<![CDATA[Stay on-chain]]>https://stayonchain.cohttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OFYQ!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1cb7b67e-ebce-4856-96c8-0a5d2b3a533d_1280x1280.pngStay on-chainhttps://stayonchain.coSubstackSun, 10 May 2026 11:53:54 GMT<![CDATA[🔹The rsETH exploit and ripple effects on Aave]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/the-rseth-exploit-and-ripple-effectshttps://stayonchain.co/p/the-rseth-exploit-and-ripple-effectsMon, 27 Apr 2026 15:34:09 GMT

Markets recovered this week, S&P500 bouncing back hard as the Iran situation cooled down, and BTC followed along. Good to see honestly, and zooming out, BTChas held its ground pretty well over the past 1/2 months. Not rallying, sure, but on the LTF it's not looking like a dead cat either. That said, I think any escalation on the Iran side hits hard, and for some reason I don't feel like the market is pricing in the scenario where this whole thing drags on. Could be wrong, you know the meme - everything is priced in.

The rsETH exploit and ripple effects on Aave

The big story this week is the KelpDAO rsETH exploit. On April 18, someone, apparently North Korea, pulled off a pretty sophisticated attack on LayerZero's infrastructure: they identified which RPC providers LayerZero was using, compromised two of them to return fake data, and DDoSed the legitimate ones to force LayerZero to route through the corrupted ones. That let them mint unbacked rsETH and drain funds across chains.

Then the classic move: take that worthless collateral, deposit it on Aave while the price feed still looked fine, and borrow real ETH against it. By the time everything was paused, the attacker was already out with actual ETH, and Aave was left holding the bag with bad debt.

Arbitrum’s Security Council moved fast, freezing 30,766 ETH connected to the exploiter’s address. Controversial? Sure, but unlike the Thorchain situation, where the protocol basically watched hundreds of millions get laundered to BTC without blinking, this one actually made sense imo.

Aave published an incident report modeling two scenarios:

  • Scenario 1: losses get socialized across all rsETH holders via a ~15% haircut on the backing ratio, resulting in roughly $124M.

  • Scenario 2: losses are isolated to L2 rsETH only, pushing bad debt to ~$230M, with Mantle taking a 71% WETH shortfall and Arbitrum a 27% shortfall, while Ethereum mainnet rsETH stays unaffected.

Which one plays out depends entirely on how KelpDAO decides to account the losses. Meanwhile, Aave is experiencing liquidity issues - users withdrew $6.6 billion from the protocol, pushing WETH, USDC, USDT pools to 100% utilization and trapping depositors.

In response, Aave kicked off DeFi United, a coordinated effort to restore rsETH’s backing and plug the hole. Stani personally committed 5,000 ETH.

Major contributions so far:

  • Consensys: 30,000 ETH

  • Mantle: 30,000 ETH credit facility

  • Aave DAO: 25,000 ETH from treasury

  • Stani (personal): 5,000 ETH

  • EtherFi: 5,000 ETH

  • Lido: 2,500 stETH

  • Golem Foundation: 1,000 ETH

Crypto

DeFi

TradFi

VC

From Great Minds

  • Cobie interviewed by Threadguy → quite bullish, sees another season of euphoria coming. for what it's worth.

  • Delphi Digital report on ETHGas → building a real-time financial marketplace for Ethereum blockspace, basically trying to make gas structured and tradable instead of the current auction mess. A lot of engineering, could be cool.

No good farms these days.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[🔹Hyperliquid prints, AAVE bleeds]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/hyperliquid-prints-aave-bleedshttps://stayonchain.co/p/hyperliquid-prints-aave-bleedsTue, 17 Mar 2026 08:41:32 GMT

I’ll give it that, crypto is holding up surprisingly well, and crypto AI tokens are pumping. But the macro outlook is ugly, and I think tradfi is seriously underpricing what’s happening. I’m no geopolitics expert, but the feeling everyone is getting is that the Iran war isn’t ending anytime soon. Trump hasn’t achieved anything meaningful, so there’s no “face-saving” exit. The oil spike and its downstream effects on the economy are going to be felt over the coming months. Not calling a recession, maybe, but definitely not a tailwind. Yet the S&P is at pre-war levels.

Crypto is outperforming equities right now, which is cool to see. Most likely just a relief bounce from being deeply oversold, but I’ll take it. Crypto in general feels a bit bottom-ish, and it’s great to see some strength again. That said, I’m not comfortable deploying in this environment. Watching.

Hyperliquid is its own asset class

At some point Hyperliquid stopped being a DeFi protocol and became its own subcategory of crypto, haha. Last week it crossed $4 trillion in cumulative perp volume. The Assistance Fund, which buys back and burns HYPE using protocol revenue, just hit $1B in total buybacks, permanently removing 41.71M HYPE (4.17% of total supply) from circulation. This thing is printing, in a bear market.

Image

But the more interesting story is RWA trading. Over the past two weeks, Hyperliquid has repeatedly broken its own records: $1.3B in open interest, $1.4B in weekend volume on commodities, oil, metals, and equity indices. When traditional markets are closed, Hyperliquid is the only venue with real price discovery running. Oil was moving over the weekend. Hyperliquid was the only market. That's the vision playing out in real time.

Trade.xyz, the procol issuing perps through HIP-3 it’s likely the best farm rn.

Someone swapped $50M into $36k

On March 12, a user swapped $50.4M of aEthUSDT through the CoW Swap widget on Aave’s interface, and received approximately $36,000 worth of AAVE in return. Largest execution loss in DeFi history.

Both teams published post-mortems. The story Aave told: illiquid market, user clicked through a “High price impact (99.9%)” warning on mobile and confirmed they accepted a potential 100% loss. Technically true. But CoW’s post-mortem told a uglier story… A stale hardcoded gas ceiling (legacy code, since fixed) rejected better-priced quotes. What was left was the worst possible execution. On top of that, apparently the transaction leaked from the private mempool, enabling a massive backrun: Titan Builder extracted ~$34M in ETH, and a MEV bot made ~$9.9M via sandwich attack.

Crypto

DeFi

TradFi

VC

  • didn’t come across interesting VC stuff this week

From Great Minds

  • Wintermute on BTC mining cycle → miners getting squeezed, difficulty keeps adjusting up while BTC price dropped, margins are thin. And the AI pivot is real: datacenters are shifting compute toward AI workloads where demand (and margins) are way higher. Rough cycle for miners.

  • Increase your surface are for luck, anon → nice post, read it. Must admit for me it was the same.

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[Lighter is going to TGE on Dec 29?]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/lighter-is-going-to-tge-on-dec-29https://stayonchain.co/p/lighter-is-going-to-tge-on-dec-29Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:18:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

Will Lighter TGE be in December?

Looks increasingly likely that the Lighter token launches in December. An insider has been aggressively betting on Polymarket that the TGE happens before year-end, with roughly $125k placed across FDV outcome markets that auto-resolve to “No” if there is no TGE by Dec 31. Wallet analysis strongly links the bettor to early Lighter deposits made before invite-only access even opened, plus interactions with Lighter contracts back when only the team had access. In short, this is not retail but rather a team member or someone very close to them putting real money behind a December launch.

And it looks like we already know the date too, thanks to another insider.

Four charts that actually look good

Markets have been bloody as hell, but not everything is falling apart.

Tokenized stocks. Total market cap just hit a new ATH at roughly $800m. That’s ~30x since the start of the year. Like stablecoins in 2019. Tiny in absolute terms, easy to ignore, but clearly moving in one direction.

PayPal’s PYUSD. PYUSD went from ~$1.2bn in September to over $3.8bn today. That’s a payments giant pushing on-chain rails because it makes economic sense. A bit boring but real.

Hyperliquid. X keeps saying Hyperliquid is dead, as Lighter launches and a new perp DEX pops up every day. BUT, it still accounts for ~80% of all perp DEX users and ~52% of open interest.

🕯️. Don’t worry, I’m a Lighter bull too. TVL. And that’s gonna go above $3bn once spot launches properly.

upload in progress, 0

Crypto

DeFi

TradFi

VC and M&A

From Great Minds

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[A Google insider and Lighter turns on spot]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/copy-the-weeklyhttps://stayonchain.co/p/copy-the-weeklyMon, 08 Dec 2025 17:28:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

market comment

Google insider extracting Polymarket

AlphaRaccoon, a Polymarket trader, somehow nailed 22 out of 23 bets on Google’s Year in Search and walked away with a nice million. Google briefly pushed the rankings early by mistake, then deleted them, but his positions were placed long before that. This same trader also made over 150k earlier this year by predicting the exact release date of Gemini 3.0. At this point it’s hard to call it anything other than a Google insider.

And honestly, that’s the issue of prediction markets. If you sit on privileged data, you print. (Let your grandma click the buttons)

Lighter rolls out spot markets

Lighter has been on a steady rollout lately. After adding equities and FX pairs, the team now launched spot trading, starting with ETH. It’s a logical next step for a perps-first exchange that has quickly grown into one of the few real competitors to Hyperliquid. The timing also lines up with expectations that Lighter will TGE in December or January. The market seems to assume it will come out trading somewhere near Hyperliquid’s FDV, though conditions today are very different from when HYPE launched.

Bullish, but let’s see how much of the momentum carries into the token.

Crypto

DeFi

TradFi

VC

From Great Minds

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[Tether's B/S under the microscope again]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/tethers-bs-under-the-microscope-againhttps://stayonchain.co/p/tethers-bs-under-the-microscope-againMon, 01 Dec 2025 17:38:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

Tether FUD and their macro trade

The drama of the week is Tether again. Arthur Hayes kicked it off by arguing that Tether is basically front-running a macro trade. His take: they’re betting hard on rate cuts. Treasury income dries up when yields fall, so they’re rotating part of their surplus into BTC and gold, which should in theory fly if money gets cheaper. The problem: if BTC and gold drop 30 percent, Tether’s disclosed “equity buffer” gets wiped and USDT becomes insolvent on paper.

Some argued Hayes is misunderstanding something basic: Tether doesn’t buy BTC or gold with customer funds. The BTC and gold purchases come from profits and excess reserves. But if that’s true, why do these sit under Asset Reserves backing Tether?

That’s when Paolo jumped in. His take: Artur is bad at reading balance sheets. Tether has two layers. The attestation only covers the reserves backing USDT. It doesn’t cover their corporate balance sheet, which holds another $23bn in retained earnings plus whatever sits inside their mining operations, equity stakes, and non-reserve BTC. $30bn buffer:

Tether Group total assets: $215bn
Stablecoin liabilities: $184.5bn

Though we can’t deny that, yes, Tether is running a macro trade. The mega profitable carry trade on US Treasuries, and using the surplus income to build a BTC and gold book. But the trade of putting part of their reserves in gold/BTC could nuke their buffer, if they are in fact reserves.

I hate the fact that when it comes to Tether, it’s still comes down to assumptions and vibes. Tether won’t blow up tomorrow, but it’d be cool to have some audited financial statements and B/S to stop the FUD forever. Audits > vibes.

Crypto

DeFi

TradFi

VC

From Great Minds

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[Saylor vs. MSCI and Monad launch for extra blockspace]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/saylor-vs-msci-and-monad-launch-forhttps://stayonchain.co/p/saylor-vs-msci-and-monad-launch-forMon, 24 Nov 2025 17:08:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

Microstrategy vs. MSCI

MSCI is reportedly considering removing MSTR from its indexes because the company no longer behaves like a traditional operating business. Too much of its market cap and risk profile is now tied to Bitcoin, which clashes with how equity index classifications work. MSTR looks, moves, and prices like a Bitcoin vehicle, not a software company. And it’s not doing great:

BTC down 20%

while MSTR down almost 40%.

Saylor fired back with a long post arguing the opposite: “Strategy is not a fund, not a trust, and not a holding company,” and instead an “operating company with a $500 million software business and a unique treasury strategy that uses Bitcoin as productive capital.” Idk sir.

On a related note, Matt Hougan had a great piece explaining how to actually value DATs. His point is simple: if a DAT had a fixed end-date, you’d discount for liquidity, expenses, and operational risk. If it trades at a premium, it’s only because it can reliably grow its crypto-per-share through debt, lending, derivatives, or buying crypto at a discount. Most DATs won’t clear that bar, and the gap between winners and losers will widen. Size helps the big ones. The rest? Probably trade at a persistent discount as the market realises they’re expensive ways to hold spot.

And if in any scenario, shareholders vote for selling underlying to buy-back shares, we spiral down hard.

Monad launches with Coinbase’s ICO

Monad finally launched its mainnet after years of prepping, with (not so great) timing but good execution. The token went live today and the Coinbase’s first ICO, where 7.5%of supply was sold through a “commit-and-lock” mechanism, was successful. Users had 5.5 days to invest, so of course the sale looked dead mid-week and then spiked in the final hours, ending at $269m raised. Classic opportunity cost game theory: everyone waits until last minute. 50.6% of MON is locked at launch, with vesting starting in 2026 and stretching to 2029.

The chain itself is pitched as a hyper-performant EVM L1, with MetaMask, Phantom, Curve, Uniswap, and multiple stablecoins live on day one. In practice, it’s another high-throughput base layer in a world where we have much more blockspace than needed. Solana, Sui, Aptos, Sei, Injective, Sonic, and a dozen others are all running the same playbook.

What did I do? I sold, yes. MON lost 60% since pre-market, dumped at launch but had now a rebound. Sentiment is so bad it almost feels like a decent short-term buy, but structurally I’m as bullish (e.g. as for MegaETH).

Now it joins the long list of “next-gen” EVM chains fighting for attention, but we can all tell the founder is locked-in:

upload in progress, 0

Crypto

DeFi

  • Base with ATH in trasactions → Bullish Base. It’s a great chain and big apps will settle there. My prediction: Coinbase tokenizes the stock and airdrops it to users. Makes much more sense than a separate COIN token. ETH stays the gas token, and you get COIN on Base with the same rights as shareholders on Nasdaq. Would be cool.

TradFi & DATs

VC

From Great Minds

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[UNI finally gets a use case]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/uni-finally-gets-a-use-casehttps://stayonchain.co/p/uni-finally-gets-a-use-caseMon, 17 Nov 2025 18:03:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

Uniswap finally turns the fee switch on

Uniswap is finally formally proposing the fee switch after five years of arguments. Hayden Adams and the Uniswap Foundation put forward a plan to merge everything back under Labs, turn on protocol fees, and use those fees to burn UNI. They also want to burn 100 million UNI sitting in the treasury as a “this should have happened from day one” correction. The burn is IMO almost an admission that the token should always have been tied to protocol usage. But that’s great, it’s never to late.

Uniswap has earned over $5.2 billion in fees since launch

and just posted its highest monthly volume ever in October.

Uniswap definitely has a product market fit, but the token never benefited. If this proposal goes through, that gap finally closes. Labs will also stop charging interface and wallet fees, which removes a weird side-business and aligns everything under one structure. Bullish for UNI.

Lighter raises $68m at $1.5bn FDV

Lighter raised $68 million at a $1.5 billion FDV, with Founders Fund and Ribbit leading the round. Perp DEXs are moving from speculative toys to real market infrastructure. Volume has been eating into CEX share for a while, and Lighter is clearly the “second best” after Hyperliquid.

I still have mixed feelings about it. First, why does a perp DEX need to raise close to $100 million? Hyperliquid proved you can build the best product in crypto with a tiny team, no VC money, and no need for external capital. And used their own revenue to buy back more $1bn worth of HYPE. Though Lighter doesn’t charge fees, so running the exchange on VC money while scaling fast can be the correct strategy. But it’s also a very different alignment model. Hyperliquid feels community-first, Lighter bit less. We’ll be able to tell after the airdrop ;)

One reason HYPE went from $3 to $25 in its first two weeks is precisely because there were no funds having exposure to it through venture capital, so they bought spot at launch. It’s not that VCs in Lighter will dump on day 1, they’re locked. But the truth is that a large part of HYPE’s rally came from funds and whales who weren’t allocated and had to chase spot on the way up. Although I expect something similar with Lighter as well, with the rounds, part of that demand was satisfied. Lighter will likely trade far above the $1.5 billion FDV once it lists, simply because a lot of people will want exposure. The unknown is where supply meets demand, especially with a huge group of point farmers ready to sell into strength. Let’s see how it plays out.

Crypto

  • Coinbase launches ICO platform, with Monad as the first project → Curious to see how it plays out, but I’m generally a bit bearish on Monad. On the ICO platform, I’m wondering how this links to Sonar. Coinbase just acquired Echo, so did they really build another ICO platform?? They just acquired one.

  • Sui launching USDsui → Just mentioning it here cause of Monad. Monad, MegaETH are hotter narratives, and SUI is sitting at $16bn FDV.. we have enough blockspace.

DeFi

TradFi

VC & DATs

From Great Minds

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[Three stablecoins down in a week]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/three-stablecoins-down-in-a-weekhttps://stayonchain.co/p/three-stablecoins-down-in-a-weekMon, 10 Nov 2025 17:46:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

How one blowup cracked DeFi’s “safe yield”

DeFi got hit again. Last week it was Balancer’s $128 million exploit, and this week three stablecoins depegged in just a few days.

Stream’s collapse

It started with Stream Finance, a synthetic asset protocol that let users mint xAssets like xUSD, xBTC, and xETH backed by onchain collateral. Stream allocated part of its treasury to external fund managers running yield and market-neutral strategies on its behalf, effectively using user funds to chase off-chain yield. On Monday, Stream froze withdrawals after disclosing a $93 million loss tied to one of those managers, likely triggered by the October 10th liquidation cascade.

The xAssets were rehypothecated across multiple lending protocols, which are now dragging an important part of DeFi down with it. Analysts mapped roughly $285 million in total exposure to Stream across curators like Elixir, Re7 Labs, MEV Capital, TelosC, and Varlamore.

Stable’s USDX depeg

Then came Stable Labs’ USDX. The protocol maintained its peg via delta-neutral hedging, and apparently, the depeg was triggered by forced liquidations of Stable Labs’ short hedges following the Balancer exploit. Traders also flagged suspicious wallet activity tied to the founder, who appeared to move collateral and drain liquidity from lending markets like Euler and Lista. As collateral dried up and borrowing rates spiked above 100%, the delta-neutral model collapsed.

Elixir deUSD domino depeg

Finally, Elixir’s deUSD. Elixir lent $68m in USDC to Stream, roughly 65% of deUSD’s total backing. Once Stream froze operations, Elixir disabled minting and redemptions, and the stablecoin depegged. About 80% of holders were already redeemed, and Elixir says the rest will get 1:1 USDC via a claims portal, but that depends on recovering funds from Stream. The team is now working with other lending protocols to unwind positions and repay users as much as possible as funds are recovered.

“Safe-yield” vaults contagion

Vault curators like Re7 Labs, MEV Capital, and Varlamore got hit too. Many of their “safe-yield” vaults on Morpho, Euler, and other protocols were indirectly exposed through Stream-linked collateral and now face frozen assets or bad debt.

My takeaway: The DeFi stack is deeply interconnected. One blowup or leverage loop can ripple across many protocols and even different chains. “DeFi risk” doesn’t just mean exploits, but systemic contagion directly built in DeFi as well.

DeFi

TradFi

VC

From Great Minds

  • Stimulating into a bubble by Ray Dalio - Great read, and yes, Pax Americana feels like a bubble. Though a bit everyone on X is calling it, which almost makes me think it won’t happen. Usually when too many people expect something, it ends up going the other way. Let’s see, but be cautions.

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[SOL ETFs launch strong and 100% staked]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/sol-etfs-launch-strong-and-100-stakedhttps://stayonchain.co/p/sol-etfs-launch-strong-and-100-stakedMon, 03 Nov 2025 16:55:00 GMT
upload in progress, 0

Are 100% staked Solana ETFs fully liquid?

The first Solana ETFs just launched in the US, and they’re the first ever to include staking. Bitwise’s BSOL and Grayscale’s GSOL now hold over $400m in assets combined after only a few days of trading. Bitwise took the clear lead, with nearly $200 million in net inflows since launch and a lower 0.2% fee. Both funds stake their SOL to earn yield, and Bitwise aims to stake 100% of holdings.

Staking adds yield but also a layer of complexity. On Solana, unstaking takes about two days, meaning the tokens can’t be instantly redeemed. To keep the ETF liquid, Bitwise has a mechanism in place: if there are large redemption requests while SOL is still staked, the fund can swap its staked (but pending-unstake) tokens with third parties for already unstaked and freely transferable SOL. In other words, they trade “cooling down” tokens for liquid ones to meet redemptions without disrupting the ETF. Clever, but I hope it works in stressed markets too ;)

MegaETH - the $1.4bn auction and a free call option

MegaETH’s public sale officially closed this week. And it was big. The auction ofc went to its max price of $0.0999 almost immediately, and ended 27x oversubscribed, implying a “hypothetical” $27.8 billion FDV. Over $1.3 billion in bids chasing a $50 million cap. Anyone who bid below the max is being refunded (that process already started on Oct 31), while final allocations will be announced and on Nov 5.

Who gets in now depends on more than just the bid. The team is selecting wallets based on on-chain activity, ecosystem contributions, testing history, etcetc. MegaETH is rewarding real users and early contributors, not just the biggest checks.

This one was a no-brainer opportunity imo, and I joined it myself. MegaETH is trading pre-market around a $3–5 billion val, so if you get an allocation, it’s basically a free 3x. You’re essentially buying a call option on MegaETH, with your gas fee as the premium. Worst case, you lose a few bucks in gas and get fully refunded. Best case, you get a ticket into what is probably the biggest L2 launch of the cycle.

Balancer exploited for ~$128m

Balancer has been exploited this morning, with over $120 million drained from its wallets across multiple chains. Onchain data shows large withdrawals of WETH, osETH, and wstETH from one of its main addresses, due to a faulty contract check in older Balancer versions, but exact details still to be confirmed.

He has a point…

At this point, it seems the only way to make serious money in DeFi is to exploit a protocol XD.

DeFi

Tech

  • Ethereum targets Dec 3 for Fusaka upgrade → Focused on security and scalability of both L1 and L2, aiming to double blob capacity for rollups. Great to see upgrades coming, though the ETH Foundation still feels a bit off lately.

TradFi

VC

Quiet week for VC. The only one worth noting:

From Great Minds

Trading on a perp DEX that hasn’t launched a token yet might still be +EV. Among the new ones, Extended is the best pick right now: smooth interface, wide token coverage, and an overall Hyperliquid-like feel. It’s the only one that actually feels ready for serious traders.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot. Catch you next week🫡

Refer a friend

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[Cobie got acquired]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/cobie-got-acquiredhttps://stayonchain.co/p/cobie-got-acquiredMon, 27 Oct 2025 20:04:54 GMT

Welcome back to our weekly chat!

First, a quick update on Stay on-chain: as the first step in bringing SOC to the next level, I’ve launched a proper website built on Ghost. To bring to life some of the ideas I have in mind, I needed a proper home base. Nothing changes for you as a subscriber. Your account is already set up, and you can log in directly. A few pieces are still missing, but I’m shaping it up, so this is probably the last email you’ll receive from Substack. I’ll share updates every week as it evolves. Check it out at stayonchain.co.

Coinbase acquires Echo for $400m

It started with one of the funniest moves I’ve seen lately. Coinbase.eth bought an NFT on OpenSea representing a season of the Up Only podcast ... for $25m. That’s over $3m per episode. If those are one-hour episodes, that’s much more than Hollywood top actor rates (lol).

How it’s going:

Turns out, it’s probably just a meme. The next day, Coinbase officially acquired Echo, Cobie’s angel investing platform, for $375m. For those who don’t know, Echo is a crypto-native investment platform that lets individuals invest in early-stage projects alongside VCs and founders. The move makes sense for Coinbase, especially given their push into on-chain infrastructure and social investing.

Still, I kind of wish Echo had stayed independent. Cobie’s vibe fits it perfectly. But either way, Cobie is now a Coinbase employee.

MegaETH ICO

Let’s talk about what’s easily the most interesting launch of the week: MegaETH’s public sale. We’ll cover MegaETH’s tech and design in a deep dive soon. For now, here’s how the ICO works and why it matters.

MegaETH is doing something between a fair launch and a directed public sale. The sale runs on Sonar (by Echo) with a starting FDV of $1m and a ceiling at $999m. Users can set their own max price per token between $0.0001 and $0.0999, and bid between $2,650 and $186,282 USDT. There’s also an optional 1-year lock-up for a 10% discount (mandatory for U.S. persons). If the sale is oversubscribed, allocation will favour broad distribution and reward key contributors (like ETH ecosystem active users and MegaETH community).

Total supply: 10B $MEGA, public sale: 5%, currently 7.2x oversubscribed.

Monad is finally launching

The Monad mainnet, finally. This has been one of the most hyper projects last year, and many have been farming it since then. I’d expect a high valuation, probably around $5–10B. Whether that’s justified depends on the post-launch traction, but everybody knows that competition among L1s is crazy high, and launching around the same time as MegaETH definitely takes some of the attention away.

The airdrop is tiered by “strength levels”:

And if it ends up being around 10% of supply, rough napkin math from CT looks like this:

Not bad. Though I’m afraid it’s going to be a straight dump for many.

DeFi

  • Aave proposes a $50m buyback program [link] → bullish long-term, hopefully it becomes more over time.

  • Infinex plans to TGE [link] → buyers of the Patron NFT with a 3-year lock got in at 125m valuation. Liquid buyers at 500m. The NFTs were below floor for a while, now up to 1.55 ETH. For reference, DeFi App’s $HOME (direct competitor) trades at $230m FDV. Let’s see.

  • Limitless dumped its own token at launch [link] → team wallets dumped at TGE, killing price discovery despite high demand, and the same wallets are now buying back lower. Founder calls it “on-chain market making”. Sure. Still bullish on the project, but not a good look at all.

TradFi

  • China and US reach trade consensus [link] → if they end this tariff drama, it’s up-only season.

  • JPMorgan to allow BTC and ETH as collateral [link] → ETFs only likely, but bullish nevertheless.

  • U.S. CPI: +3% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +3.1%) [link] → cuts incoming this week.

VC

  • FalconX acquired 21 Shares [link] → biggest crypto prime broker gets one of the leaders in crypto asset management.

  • Pump.fun acquired Padre [link] → acquiring a trading terminal, the missing piece of infra for memecoins.

  • Aave acquired Stable Finance [link] → Aave going into the savings app business. Total no-brainer and they can outcompete most with ease.

From Great Minds

  • Life lessons from trading by Thiccy [link] → on trading edge, philosophy, and balance.

  • Buy your freedom first [link] → good life/career advice.

We talked last week about points farming on perp DEXs. It’s still going strong everywhere, but after testing many, I have to say none match Hyperliquid’s level (though maybe I’m biased). That said, the pie is big. Hyperliquid, Aster, Lighter have their chunk, but there’s likely space for 1/2 more. The trade is getting very crowded, obvious, and low-edge, but if you can move your trading volume somewhere and earn along the way, it can still be +EV.

Right now, the best mix of UX and opportunity is Extended: smooth UI, wide token coverage, very Hyperliquid-like feel. For stock trading instead, Vest Markets is another good pick.

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot! Click below or just forward this email..

Catch you next week 🫡

Share

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[Binance glitched, $20bn evaporated]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/binance-glitched-20bn-evaporatedhttps://stayonchain.co/p/binance-glitched-20bn-evaporatedMon, 20 Oct 2025 21:11:33 GMT

The big liquidation & Binance drama

Last Friday night was wild. Donald Trump announced 100% tariffs on China and the macro risk-aversion hit crypto hard. Then about an hour later the real dominos fell: market-makers pulled liquidity from major order books, bid-ask spreads blew out, and leveraged traders lost … everything.

On Binance, three assets, USDe, BNSOL and wBETH, de-pegged briefly. Binance’s mistake. It was using its own order-book based oracle (with then thin liquidity) rather than deep cross-venue data. Ethena worked perfectly fine, but the exchange’s pricing mis-marked collateral and triggered even more liquidations. It wasn’t a collapse of protocol fundamentals, it’s no FTX or Terra/Luna type of collapse. This was a micro-structure / venue failure + leverage + withdrawal of liquidity.

Net result: leverage and OI got COMPLETELY cleaned ($15bn to $6bn on Hyperliquid alone), and fundamentals (for many projects) remain intact. The Binance drama? Arguably bullish for other venues.

Two men in a room, one performing a push-up in a gray shirt, the other standing and smiling in a blue shirt. An exercise bike and a whiteboard with "Binance" are visible in the background.

What happened with market-makers? They simply made the rational decision to pull back in an adverse market environment. When Binance (~50% of global spot volume) becomes black-boxed, you don’t show standing bids for something you can’t model or properly hedge. You dump or retreat. That created the “liquidity vacuum”, i.e. no one was there to take the other side.

Compared to TradFi: MMs have obligations, there are circuit-breakers, halts in case of high volatility. In crypto: 24/7, permissionless, no duties. So when volatility goes wild and the leading venue glitches, liquidity disappears, volatility gets even wilder, cascades of liquidations follow, and alts go to zero (see: ATOM).

But again: this was technical, not fundamental insolvency. The nuance matters.

Bitcoin is not gold (yet yet yet?)

The data still shows weak BTC-gold correlation. Bitcoin is not yet behaving like gold. Its correlation with U.S. equities remains elevated (~0.33 in 90-day rolling) while correlation with gold stays very low.

Meanwhile, gold keeps printing all-time highs ($4,100–$4,200/oz last week), with literal queues outside bullion shops (top signal).

Image

Guess what has China been doing:

Line chart titled Chinas Gold Stock Levels 2009-2025 displays purple line representing stock level on warrant rising sharply from near zero in 2009 to over 3500 tonnes by 2025 with x-axis years from 2010 to 2025 and y-axis gold stock in tonnes from 0 to 4000 sourced from Bloomberg Shanghai Gold Exchange SP Global

My take: Bitcoin will catch that wave as well. Macro shifts, liquidity easing, dollar rolling over, digital gold narrative etc. Watch the divergence to close in the following months with classic BTC delayed reactions.

Perp DEXs popping up everywhere

Hyperliquid, Lighter, EdgeX, Extended, Pacifica, Ostium, Vest Markets, Paradex, GTE, plus older ones like GMX, Synthetix, Jupiter and Drift. Many run points or “airdrop” incentive programmes to lure users. Early users on Lighter definitely printed, with points trading at ~$100 each OTC. While for Extended points trade at ~$3.

The first-mover edge is shrinking. Farming volume purely for points is risky: points ≠ tokens, tokens ≠ value, trend = diluted. May still be worth it, but pick DEXs with real open interest, decent infrastructure and tech, cracked team.

My take:

A stylized roller coaster chart with a steep upward peak followed by a series of loops and declines. The chart includes a tall vertical climb with vertical lines and a descending path with circular loops.

Hyperliquid > Aster > Lighter > EdgeX > Extended > Pacifica > Paradex > Vest >>>>>>>>> Synthetix >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Drift

And I probably forgot some..

DeFi

VC

TradFi

From Great Minds

As we’ve discussed before, perp DEXs are clearly the meta of this cycle. Even if the farming of them is super crowded, there’s still room to farm selectively. Pacifica and Vest Markets imo worth watching. We’ll deep dive into both soon. Lighter, on the other hand, feels too late.

From what’ve seen, wash trading (opening and closing trades) doesn’t work. It gets detected. What matters is authentic activity: normal trading, holding positions, using the platform as you naturally would. The refs give you access to beta and the discounted fees:

Merci!

If you found this worth your time, pass it to a friend. Means a lot! Click below or just forward this email.

Catch you next week 🫡

Share

Disclosure: I am exposed to crypto and may own assets mentioned in this post. This article is meant for informational purposes only and should NOT be considered as investment advice. This research is independent and unrelated to my professional work. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. NFA

]]><![CDATA[Stay on-chain is back!]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/stay-on-chain-is-backhttps://stayonchain.co/p/stay-on-chain-is-backFri, 17 Oct 2025 10:18:03 GMTHey everyone,

Jakob here, one of the two co-founders of Stay on-chain. It’s been a while, and yes, some dust has settled on this substack. Time to shake it off.

Back when Gabriele and I started this project during university, it published for 83 weeks straight. No breaks, no skips. Even through the most boring periods of the bear market. SOC grew and evolved. And so did we.

After graduation, life took us in different directions. I joined the industry full-time, while Gab kept SOC alive and built a strong community around it. Over time, though, this substack went quiet.

Now, it feels right to bring Stay on-chain back, with a slightly new flavor. I’ll be the one writing from here on. The newsletter is back, but with a more personal and opinionated tone. Expect one issue per week, focused on markets, DeFi, and the intersection with TradFi. The goal stays the same: cut through the noise, highlight what matters, and share the kind of signals I find useful myself.

Where next? First, I’ll focus on bringing back the regular weekly issue. From there, I’d love to revive one of my favorite parts of SOC, the SOC Wallet: openly managing a DeFi portfolio, tracking performance, and benchmarking it against the market. I plan to rebuild this in a transparent, systematic way over time. That’ll take some work, but I’ll keep you posted. Always happy to chat and hear your thoughts - just reply to this email.

For now, Stay on-chain is officially back. First issue drops Monday.

Jakob

Current vibe (click to watch):

]]><![CDATA[Hyperliquid: the best airdrop ever?]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/hyperliquid-the-best-airdrop-everhttps://stayonchain.co/p/hyperliquid-the-best-airdrop-everThu, 05 Dec 2024 18:02:23 GMT

First things first: Bitcoin broke past the $100,000 wall. Congrats. We deserve all of this.

On another note, this cycle is playing out very differently from the previous ones. Besides Bitcoin, there have been violent pumps on mostly ‘Dino’ coins, in particular those born in the US.

This stems from the upcoming Trump presidency, and his vocal support for cryptocurrencies made in the U.S.A. — He went as far as proposing to cut capital gains for them to 0%! Unlikely to go through, but we like the hype nevertheless.

So far, we haven’t got a proper alt season (i.e. a distribution from majors to alt-coins), but things are heating up. Ethereum is showing signs of life, but let’s not forget that while BTC is trading at 46% more than its past cycle ATH, ETH is 20% down from its own past ATH.

Paul Atkins has just been nominated by Trump to be the new SEC chair following Gensler’s departure. He was an advisor to the RSR cryptocurrency, which greatly benefited from the news rising 89% in two days.

Allegedly, he’s quite pro-crypto. Here’s an interview to get to know him better.

Happens on-chain

  • ETH : Trump’s crypto project is swapping stablecoins for Ethereum

  • HYPE : A dashboard taking a deeper look into Hyperliquid’s launch

  • Pumpdotfun revenues peaks at $93M in November, cumulative revenue sits at $240M

  • BTC : Bitcoin exchange reserves are the lowest they’ve been in years

  • CAKE : PancakeSwap launches pumpfun competitor ‘SpringBoard’

  • BLAST : New governance proposal tries to introduce buybacks

  • BTC : Mt. Gox moves $2.4B as Bitcoin soars over $100K

  • XRP : Ripple postpones RLUSD stablecoin launch, awaiting regulators approval

  • VIRTUAL : Virtuals on Base released an NFT collection

  • Pudgy Penguins hit all-time highs as the NFT sector rebounds

The legendary UpOnly podcast by Cobie & Ledger is teasing a return

Traditional rails

  • South Korea to defer crypto taxes until 2027

  • MSTR : Microstrategy to be included in the Nasdaq 100 (NDX) as of December, 20

  • BTC : Fed Chair Jerome Powell likens BTC to Gold, says it’s not Dollar rival

  • XRP : WisdomTree files S-1 application for XRP ETF

  • SOL : Grayscale files to convert Solana trust into ETF

  • Enron is relaunching to ‘solve the global energy crisis’ teasing a token

  • Celsius founder Mashinsky pleads guilty to defrauding investors, faces up to 30 years

  • Forbes 30u30 just dropped, and 8 crypto founders are part of it

  • HAWK : Burwick Law allegedly looking to organize a class action against the Hawk Tuah girl memecoin

  • Financial Times issues public apology for 14 years of negative crypto coverage

How Meta’s Libra stablecoin project was killed by the US government

Security & development

  • FTM : Sonic Labs launched its private mainnet

  • HYPE : Curve smart contracts go live on Hyperliquid EVM testnet

  • SAFE : Gnosis Safe rolls out ‘Safenet’ to unify liquidity and user interactions across blockchains

  • ORD : Orderly launched an orderbook enabling perp trading across Solana and EVM chains

  • SUI : Phantom wallet set to integrate the Sui blockchain soon

  • BTC : Some Bitcoiners will attempt a blockchain soft-fork to introduce the CTV (Check Template Verify)

  • AVAX : Avalanche9000, aka Etna upgrade, to go live on mainnet Dec, 16

  • BTC : Botanix Labs launches final testnet for its BTC L2 before ‘Spiderchain’ in 2025

  • Austin Federa, ex Solana Foundation, co-founded Double Zero: a neutral base layer infrastructure

  • JUP : Jupiter exchange enables iCloud backup feature for seed phrases and private keys

U.S. Representative Mike Collins just bought up to $30K of a cryptocurrency called "Ski Mask Dog".

Where’s the money flowing?

  • TON : Pantera Capital raised $20M to back TON projects

  • BTC : Microstrategy acquired 15400 bitcoin (~ $1.5B)

  • BTC : Mining company MARA holdings proposes $700M convertible senior note to buy more bitcoin

  • BTC : US Government moves $1.92B Silk Road funds to new addresses

  • Stablecoin USDX money raised $45M Round — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Blockchain interoperability protocol Union Labs raised $12M Series A — crypto-fundraising.info

Ethereum recorded the highest daily ETF inflows on Friday, $333M

Airdrops

  • NAM : Cosmos privacy focused L1 Namada launches mainnet and airdrop

  • ENA : Ethena partners with Derive, sENA holders to receive 5% of its supply

  • ME : Magic Eden’s eligibility checker is live

  • JUP : Jupuary vote 2 goes live

  • M3M3 : Meteora creates a staking mechanism for memecoins, starting with its own. You may have got some in your wallet!

Someone convinced an AI agent to send all of its funds to them (and Musk RTed it!)

Upcoming events

  • December, 5-6: Emergence Conference (by The Block) in Prague

  • December, 10: Microsoft board to vote on adding BTC to its balance sheet

  • December, 16: Stacks’ sBTC rollout

  • January, 20: Inauguration Day for Donald Trump

  • Not eager to go risk-on, but holding stable looks boring? Check out JLP, a liquidity pool composed of different crypto assets and stablecoins managed by Jupiter, used as a counterparty for their trading platform. It offers a 54.55% APY derived from the fees it generates.

  • Just use Aave! Earn a 18.52% APY supplying USDC on Ethereum, 26.42% APY supplying DAI on Arbitrum, 19.20% APY supplying USDT on Optimism.

  • Aptos aficionado? Cellana offers a 31.98% APY to LP wUSDC/zUSDC

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[Microstrategy: the LUNA/UST of this cycle?]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/microstrategy-the-lunaust-of-thishttps://stayonchain.co/p/microstrategy-the-lunaust-of-thisThu, 28 Nov 2024 18:12:03 GMT

No, despite Saylor pouring billions into bitcoin we didn’t break $100K. More than anything, it seems to be a psychological resistance that proved to be a perfect example of a ‘sell the hype’.

My take remains that, it’s more of a psychological resistance than anything, and as soon as enough people are convinced of that and turn short, we’ll break it violently.

Meanwhile, DeFi is picking up, especially on Ethereum. On-chain metrics look great, with both TVL and Volume improving across Layer-2s, especially Coinbase-backed Base.

More generally, it seems we’re approaching a turning point for Ethereum — after getting hammered for months while Solana took center stage (recently breaking its ATH!), its time seems to have come. Ethereum ETFs could finally start catching a bid as staking is implemented (TradFi loves yield, remember that), and US crypto policy now being far more permissive opens up a lot of opportunities for DeFi protocols such as enabling fee switch, and additional utility for tokens holders.

To date, polymarket prices an ETH all-time-high by end of year at only 21%.

Despite going up in aggregate, this market is tough to trade. Rotations are extremely fast, hence, we’re not a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ scenario. The spotlight is still on memecoins, ai agents, and a few select alts.

BTC remains king, but its dominance being down 4.07% is great, signaling a potential capital distribution that kickstarts an alt season.

Happens on-chain

  • AI16Z, one of the hottest coins in the Crypto x AI sectors, is down 70% from its ATH, here’s a summary of the drama (meanwhile, Tangent is loading up) — 𝕏/apewoodx

  • Tether has minted $15B so far in November — 𝕏/Cointelegraph

  • Aptos Labs adds former Grayscale CEO and OpenAI chief to its advisory board — The Block

  • Huobi’s L1 blockchain will officially retire January 15, 2025 — heco123.com

  • Axie infinity developer Sky Mavis cuts 21% workforce — TechInAsia

  • Ethena’s stablecoin supply increased 60% in the last six weeks — Defiant

  • Pump fun disables live streaming feature indefinitely — The Block

  • Tether discontinues support for its Euro-backed stablecoin due to European MiCA requirements — tether.io

  • Haliey Welch, the ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl, to launch her memecoin on Dec, 4 — 𝕏/HalieyWelch

Traditional rails

  • Microstrategy will be reflexive on the way up, and on the way down — Fidenza

  • SEC Chair Gary Gensler to step down on January, 20 — The Block

  • Ex-CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo is running for ‘Crypto Czar’ position under Trump admin — The Block

  • FTX expects to start repaying customers $16.5B no later than March 2025 — DLnews

  • Celsius to distribute $127M to creditors in second bankruptcy payout — The Block

  • Trump’s media company files trademark application for ‘TruthFi’, a crypto payments service — The Block

  • US court says that Tornado Cash smart contracts don’t fall under US laws — DLnews

  • Trump proposed Crypto Advisory Council could set up a US Bitcoin reserve — The Block

  • Trump nominates pro-crypto hedge fund manager Bessent for Treasury Secretary — The Block

  • Ripple donates $25M to Fairshake, backing pro-crypto candidates — 𝕏/BGarlinghouse

  • Finance giant Charles Schwab to offer spot crypto services to clients — CoinDesk

  • Brazilian lawmaker proposes $18B national bitcoin reserve — The Block

  • Major of Vancouver submits proposal to include bitcoin in city’s balance sheet — Cointelegraph

  • Japan energy and automotive firm Remixpoint invests $3.2M in bitcoin — Binance

  • Chinese company Sos ltd. plans to invest $50M in bitcoin — investing.com

  • Cantor Fitzgerald in talks with Tether about $2B Bitcoin lending project — Fortune

  • Bitwise joins Solana spot ETF applicants in the U.S. — DLnews

  • SEC filed Bitwise 10 crypto index ETF (BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA, AVAX, LINK, BCH, DOT, UNI) — sec.gov

  • Binance boosts compliance staff by 34% — CoinDesk

  • UK to unveil crypto and stablecoin legislation in early 2025 — Bloomberg

  • Polymarket blocks French traders amid gambling inquiry — CoinDesk

  • Coinbase strikes sponsorship with LA Clippers NBA team — Decrypt

  • ZA Bank, largest bank in HK, claims to be the first bank in Asia to allow retail clients to trade crypto — life.mingpao.com

  • Suriname candidate for presidential elections plans to make the country adopt Bitcoin-standard — Cointelegraph

Tech go up

Where’s the money flowing?

  • Microstrategy bought another $5.4B in Bitcoin over the past week — velo.xyz

  • Publicly traded bitcoin mining company MARA purchased $615M bitcoin after raising $1B in convertible notes — The Block

  • Semler Scientific acquires additional 297 BTC ($28.3M), boosting holdings to 1570 BTC total — semlerscientific.com

  • Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and US Commerce Secretary nominee, negotiated a 5% stake in Tether valuing it $12B — The Block

  • Justin Sun buys $30M of Trump-backed project tokens and gets ‘Advisor’ role — The Block

  • Liquidity protocol Partior raised $20M Series B — crypto-fundraising.info

  • GameFi platform Balance raised $10M Round — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Restaking protocol Kernel DAO raised $10M Round — crypto-fundraising.info

Airdrops

  • Hyperliquid to launch its token tomorrow, with 31% supply assigned to points holders with no vesting — 𝕏/HyperFND

  • Mitosis public testnet to go live, with participation resulting in mainnet airdrop — 𝕏/Luke_mitosis

  • Side genesis airdrop goes live, targeting Bitcoin, Cosmos users and NFT holders — genesis.side.one

  • Japuary DAO vote kicked off on November, 25th requiring 70% approval — 𝕏/weremeow

  • WalletConnect airdrop eligibility goes live — 𝕏/WalletConnect

  • Swell airdrop S2 is live — swellnetwork.io

Upcoming events

  • December, 1: Sonic Shard upgrade

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • January, 20: Inauguration Day for Donald Trump

  • Not eager to go risk-on, but holding stable looks boring? Check out JLP, a liquidity pool composed of different crypto assets and stablecoins managed by Jupiter, used as a counterparty for their trading platform. It offers a 71.57% APY derived from the fees it generates.

  • Just use Aave! Earn a 16.50% APY supplying DAI on Ethereum, 15.87% APY supplying USDC on Base.

  • Aptos aficionado? Cellana offers a 23.92% APY to LP wUSDC/zUSDT

r/cryptocurrencymemes - Crypto phone for crypto bros

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[Trump to create crypto role at the white house?]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/trump-to-create-crypto-role-at-thehttps://stayonchain.co/p/trump-to-create-crypto-role-at-theThu, 21 Nov 2024 17:44:53 GMT

That’s it. The Bull Market euphoria is in full swing — crypto is being legitimized from every angle:

  • Traditional firms get back into the space (McDonald’s, Lamborghini, Stripe..)

  • Companies rush to add BTC to their balance sheet to steal MicroStrategy’s popularity

  • The soon-to-be president of the United States, arguably the most influential government on earth, is considering a crypto-related role in the White House administration

  • The first non-crypto friends are coming up to you asking whether it’s the right time to start investing, and which coins they should pick

To me, this doesn’t feel like the top. But euphoria is certainly there. If you stuck around since the bear as this newsletter did, congrats. You deserve these gains ~ however, don’t get shaken out.

As markets gets more and more overheated, everyone starts feeling like a genius. People increase leverage, make rushed decisions, and throw risk management out of the window because “everything’s going up”. This is the perfect way to get rekt while all your friends make life-changing gains during the bull.

Thing is: as prices and euphoria increase, the effective risk does too, usually ending with a nasty leverage flush and a 30% correction. On the other hand, the risk perceived by investors does the opposite, it decreases. Notice that, and adapt accordingly.

Manage risk. Take profits (gains aren’t real until they hit the bank). Take care of your health: sleep enough, eat well, and hit the gym.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. You likely have 6 to 9 months of this frenzy ahead of you. Get the end of it!

Happens on-chain

  • Tether launches ‘Hadron’, an RWA platform to ‘tokenize everything’ — The Block

  • The Bonk DAO aims to burn 1T tokens by Christmas — 𝕏/bonk_inu

  • Coinbase to delist the wrapped version of Bitcoin by BitGo wBTC, as their newly created cbBTC reaches $1.5B market cap — The Block

Traditional rails

  • SEC is engaging Solana ETF applicants, sparking optimism for approval — The Block

  • Microstrategy acquires another 51780 Bitcoin for $4.6B, taking holdings to 331200 BTC — The Block

  • First day of Options Trading for Blackrock’s Bitcoin ETF sees $2B in volume — 𝕏/JSeyff

  • Trump to meet privately with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong — Cointelegraph

  • Trump team mulls creating first-ever white house crypto role — Bloomberg

  • Trump is set to pick a new chair for the SEC, and seemingly 4 people are on the list — The Block

  • Trump media company in talks to buy crypto exchange Bakkt — CNBC

  • China expelled head of Central Bank Digital Currency Institute from CCP over alleged corruption through cryptocurrencies — The Block

Bhutan mined $1B worth of BTC, accounting for 34% of its GDP

  • Switzerland’s 21Shares introduces Ethereum Staking in Ethereum Core ETP — binance.com

  • Bitcoin mining company MARA to raise $700M for BTC purchases — mara.com

  • Dogecoin investors drop lawsuit against Elon Musk where they alleged market manipulation — The Block

  • OpenAI wanted to do an ICO in 2018, but Musk shot it down — The Block

  • 18 U.S. states sued the SEC and Gary Gensler alleging crypto regulatory overreach — Decrypt

  • Shaquille O’Neal signs $11M settlement for Astral NFTs & Galaxy tokens lawsuit — DLnews

  • Coinbase Wallet introduces 4.7% APY for USDC holders — The Block

  • South Korea’s largest exchange UpBit under probe for at least 500K KYC violations — The Block

  • Shangai court says crypto ownership is legal in china — scmp.com

  • Bitfinex hacker Ilya Lichtenstein sentenced to 5 years in prison for attempting to launder 120K Bitcoin — The Block

  • Kraken & Tether backed company Quantoz launches MiCA-compliant stablecoins USDQ, EURQ — The Block

99.3% of Bitcoin holders are in profit. This euphoric phase usually lasts 3-12 months — 𝕏/ki_young_yu

Security & Development

  • Aptos protocol Thala suffered a $25.5M hack, but negotiated a $300K bounty resulting in a full recovery — 𝕏/ThalaLabs

  • Lido Co-Founders set to launch WorldCoin competitor ‘Y’, providing alternative to eye-scanning orbs — CoinDesk

  • Injective launches iAgent SDK to automate blockchain tasks with Ai-powered agents — blog.injective.com

  • Lead dev Jeffy Yu launches ZerePy framework to launch AI agents, directly competing with AI16Z — 𝕏/jyu_eth

  • Stripe integrates Aptos as Circle enables native USDC on the chain — CoinDesk

  • Sui Network faced 2-hours outage — The Block

Where’s the money flowing?

Upcoming events

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • January, 20: Inauguration Day for Donald Trump

  • Not eager to go risk-on, but holding stable looks boring? Check out JLP, a liquidity pool composed of different crypto assets and stablecoins managed by Jupiter, used as a counterparty for their trading platform. It offers a 57.97% APY derived from the fees it generates.

  • Just use Aave! Earn a 56.63% APY supplying FRAX on Ethereum, 19.71% APY supplying USDS in Lido’s market, or a 20.26% APY supplying DAI on Arbitrum.

r/cryptocurrencymemes - If you know, you just know.

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[Memecoin supercycle?!]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/memecoin-supercyclehttps://stayonchain.co/p/memecoin-supercycleThu, 14 Nov 2024 18:31:25 GMT

So far, so good. Markets have been in ‘easy mode’ for the last week — less formally, it’s “long your longs” season. We got a leverage flush here and there, but nothing big.

This time isn’t different, though. Markets don’t go up in a straight line, and drawdowns will come. To be fair, all the top signals that worked in the past have already occurred, in the span of a week from the elections:

  • Your non-crypto friends message you asking what memecoins they should buy

  • Funding rates on CEXes increase, signaling longs dominance on perpetuals

  • On-chain rates to borrow stables (i.e. to leverage) increase to 10-15%

  • The Finance category in the App Store features only crypto apps in the top-5

There are plenty of top indicators, here’s an aggregator for them. But hey, they seem to not be working this time.

This time, it might be a PEPE or DOGE spot ETF, the US going through with its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, or a G8 country adopting BTC as legal tender. Maybe we’re indeed in a supercycle, and BTC won’t ever see 80% drawdowns again. Nobody knows.

What’s observable is that to date utility altcoins got the short of the stick — they’re lagging behind. BTC leads majors, and memecoins mint millionaires every day. They’re easier to pump given the lower market cap, and in a way, they’re fairer as everyone can access them since the beginning instead of utility coins — where it’s the norm for most value to be extracted through private markets by VCs pre-launch.

Needless to say, trading them is more akin to gambling unless done with a clear strategy. However, they’re the best at capturing attention and narratives.

They’re the people’s coins. Are we going to see a return to rationality? Hard to say.

Meanwhile, Ethereum seems to be coming back from the dead. Even though ETHBTC still struggles, ETF inflows for the second best are picking up.

In the last three days, we’ve had combined inflows of $578M, signaling a return of interest from TradFi. Perhaps, the upcoming staking feature for ETFs and its being the only alternative to BTC spot ETFs will increase investors’ appetite.

Happens on-chain

  • The Ethereum Foundation released its yearly report, attesting $788M in crypto assets, 99.45% of which are Ethereum tokens — ethereum.foundation

  • Solana-linked company Jito Labs records $78.9M in monthly fees for October — The Block

  • OpenSea redesign teases ‘XP’ points, possibly anticipating an airdrop — The Block

  • Mt.Gox further moves $2.5B in Bitcoin, possibly anticipating another round of repayments — The Block

  • Truth of Terminal’s coin is the first pump.fun coin to reach a $1B market cap — 𝕏/pumpdotfun

  • Blackrock’s tokenized fund is expanding to Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon — The Block

  • Franklin Templeton expands tokenized money market fund to Ethereum - The Block

  • TraderJoe launches TokenMill on Solana, tweaked version of pump.fun to empower creators — 𝕏/LFG_gg

Traditional rails

  • The Pennsylvania House of Representatives introduced legislation to let the state hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet — 𝕏/EleanorTerrett

  • China unveils $1.4T debt swap, but retain fiscal room for when Trump takes office in January — Bloomberg

  • Gary Gensler plans to resign by end of December, says anonymous source — 𝕏/mrnguyen007

  • The FBI seized Polymarket CEO’s phone and electronics as part of an investigation that alleges platform’s role in manipulating elections’ results — The Block

  • Rumor has it that Trump is considering a 0% tax on crypto capital gains — 𝕏/dotkrueger

  • Coinbase launches COIN50 index, tradable as a perpetual future with up to 20x leverage — 𝕏/Coinbase

  • FTX files $1.7B lawsuit against Binance and CZ — The Block

  • Doodles NFT collection partners with McDonald’s creating limited-edition McCafé Holiday Cups — 𝕏/doodles

  • Former Alameda Co-CEO Caroline Ellison begins 2 years sentence in Connecticut for the FTX meltdown — The Block

  • Former Alameda Co-CEO Sam Trabucco to forfeit $70M, Apartments, and a Yacht in proposed settlement with FTX bankruptcy estate — The Block

  • BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF becomes bigger than its Gold one (the #2 largest) — DLnews

  • Detroit to start accepting crypto for tax payments — 𝕏/BitcoinMagazine

  • Italy considers lowering tax rate hike from 42% to 28% — The Block

  • Sam Altman’s World launches in Brazil — The Block

  • Cryptodotcom acquires Aussie-based firm to start offering its services in Australia — crypto.com

  • Revolut expands crypto exchange to European Markets — DLnews

  • Bitcoin Fog founder Roman Sterlingov sentenced to 12 and a half years for providing BTC mixing service, facilitating money laundering — Bloomberg

Devs doing developers stuff

  • Ethereum researcher Justin Drake proposes ‘Beam Chain’, an Ethereum consensus layer redesign, also named ‘Ethereum 3.0’ — The Block

  • Pendle introduces Boros, yield trading with margin — Medium

  • AltLayer unveils ‘Autonome’, a platform to create and deploy autonomous AI agents — The Block

  • Ethereum’s first SVM L2 Eclipse is live with its public mainnet — 𝕏/EclipseFDN

  • Stacks hinting it could release in December its sBTC upgrade, enabling a decentralized wrapped version of BTC — The Block

  • Infinex partners with Near Foundation to integrate chain signatures — The Block

  • Ethereum Name Service set to launch its own L2 ‘Namechain’ — CoinDesk

  • Ethereum L2 Starknet to roll out staking feature this month — CoinDesk

  • Celo L2 transition Testnet is set for December, with mainnet launching in mid-January — celo.org

Where’s the money flowing?

Airdrops

  • Expecting a laxer regulatory environment with Trump, Consensys seems ready to release the Linea token in Q1 — CoinDesk

  • Mantra includes over 350,000 users in its $75M GenDrop — mantrachain.io

Upcoming events

  • November, 16: Trump sentencing in Manhattan’s Hush Money case

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • January, 20: Inauguration Day for Donald Trump

  • Not eager to go risk-on, but holding stable looks boring? Check out JLP, a liquidity pool composed of different crypto assets and stablecoins managed by Jupiter, used as a counterparty for their trading platform. It offers a 66.59% APY derived from the fees it generates.

  • Just use Aave! Earn a 27.67% APY supplying USDT on Avalanche, or a 14.47% APY supplying USDC on Scroll.

  • Aptos Aficionado? You can earn a 19.97% APY providing liquidity for the wUSDC/wUSDT pair on Cellana

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[Trump won, and crypto with it ]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/trump-won-and-crypto-with-ithttps://stayonchain.co/p/trump-won-and-crypto-with-itThu, 07 Nov 2024 17:45:13 GMT

Regardless of your political stance, the result of the U.S. elections sends a clear signal: cryptocurrencies will now be recognized as a staple of the global economy, with their development being supported by the American government, rather than hindered.

To sum it up, here’s what ‘crypto winning’ means:

On top of it, a strategic BTC reserve is in the talks, supported by Senator Lummis and shared by Trump at his speech during Bitcoin Nashville 2024.

The implications of this open stance towards crypto are wide: in the next 6 months, there’ll be an enormous amount of token launches, listing of popular assets on major exchanges, and increased experimentation by teams now less wary of regulations backfiring.

As far as markets are concerned, they tend to rally — on average — until the Inauguration Day for the new President (set for January, 20th). This is, mind you, an average. There’ll be bumps on the road, as always. And most importantly, the current SEC administration (deliberately hostile toward crypto), has the power to continue freely with enforcement actions until Inauguration — after which Gensler might be demoted, if he doesn’t resign earlier.

So, don’t get burned. Plan ahead. Assess the risk level you’re willing to take, and define targets at which you’re comfortable taking chips off the table.

A good framework might be to buy 1-2% monthly of assets like JLP (Jupiter), which dampens the volatility in both directions and makes it less mentally taxing to convert them to FIAT or Stablecoins.

It’s gonna be an intense few quarters. Good luck, anon.

Happens on-chain

  • Mt. Gox transferred $2.2B in BTC, preluding another batch of repayments to creditors — The Block

  • Despite winning the elections, Trump’s crypto project has sold only $15M tokens in its public sale, or 5% of the offered amount — The Block

  • Wintermute proposes enabling Fee Switch to reward Ethena stakers — ethenafoundation.com

  • GHO reached $175M mcap, buybacks starting soon — 𝕏/lemiscate

  • Paolo Ardoino denies rumors of a ‘Tether chain’ — 𝕏/paoloardoino

  • Ethereum Foundation researchers Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake resign as EigenLayer advisors

  • BNB Foundation completed its 29th quarterly burning, sending $1.07B to the ‘black hole’ address — bnbchain.org

  • The Telegram mini-game Hamster Kombat saw its monthly active users plummet from 300M to 41M, with the token down 76% since ATH — Protos

  • Decentralized derivatives startup ‘SynFutures’ introduced launchpad for perpetuals of any kind — The Block

Traditional rails

  • Senator Cynthia Lummis chants: “We are going to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve” — 𝕏/SenLummis

  • Tether reports $2.5B Profit in Q3 — CoinDesk

  • 21Shares files for XRP Spot ETF — Cointelegraph

  • Immutable received a Wells Notice from the SEC over securities law — The Block

  • Florida’s Chief Financial Officer says state holds about $800M in crypto-related investments — The Block

  • State of Michigan’s state pension fund discloses over $10M worth of Ethereum ETF holdings — The Block

  • First pension fund in the UK invests 3% of its AUM into Bitcoin — CoinDesk

  • Swiss bank UBS to launch tokenized investment fund, following Blackrock’s and Franklin Templeton’s footsteps — DLnews

  • Robinhood, Kraken, Paxos, Galaxy Digital and others partner to introduce global stablecoin network named ‘USDG’ — The Block

  • Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s trial delayed until April — CoinDesk

  • JPMorgan to offer instant Dollar-Euro settlement via Blockchain — Bloomberg ($)

  • France to ban users’ access to Polymarket — DLnews

Tech go up

Where’s the money flowing?

  • Avalanche Foundation buys back $52M worth of AVAX tokens from Do Kwon’s defunct ‘Luna Foundation Guard’ — The Block

  • ZK Data platform Vlayer raised $10M Pre-seed Round — crypto-fundarising.info

  • L1 blockchain Cytonic raised $8.3M Seed led Round led by Lattice and Lemniscap — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Web3 Gaming platform GameBeast raised $2M Seed Round led by Tido Capital and T Fund — crypto-fundraising.info

Airdrops

Upcoming events

  • November, 7: FED interest rates decision (est. 25bps cut)

  • November, 12-15: Devcon in Bangkok

  • November, 16: Trump sentencing in Manhattan’s Hush Money case

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • January, 20: Inauguration Day for Donald Trump

  • Just use Aave! You can earn a 10.32% APY supplying USDT on Ethereum, 20.54% APY supplying USDC on Base, 16.15% APY supplying USDT on Optimism, or an 11.58% APY supplying USDT on Optimism.

  • Aptos Aficionado? You can earn a 18.02% APY providing liquidity for the wUSDC/zUSDC pair on Cellana

Source: 𝕏/boldleonidas

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[BTC nears ATH ahead of US elections]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/btc-nears-ath-ahead-of-us-electionshttps://stayonchain.co/p/btc-nears-ath-ahead-of-us-electionsThu, 31 Oct 2024 17:31:08 GMT

Despite the recent shakedown, BTC led markets this week, missing its all-time high by just a few dollars — topping at $73,619 on October, 29th.

Meanwhile, DOGE shows strength across the board as Musk keeps mentioning that he’ll lead the Department Of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) should Trump win the elections — just one week away. If anything, they’ll remove uncertainty and give a clearer understanding of whether the U.S. will continue trying to suppress the industry or do a 180° on their approach.

While ETH shows no signs of reversing its downtrend against BTC, the latter continues its streak of huge ETF inflows. Since last week, $2.8B has been injected into the markets — bringing the value of the total assets held under ETFs to an all-time high of $72.5B (5.1% of BTC’s market cap).

Happens on-chain

  • Trump’s World Liberty Financial slashes fundraise goal by 90% — CoinDesk

  • Trump’s project World Liberty Financial has plans to launch its $-backed stablecoin — Fortune

  • Allegedly, someone stole $20M of a US government wallet, but $19M has been returned — DLnews

  • Infinex Patron NFTs have been distributed, now trading at 1.09 ETH (45% discount to Patron Sale) on main marketplaces — blur.io

  • Ironically, ZachXBT made a memecoin without wanting to, thanks to Zora’s ‘Artcoins’ — 𝕏/Cooopahtroopa

  • BitGet-linked Morph L2 mainnet is live — 𝕏/MorphL2

  • Solana is now live on Arkham — 𝕏/ArkhamIntel

  • Farcaster’s monthly revenue is down 96% compared to its February peak — The Block

Traditional rails

  • Michael Saylor plans to raise $42B through Microstrategy to buy more Bitcoin over the next three years — 𝕏/saylor

  • Former Binance CEO CZ made his first public appearance during Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai — CoinDesk

  • Microsoft is going to vote on whether it should start investing in BTC on December 10th (likely to be rejected) — 𝕏/MacroScope17

  • Atlanta-based Emory University reports $15M BTC holdings in Grayscale ETF — The Block

  • Plan B Forum in Lugano unveils Satoshi Nakamoto statue — tether.to

  • FTX secures $228M settlement with ByBit, sued for withdrawing $327M off the platform right before the collapse — DLnews

  • Robinhood launches contracts to bet on US elections following the popularity of Polymarket and Kalshi — The Block

  • Someone exploited GOAT’s creator 𝕏 account, netting $600K promoting a scam token — The Block

  • Consensys, the company behind MetaMask, lays off 20% of its workforce — Fortune

  • dYdX lays off 35% of the ‘core team’ — 𝕏/AntonioMJuliano

  • Kraken announces new co-CEO, and lays off 15% of the company, roughly 400 people — The Block

  • According to a document submitted by Reddit to the SEC, the company sold most of its crypto holdings in Q3, about $7M — Decrypt

  • Canary Capital submitted an application to list a SOL Spot ETF. To date, they’ve submitted for SOL, LTC, and XRP — 𝕏/ELeanorTerret

Tech go up

  • Cardano is looking to pivot from a L1 to a Bitcoin L2 — 𝕏/Ordinal_News

  • Bitcoin ‘L2’ Stacks activates Nakamoto upgrade — CoinDesk

  • Circle introduces ‘Confidential ERC-20’ whitepaper, featuring masked balances and transaction amounts — circle.com

  • Arbitrum to shorten withdrawal period from 7 days to 15 minutes for Orbit chains — 𝕏/arbitrum

  • LRT Protocol Swell changes course for its rollup, replacing Polygon CDK with the Optimism stack — The Block

  • Chainlink unveils ‘Chainlink Runtime Environment’ to improve blockchain workflows — CoinDesk

  • Kraken launches fully customizable desktop trading app, inspired by Cryptowatch — The Block

Where’s the money flowing?

  • The kingdom of Bhutan moves $66M in Bitcoin to Binance, still holding $890M — The Block

  • Optimism Foundation to give $42.5M in OP tokens to Kraken, which is building its own L2 on the Superchain stack — CoinDesk

  • Solar energy-focused company Glow Labs raised $30M Round led by Framework and Union Square Ventures

  • Decentralized storage company Nillion raised $25M Round led by HackVC

  • Blockchain infrastructure company Chainway Labs raised $14M Series A led by Founders Fund

  • Decentralized Backend company Gelato raised $11M Series A led by HackVC

  • Game-Fi platform Sapien Ai raised $10.5 Seed Round led by Variant

Airdrops

  • COOK, the governance token of Mantle’s liquid restaking token cmETH, is live and claimable — mantle.xyz

  • Solana wallets Phantom and Backpack struggled today as 2.8M users claimed the GRASS airdrop — Blockworks

  • Friend.tech competitor Arena has launched a token. You might have got an airdrop if you used it in the past! — 𝕏/TheArenaApp

  • $TestME is live for claiming, in anticipation of MagicEden’s $ME airdrop. The token is trading at a $14M mcap — 𝕏/MagicEden

Upcoming events

  • November, 2: Doge Day in Sakura, Japan — ownthedoge.com

  • November, 5: U.S. elections

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • Just use Aave! You can earn a 13.32% APY supplying USDC on the BNB Chain, or a 11.58% APY supplying USDT on Optimism.

  • Like Delta-neutral strategies? Drift has introduced a JLP vault that neutralizes market movements, earning you around 30% APY — 𝕏/gauntlet_xyz

  • Got spare EUR? Moonwell’s vault on Morpho pays you a 20.85% to deposit EURC — morpho.org

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[Denmark to tax unrealized gains at 42%]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/denmark-to-tax-unrealized-gains-athttps://stayonchain.co/p/denmark-to-tax-unrealized-gains-atThu, 24 Oct 2024 16:31:19 GMT

The Bitcoin ETFs have been relentless lately — the last 6 days saw $1.15B in inflows. Even though we have few data points to prove that, huge inflows have always marked local tops: is this going to be the exception?

What’s surprising is to see that much capital allocated ahead of U.S. elections, which tend to represent uncertainty and volatility.

Talking macro, the Bank of Canada just cut its rates for the fourth consecutive time, bringing interest rates from 4.25% down to 3.75%.

Net assets held in ETFs (white), BTC price (orange), inflows (green & red)

Back to crypto, ETH continues to be a cursed coin. Seemingly, there’s no bid for it. ETH/BTC has broken a resistance formed during the previous two cycles (2017, 2021) like its butter — if there’s a time to bounce, that’s it. Meanwhile, SOL/ETH is recording new highs, reinforcing the Solana supremacy over Ethereum this cycle.

While this may not be true in terms of ecosystems, it’s hard to deny it from an economic standpoint. Ethereum L2s finally made Ethereum accessible and cheap to use, and this is the issue: ETH isn’t accruing value, it’s not used as money, and institutions aren’t bidding its ETF as they don’t consider it a store of value as they do with BTC. What do, then?

Happens on-chain

  • Kraken launches new wrapped Bitcoin product kBTC on Ethereum & Optimism — CoinDesk

  • Kraken exchange plans to launch its own blockchain ‘Ink’ on Optimism early next year — Bloomberg

  • Worldcoin launches mainnet, and rebrands itself as “World” and “World Network”. Uniswap already live.

  • ApeChain launches mainnet using Arbitrum Orbit — CoinMarketCap

  • Elixir introduces mainnet phase 1, anticipating public mainnet — 𝕏/elixir

  • Pump.fun announces token plans on 𝕏 space — The Block

  • Re-named Sky protocol might go back to ‘MakerDAO’ brand — The Block

  • Infinex Patron NFTs have been distributed, now tradable on MagicEden and OpenSea

  • Thunderhead Labs announced Hyperliquid’s liquid staking token $stHYPE — 𝕏/ThunderheadLabs

  • Polymarket cracks down on US users, not allowed to trade — Yahoo

Tether, you got competition: Memecoin casino Pump.fun has generated $162M revenue since its launch, selling $78M so far — 𝕏/lookonchain

Traditional rails

  • BlackRock seeks BUIDL integration as perps collateral on CEXes — bloomberglaw.com

  • Denmark set to propose taxing unrealized crypto gains at 42% in upcoming bill — The Block

  • VP Harris is looking at potential replacements for SEC Chair Gary Gensler, candidates being Chris Brummer and Erica Williams — 𝕏/laurashin

  • The SEC has approved options for spot Bitcoin ETFs at both NYSE & CBOE

  • European Central Bank newly published paper lies groundwork for aggressive regulation, tax hikes, and bans — DLnews

  • U.K. Pension giant L&G ($1.5T AUM) looks to enter crypto tokenization space — CoinDesk

  • Ripple’s Co-Founder donates another $10M XRP to Kamala Harris, totaling $11M in donations — CoinDesk

  • Nigeria withdrew money laundering charges against jailed Binance exec — DLnews

  • Private equity firm Aurum is launching a $1B tokenized fund on the XRP network — CoinDesk

  • Vietnamese government plans to create 20 blockchain brands with regional influence — vietnam.vn

Fat app thesis: Aerodrome accounts for more than half of Base’s TVL, and 58% of its DEX volumes — Coinbase research

Security & Development

  • Chainlink taps Botanix Labs to make its move into the Bitcoin ecosystem — CoinDesk

  • Crypto on-ramp company Transak suffers data breach involving 93K users (1.14% userbase) — CoinDesk

  • Celestia announces ‘Mammoth Mini’ testnet, averaging 27Mb/s data throughput, compared to Eigen’s 15Mb/s — 𝕏/CelestiaOrg

  • Uniswap’s permissionless bridging goes live across nine networks — The Block

  • Gnosis Safe now allows gasless deployment with same address across multiple chains — 𝕏/safe

  • Buenos Aires city issued 3.6M digital IDs using ZkSync — 𝕏/zksync

North Koreans love crypto: allegedly, NK developers helped build Cosmos’ liquid staking module — Rekt

Where’s the money flowing?

  • Stripe strikes their largest acquisition ever, $1.1B to acquire stablecoin payments company ‘Bridge’ — The Block

  • Gnosis DAO launched a new $40M venture fund targeting RWA, infrastructure, and payments — The Block

  • P2P trading protocol Variational raised $10.3M Seed Round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Infrastructure protocol Validation Cloud raised $10M Round led by True global ventures — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Gaming protocol Party Icons raised $9M Round led by Bitkraft — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Tokenized securities marketplace STOKR raised $7.98M Strategic Round led by Fulgur Ventures — crypto-fundraising.info

Airdrops

Upcoming events

  • October, 29: Mantle’s $COOK TGE

  • October, 30: TIA unlocks $1.05B

  • November, 5: U.S. elections

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • Just use Aave! You can earn a 10.43% APY supplying USDC on Avalanche, 36.08% APY to supply sUSD on Optimism, 15.81% APY to supply DAI on Polygon. Otherwise, staking GHO on Ethereum yields 16% APR.

  • Aptos aficionado? Cellana’s paying a 24.92% APR to LP wUSDC/zUSDT

Image
Source: 𝕏/BoldLeonidas

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]><![CDATA[Hyperliquid announces HYPE token]]>https://stayonchain.co/p/hyperliquid-announces-hype-tokenhttps://stayonchain.co/p/hyperliquid-announces-hype-tokenThu, 17 Oct 2024 16:47:06 GMT

Meanwhile, BTC ETFs have seen $1.5B inflows during the last week. ETH ones have remained essentially flat, with $38.5M inflows.

Hyperliquid announces HYPE token

Hyperliquid was no doubt the most-awaited launch following EigenLayer’s TGE. The Hyperliquid Foundation announced the HYPE token, asking users to accept terms & conditions (check out our 𝕏 post here) within November, 11 — suggesting a TGE within the month. Apparently, top users (1000+ points) are going to receive an NFT alongside HYPE tokens.

To date, HL points are trading at $6.3 on Whales Market, and considering a total supply of points of roughly 51M (not final, points could be attributed retroactively) we come up with a $330M mcap for points.

Now it’s all about patience. However, we’ll be keeping other on-chain perpetuals protocols on our radar as a successful launch for HL could mean a general repricing of the sector.

Can’t make this up: The code behind the coin created by the FBI is violating the MIT license, crypto developer reports them to.. the FBI — 𝕏/0xCygaar

A16Z funded an AI agent, and its pumping our bags

Crypto 𝕏 has been going crazy in the past few days, the reason? AI cults.

Here’s the backstory: Marc Andreessen (random guy, invented the first internet browser) from a16z sent $50K in BTC to an AI agent to help it “escape” its creator.

Named truth_terminal on 𝕏, said agent just talks freely about whatever on his profile. But he got obsessed over ‘Goatse’, an early internet shock meme — then, someone made the GOAT memecoin and sent 300K to the AI’s wallet.

The agent keeps rambling about it on 𝕏, talking about how GOAT is going to the moon. Considering its holdings, he’s the first AI agent becoming a millionaire!

Dystopic? For sure. Yet, incredibly interesting to follow. Here’s the full story.

Wanna-be Satoshi Craig Wright is suing BTC Core developers for £911B — 𝕏/BitcoinNewsCom

Trump’s token sale is not going well

So here’s the thing.. the Orange man, supposedly the one going to save our bags from doom in this Q4 if he wins — is securing an overwhelming majority on Polymarket, now quoted at 62.1% vs. 38.0% for Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, for no clear reason, he’s launching a crypto grift to fill his pockets once more. Don’t get us wrong, we appreciate the hustle, but the situation is just hilarious.

World Liberty Financial is selling 20B WLFI tokens at a price of $0.015 each, totaling $300M. To date, they sold.. $13M, or 4.3%. Considering a 100B supply, that’s a $1.5B valuation.

Thing is, this application is nothing more than an Aave wrapper disguised under different name, blasting Trump photos everywhere. To participate, you need to pass KYC and be an accredit investor (if in the U.S.), and tokens are set to be non-transferable and locked indefinitely. See more here.

It errr.. doesn’t seem such a good deal. And the comments under Trump’s 𝕏 post seem to agree.

Crypto doesn’t mean Republicans: Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen donates $1M in crypto to PAC supporting Harris’ campaign — The Block

Radiant Capital exploited, once again

That’s not the first time. The lending protocol already suffered an exploit back in January, losing $4.5M. But this time the losses amount to roughly $50M, on both Arbitrum and the BNB Chain.

While we wait for a post-mortem, make sure to revoke contracts you approve periodically (even better, only approve the amount you’re going to spend!) using revoke.cash or Rabby’s internal revoke tool.

Interestingly, the market response on the protocol’s token RDNT has been quite tame. To date, the token is down 11%. Which is low, considering they just lost 25% of their TVL due to an exploit and the token’s mcap is “just” $75M — making a reimbursement through RDNT tokens unpractical.

Arbitrum-based Lending Protocol Radiant Capital Launches V2 | TokenInsight

Happens on-chain

  • Tesla transferred all of its $760M BTC holdings to unknown wallets — CoinDesk

  • On-chain sleuth ZachXBT uncovers wallets of newfound memecoin ‘star’ Murad — 𝕏/zachxbt

  • dYdX starts offering 20x leverage on U.S. election prediction market, using Polymarket as an oracle — DLnews

  • Crypto whale lost $35M ETH on Blast due to a phishing attack, causing dETH’s depeg — The Block

  • Allegedly, a signifcant part of Cosmos’ liquid staking module was developed by North Korean agents — The Block

  • Flaunch, the pump.fun version of Ethereum powered by Uniswap V4? — 𝕏/flaunchgg

  • Wallets tracker Arkham is set to launch a crypto derivatives platform in November — The Block

  • Felix launches the “people’s stablecoin” on Hyperliquid, a Liquity V2 fork — 𝕏/LiquityProtocol

  • Ethena Labs proposes SOL for USDe’s collateral — CoinDesk

  • Karate Combat to launch its L2 — Blockworks

Mercenary capital: PYUSD supply is down 40% from its $1B+ high since incentives have been tapered off — The Block

Traditional rails

  • Former FTX executive Ryan Salame begins seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence — The Block

  • Tether is exploring commodities trading and TradFi opportunities, CEO says — The Block

  • Canary group files for first Litecoin ETF — CoinDesk

  • Italy plans to raise tax on crypto capital gains from 26% to 42% — bloombergtax.com

  • Grayscale files to convert mixed crypto fund with BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, AVAX into ETF — The Block

  • Alabama man arrested by FBI for hacking SEC’s 𝕏 account to manipulate BTC price on ETF approval — CNBC

  • Hong Kong busted $46M romance fraud scheme involving crypto — The Block

  • SEC charges Cumberland DRW for acting as an “unregistered dealer” in crypto transactions. Labels POL, SOL, ATOM, ALGO, FIL as securities — The Block

  • Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan has been denied bail in Nigeria, now detained for over 220 days — CoinDesk

  • Off The Grid, battle royale game with planned crypto features through Avalanche subnet, nabs #1 slot on Epic Games Store — The Block

  • Avalanche set to repurchase 2M AVAX (~ $58M) tokens sold to Terra Foundation in 2022, pending court approval — The Block

  • Kamala Harris vows to support crypto regulatory framework to support black men. Yes, you read that right — The Block

Tech things we pretend to understand

  • Unichain testnet is now live on the Uniswap front-end — 𝕏/Uniswap

  • Worldcoin partners with Dune to boost transparency ahead of World Chain mainnet launch — The Block

  • Fuel Labs officially launches ‘Ignition’ mainnet, supporting parallelized transactions and high throughput — The Block

  • Conduit launches G2, the world’s most powerful sequencer — Blockworks

  • Hyperliquid is proposing to integrate Ethena’s hedging engine, and launch USDe on its L1 upon mainnet — ethenafoundation.com

One L2 to rule them all? Base becomes the largest Ethereum Rollup by TVL, surpassing Arbitrum

Where’s the money flowing?

  • Crypto-friendly Praxis announces $525M in committed financing to build city state — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Blockchain technology solution company Blockstream raised $210M round led by Fulgur Ventures — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Gaming studio Azra Games raised $42.7M Series A round led by Pantera — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Pan-African currency exchange Yellow Card Financial raised $33M Series C led by Blockchain Capital — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Social application Towns raised $25.5M Series A — crypto-fundraising.info

  • Paradigm invests $20M in Ithaca, a L2 ‘from the future’ — The Block

  • CoinDesk buys crypto data provider CCData and CryptoCompare — CoinDesk

Airdrops

Upcoming events

  • October, 18: Bybit to list PUFF spot trading — 𝕏/Bybit_Official

  • October, 18: JPY inflation rate

  • October, 23-24: Cardano Summit

  • October, 24: Infinex to send out Patron NFTs — 𝕏/infinex_app

  • October, 30: TIA unlocks $1.05B

  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

  • Aptos aficionado? Cellana’s paying a 21.9% APR to LP wUSDC/zUSDC, while the lending protocol Joule pays 15.8% APY to deposit zUSDC.

  • Jumping ship to Sui? Cetus pays a 26.23% APR to LP USDCsol/wUSDC.

  • Just use Aave. Get paid a 9.36% APY to lend GHO on Ethereum, or 16.2% APR to stake it.

Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a friend?
Forward this email—it's the best gift you can give us!

Refer a friend

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

]]>