idea of being a completely decentralized stablecoin or a large-scale, dollar-pegged asset. Maker's Endgame allows these visions to be pursued simultaneously, with DAI being replaced by two stablecoins: NewStable and PureDai. NewStable will focus on utility and adoption, emphasizing decentralization but incorporating RWA and TradFi. PureDai will be collateralized by decentralized assets like ETH, with a free-floating peg, maximally decentralized oracles, and no governance.
TON, founded by the Durov brothers in 2017 and rebranded to "The Open Network" in 2020, has seen a resurgence since its collaboration with Telegram in September 2023. It is now the 9th largest crypto project with a current FDV of ~$25B. TON's ecosystem includes the TON Blockchain, TON DNS, TON Storage, and TON Payment. TON benefits from being able to leverage Telegram's user base of ~900M users. It is currently experiencing significant growth in TVL and trading volume bolstered by USDT integration and incentive programs like The Open League.
Attention is the most valuable yet misunderstood resource. Big tech has attempted to monetize it to the greatest extent possible via algorithms. These companies aim to capture, retain, and monetize attention, creating the attention economy that dominates the internet today. GameStop's stock pump and memecoins exemplify how attention can be monetized and demonstrate its value – crypto democratizes attention by tokenizing it. Bitcoin's various narratives, from a store of value to a hedge against World War 3, make it broadly approachable and create a contagious expression of ideas.
Although Pump.fun, a new popular memecoin launcher, claims its smart contracts are secure, a former employee allegedly exploited a vulnerability, stealing ~12.3K SOL (approximately $1.9 million).
Top venture capital firms have generated 3x returns in ideal macroeconomic conditions, but crypto VC has drastically outperformed even the best traditional firms.
AI remains one of the strongest narratives, taking up 30-50% of mindshare in 2023, with SocialFi and memes growing significantly.
Alex Labs was recently hacked for ~$29.3M USD hack in STX because of a phishing attack that compromised private keys.
Nearly 1,000 firms hold spot Bitcoin ETFs less than a quarter after release.
The U.S. Department of Justice has arrested Anton and James Pepaire-Bueno, charging them with using a maximal extractable value (MEV) exploit to illicitly obtain $25 million from Ethereum blockchain transactions in just 12 seconds. This unprecedented scheme involved manipulating pending transactions to redirect funds, a significant manipulation of blockchain technology.
Investment management firm Vanguard has appointed Salim Ramji as its new CEO and board member. Ramji previously led BlackRock's global ETF department, overseeing the iShares spot Bitcoin ETF launch. Vanguard was previously anti-Bitcoin and did not allow brokerage account holders to buy Bitcoin ETFs as they thought the assets were too risky. Analysts are mixed on whether this hire will shift Vanguard's position on Bitcoin.
Tori, launched by the Utopia Labs team, aims to simplify DeFi access by offering a user-friendly, self-custody wallet with FaceID, instant bank connections, and high APYs (via Aave). People based in the US can currently get access to the app by invite.
Spark, the first SubDAO under MakerDAO, is set to launch along with its native token SPK, SparkLend, and Spark Cash & Savings as part of its suite of DeFi products. The initiative aims to decentralize banking-like features through the Dai Savings Rate. Users have a chance to pre-farm SPK tokens ahead of its launch. Spark's governance model and phased token distribution strategy encourages long-term stability and community engagement.
LayerZero's upcoming airdrop is set to be one of the most complex ever due to its massive scale, involving over six million wallets, and the necessity to manage equitable token distribution across its diverse user base. The airdrop, timed with LayerZero's token generation event, faces additional complexities from cross-blockchain operations, varying community expectations, and the challenging task of preventing fraud among participants.
Crypto in Latin America is driven by economic instability and inadequate banking services. Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico lead in usage due to their unique economic challenges. Brazil boasts a developed crypto market with high Bitcoin demand, Argentina utilizes crypto to preserve value amid hyperinflation, and Mexico leverages it for cost-effective remittance solutions. These examples demonstrate the region's varied but growing embrace of digital currencies.
2024.05.16·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Crypto Sonne Finance, a decentralized money market on the Optimism L2, has been exploited for $20 million. Sonne offered a 10% bounty to the hacker if the funds were returned, but the money is already being moved to other addresses. The hacker took advantage of a known bug in Compound V2, which Sonne forked for its protocol.
This article promotes bringing back Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) through a new method called Distributed Token Launches (DTLs). It criticizes traditional venture capital for often excluding the wider community. The article highlights the significance of involving the community in funding processes, arguing that decentralized, community-focused approaches can spur innovation and create greater value. It uses examples from successful crypto projects to illustrate the benefits.
2024.05.16·links.tldrnewsletter.com·5 min read·TLDR Crypto Blast airdrop will now launch on June 26 instead of its initial estimate of May.
The $FRIEND token faces two key issues: a misalignment of interests between equity and token holders because the team doesn't own any tokens (no incentive to increase price), and the token's limited tradeability on other DEXs.
Mastercard's Start Path program aims to develop blockchain use cases and improve digital commerce experiences.
HB3594, the Blockchain Basics Act, codifies the rights of citizens to run a node, mine, and self-custody their Bitcoin.
El Salvador has mined 474 Bitcoin using geothermal energy from its volcano in the past three years.
A Dutch court convicted the Tornado Cash developer of laundering $1.2 billion of crypto, with a three-judge panel sentencing him to five years and four months in prison. Co-founder Roman Storm is facing similar charges in the United States, with a federal court trial scheduled for September.
The State of Wisconsin Investment Board, a state agency responsible for public retirement and trust funds, filed reports showing that it holds $163 million in Bitcoin ETFs. $99 million is held in BlackRock's iShares ETF, with $63 million in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. The Board also holds shares of Coinbase, Marathon Digital, Riot Platforms, MicroStrategy, and other crypto-related companies. Analysts expressed surprise at the rapid adoption of Bitcoin by a state pension fund.
Arweave has launched AO, a powerful new computer system that enables many processes to run at the same time, each operating independently. This advanced technology promises to transform how decentralized applications work, using Arweave's permanent storage to handle more complex tasks without the usual limits of blockchain technology.