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Circle and Tether are adopting different approaches toward driving global stablecoin adoption. While Circle seeks clearer regulations and coordination among nations, particularly urging U.S. lawmakers to take action, Tether is focusing on developing countries and regions with less stringent regulations.
TON, one of the best-performing tokens of the past month, is being used to share 50% of advertiser revenue with Telegram channel owners. The TON Foundation's Open League program will distribute nearly $200 million to community members to incentivize the network's growth. TON aims to become the home of blockchain-based consumer products, bringing millions of Telegram users onchain.
In an interview with Blockworks, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe discusses the impact of the recently launched spot bitcoin ETFs on institutional and retail demand, as well as the potential differences in this halving compared to previous ones due to the evolving market landscape.
Scroll's upcoming Bernoulli upgrade, scheduled for April 29th, will reduce transaction costs 10x by introducing support for EIP-4844 and blobs.
EigenLayer has unpaused LST deposit caps, meaning users can once again deposit tokens like Lido's stETH.
Bitcoin's fourth halving will reduce block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, putting pressure on miner profitability.
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BITCOIN'S MARCH TO $150,000 COULD START ON APRIL 22. Crypto millionaire James Altucher – who called Bitcoin in 2013 when it was at just $100…Now predicts Bitcoin will go as high as $150,000…
Senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Eric Balchunas speculates that the upcoming Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs will not have substantial inflows or market effects. The ETFs will not be available to Chinese locals, and the Hong Kong ETF market is only $50 billion. With no big players involved and less liquidity, the market will be less efficient with spreads beyond where Bitcoin normally trades. These factors and relatively high 1-2% fees make this more of a moral victory than a financial one for Bitcoin.
OKX, a major cryptocurrency exchange, has launched its own Ethereum layer-2 scaling network called X Layer, built using Polygon's AggLayer solution. X Layer aims to provide faster and cheaper transactions, as well as seamless interoperability across different blockchains. The launch positions OKX as a competitor to Coinbase's Base, another layer-2 network built on Optimism's OP Stack.
Offchain Labs has released Arbitrum BOLD on testnet, a new dispute resolution protocol for optimistic rollups that enhances permissionless validation and security. Now, anyone can secure claims about Arbitrum's state on Ethereum, promising increased network security and democratizing the validation process. Following thorough testing, including community engagement and a tally vote, BOLD is expected to further align Arbitrum with Ethereum's decentralization goals.
Subscription Minting is being launched as a solution to high gas fees and minting inconveniences, allowing users to prepay for future mints at lower costs, with the flexibility to opt in or out of specific mints while still adhering to the established allowlist process. This system aims to relieve stress for collectors by providing a quick, secure way to manage mints without bots or season passes, ensuring a fair chance for all participants.
Franklin Templeton Digital Assets highlights the upcoming Runes standard and its significance for Bitcoin. After the success of Ordinals, which has a market cap of around $2 billion, creator Casey Rodarmor is introducing Runes as a more efficient version of BRC-20 tokens that better uses Bitcoin's UTXO design. Specifically, Runes will be entirely onchain, Lightning network compatible, and will not require wasted UTXO transactions. Bitcoin's current fungible token market cap is $600 million, but the adoption of Runes could drive it higher.
General Partner at Electric Capital Maria Shen divides her list of the most innovative onchain experiments from the last 3 years into four categories. For human coordination mechanisms, she highlights Nouns DAO for its complex treasury system and spin-off projects and Curta for its recognition of solving hard problems. In the “pricing historically difficult assets” category, Love on Leverage prices momentum during a live dating show and Orb Land allows users to access Q&As with influencers. Her “markets for unique assets” category includes liquid NFT markets. The final category is for incentive mechanisms for onchain art, represented by the 5/9 chess engine's NFT-per-move mechanic.
The most suitable asset for staking should be the one that mirrors the denomination of risk, minimizing cross-volatility risks. Ethereum is identified as the most common digital asset for risk denomination in internet-native applications, especially with the rise of Ethereum rollups.
Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra's recent paper about intents researches how effort, congestion, and entry costs affect intent markets. To receive the most tokens during an intent swap, reduced competition helps since it increases the win rate of solvers, reducing their cost. A system similar to a Dutch auction can be used to maximize user utility when there's no possible arbitrage between an onchain AMM and a solver.
Blockchain presents an opportunity to reshape how we think about ownership and collecting, but we need to be careful to prevent scams to make blockchain applications more mainstream.
The floor price of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs has decreased to its lowest since August 2021 (10.9 eth - $34k), marking a decline of over 90% from its peak in April 2022 (128 eth - $395k).
The first update to address Solana's network congestion issues has been released.
Eigen DA is the most scalable, Avail offers the fastest finality, Celestia has the first-mover advantage, and NEAR claims to be the cheapest option by over 30x.
$256 million worth of long positions were liquidated in Bitcoin's recent price drop. Analysts expect this to be a short-term downturn before the market improves. Despite the dip, demand from Bitcoin whales is growing, with demand from holders outstripping the market supply of new Bitcoin for the first time.
Pectra is Ethereum's next hardfork, expected to go live in Q4 2024/Q1 2025. The name combines ‘Prague,' the execution layer upgrade, and ‘Electra,' the consensus layer upgrade. It will include EIP-7251, which allows validators to stake more than 32 ETH, and EIP-3074, which upgrades account abstraction, among other improvements.
Wayfinder demoed an AI chatbot that finds transaction routes based on intents. Users type commands in natural language and the agent finds a series of transactions to execute on that intent. The video covers swapping, sending, bridging, and staking over a number of chains.
This article compares Bitcoin's big block versus small block debate to the modern-day monolithic versus modular architecture argument between Solana and Ethereum. It states that Ethereum's approach, where the L1 is the small block basis for big block L2s, provides an ideal amount of coordination and sovereignty to facilitate interoperability yet still allow for independent ecosystems. By synergizing big and small block ideas, Ethereum achieves greater security and composability while making ETH the default unit of account for L2s.
This author describes learnings from talking to founders and investors in Hong Kong. For example, more people in Indonesia own crypto than stocks, and their trading volume skews towards longer tail assets. The general view is that both stocks and crypto are like a casino and even institutional investors in Asia seem to have a higher tolerance for risk in buying liquid tokens.
The next big narrative in crypto might be centered around GPU and cloud computing infrastructure, driven by the growing demand for artificial intelligence training and the asymmetry between rapidly advancing software and the slower pace of hardware development. Sam Altman's plan to raise trillions to accelerate chip manufacturing, the potential reunification of China and Taiwan, and the upcoming io.net token generation in April could catalyze interest in this narrative. Numerous projects in this sector could capitalize on this “GPU is the new oil” sentiment.
Though NFTs have seen much less interest than in the previous bull market, they represent the evolution of how artists and collectors can place meaning on a work – by permanently inscribing it in a blockchain, timestamped at the moment, a collector realizes its importance. At the same time, the art industry is slowly developing the knowledge to value and distinguish NFT collections from one another. The movement of speculation from NFTs to memecoins has flushed out most of the market's inflated prices. As one of the original PFP collections, CryptoPunks is a market leader responsible for many of the trends and characteristics that future collections will use for inspiration, cementing its status as a pivotal work.
The highly-regarded Twitter account GCR broke its 1-year retirement to tell followers that this market downturn is a good time to buy into high-conviction tokens.
With fintech, consumer, and enterprise software sectors overcrowded with VCs and competition, cryptocurrencies and distributed computing are the last compelling industries with massive potential for venture investors.
After raising a second round of $100 million, Berachain has legitimized the strategy of creating a meme culture around serious blockchain infrastructure.
The divergence between PAXG and bitcoin has raised questions about bitcoin's appeal as a geopolitical hedge.
JPMorgan estimates that the chances of spot ether ETF approval in May are no more than 50%. The company suggests that, based on recent litigation outcomes and decreasing concentration in Ethereum staking, the SEC will eventually have to approve spot ether ETFs.
Top U.S. House lawmakers, including Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry and Democrat Maxine Waters, met with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss advancing stablecoin legislation. They have considered packaging the stablecoin bill with the Federal Aviation Administration's funding reauthorization. Despite doubts about the stablecoin bill passing this year, McHenry, who is retiring, is prioritizing the bill to regulate stablecoin issuers and stabilize cryptocurrency trading.
EIP-3074 is an approved upgrade to Ethereum that will allow externally owned accounts to act like smart contract wallets without deploying a contract. This enables single transaction approvals, batch transactions, wallet asset recovery, sponsored transactions, and more.
Transporter is a new cross-chain bridge developed in collaboration with the Chainlink Foundation. It is designed to securely transfer tokens across multiple blockchains, addressing the industry's need for better security in the wake of $2.83 billion lost to bridge hacks. Transporter prioritizes security, utilizing Chainlink's CCIP for protection and offering a user-friendly interface with 24/7 support and a visual tracker.
Uniswap Labs is being sued by the SEC. The Uniswap Protocol is a credibly neutral infrastructure. It acts like an electric grid that can be built upon by other companies and applications to utilize the benefits of trustless liquidity. The company has no control over what is listed or who builds on the protocol — it is merely a software publisher operating a front end.
Though onboarding and transaction costs decrease by 99% for L3s compared to L2s, the reduction in higher layers is not nearly as significant. L4s and up improve scalability but ultimately settle to Ethereum and do not come with additional cost reduction. There may be L4s that emerge on the most successful L3s, but primarily for ecosystem reasons and not technical or financial benefits.
DeFi is being tested in legal battles. Avi Eisenberg leveraged Mango Markets' code to extract $110 million, arguing that because the code permitted it, he didn't commit a crime. At the same time, the SEC's case against Uniswap Labs could determine how decentralized DeFi can be and whether the vision of a fully autonomous, code-based financial system is realizable.
AI creates a torrent of images that can't be trusted - blockchain can be used to verify the origins of images.
By creating memecoins for specific communities or applications, creators are both deriving value from and creating value for the original content.
They include a fast finality rollup solution, a zk coprocessor, an Ethereum oracle, light client functionality, and DePIN coordination.
Arch brings smart contract functionality to Bitcoin through the ArchVM, a Rust-based zero knowledge virtual machine and a decentralized verifier network.
Uniswap Labs received a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission warning the company that the regulator intends to pursue legal action. The company argues that tokens are not securities and that most tokens traded on the protocol are not investment contracts. Recently, there have been discussions about turning on the fee switch for the UNI token. However, this has not been implemented, and Uniswap Labs insists that UNI does not fit the definition of a security since there is no investment contract between the company and token holders.
The price of Bitcoin has dropped below $69,000 as investors wait for U.S. Consumer Price Index data that could influence the Fed's decision on interest rates. Although the market is divided on the possibility of a June rate cut, strong employment data suggests the Fed may maintain current rates, even as inflation is expected to show an increase.
Ora Protocol’s IMO allows tokenizing AI models onchain, bringing revenue sharing to IMO token holders. IMOs serve three purposes: enabling sustainable open-source AI funding, aligning contribution incentives, and model value capture for holders. The $OLM IMO will tokenize the OpenLM model, a medium-sized language model that is performant on up to 7 billion parameters.
Privy is introducing passkey-based login for users, which combines the security of biometric authentication with an enhanced user experience. The company recognizes the current limitations of passkeys, such as cross-device usability and partial browser support, and claims to have developed solutions to solve some of these roadblocks.
Liquid restaking tokens comprise 73% of EigenLayer deposits and are the next evolution of liquid staking protocols like Lido or Jito. With a 7-day withdrawal period on EigenLayer, the barrier to exit is high, making liquidity and price pegging to ETH critical to the success of LRTs. This article analyzes the liquidity, volatility, and volume of the top 5 LRTS – Ether.fi, Renzo, Puffer, Swell, and Kelp DAO – finding that they are not incredibly liquid but have been slowly improving. The LRT market has winner-take-most characteristics since liquidity and integrations are critical to an LRT’s broader success.
Though EigenLayer is the clear market leader in the restaking space, other ecosystems may introduce similar protocols that use SOL or TIA as collateral. As the first asset-agnostic platform, Karak may see a first-mover advantage, especially since it accepts stablecoins. At the same time, single-ecosystem protocols like Lido or Jito have historically performed better, and partnerships with liquid staking and DeFi protocols will prove critical in gaining adoption and integrations.
The commoditization of blockchain infrastructure, enabled by more competitors and options in the modular stack, is catalyzing a new wave of customized, application-specific rollups. By leveraging components like data availability layers (Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA), rollup SDKs (Sovereign and RollKit), and shared sequencers (Astria and Espresso), developers can focus on optimizing applications without the burden of managing the entire stack. At the same time, infrastructure providers can increase demand for their products and protocols by decreasing the cost of using them by commoditizing the complements or tools an application relies on.