#53 Smart contracts coming to Bitcoin?
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Welcome to Stay on-chain! This week saw plenty of activity on the Bitcoin front, with miners printing fees due to Runes release post-halving, alongside the new proposal aiming to enable advanced scripting on it. While markets went pretty much sideways, we saw tons of innovations & drama in the space — never a dull day in crypto they say.
🪂 On a side note, Solana's latest airdrops have created billions of dollars in wealth overnight with projects like Wormhole, Parcl, Jito, Tensor, and Jupiter. Here at Stay on-chain we crafted a guide on what we’re farming, piecing together our list of top picks among under-farmed protocols with huge treasuries. Want to get it? Get one friend to subscribe to our newsletter, and we’ll deliver it straight to your inbox.
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The market hasn’t moved much in the past week, with majors slowly climbing back to all-time highs. ETH/BTC tested for the third time the 0.05 support level — and losing that level would signal weakness for alt-coins, paving the way for Bitcoin-led rallies. However, in case ETH manages to leverage its catalysts, like the upcoming EigenLayer launch and a potential spot ETF approval in the next months, we could see capital finally pouring into alts. All in all, crypto markets feel boring and some analysts are even speculating that we’ll be consolidating until September. Nonetheless, this is a perfect moment to rebalance positions without worrying much about volatility. Besides that, memecoins are seizing the opportunity to regain market cap, while TON & MKR seem to have suffered from speculators selling the recent news regarding them.
As of today, we’re going to sunset the wallet section of the newsletter for the time being. We’re happy that many of you found it helpful along with the spreadsheet attached — however, we’re going to concentrate our efforts on bringing you a better newsletter overall rather than spread ourselves too thin. This isn’t a goodbye, the Stay on-chain wallet might come back later on 🤝
Wizards to bring smart contracts on Bitcoin
Udi Wertheimer, co-founder of Taproot Wizards and behind the Quantum Cats & CatVM project shared the BIP-420 draft proposal, authored by Ethan Heilman and Armin Sabouri. The BIP, standing for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, aims to introduce the operation code OP_CAT to Bitcoin through a soft fork. Without digging too deep, said opcode would enable on-chain covenants, allowing advanced scripting functions (conditions to spend BTC in the future, secure vaults, recurring payments, time-locked transfers, escrows, advanced multi-sig setups, and others). Originally introduced by Satoshi itself, OP_CAT was disabled for security concerns in 2010 — while its future is uncertain, the proposal could make decentralized protocols on top of Bitcoin more feasible, and allow more sophisticated layer-2s.
First, they ignore you, then.. The IMF wrote a paper on Cross border flows in bitcoin — 𝕏/Matt_Hougan
USDT lands on the Ton Blockchain
Paolo Ardoino and Pavel Durov, respectively CEOs of Tether and Telegram, announced on stage at Token2049 Dubai the addition of USDT to the Ton Blockchain — Enabling free and instant transfers between Telegram users. Currently, Telegram counts 900M active users, and TON is the 9th most capitalized coin with an $18B market cap. To incentivize its usage, the TON foundation has committed 11M TON (~ $70M) to TON/USDT LPs, earn campaigns, and free TON withdrawals from exchanges. Still flying under the radar, we expect the TON blockchain to see a surge in activity as more dApps start building on it and additional on-ramps are enabled.
Top signals: EigenLayer might mark the top for ETH this cycle — 𝕏/chudnovglavniy
Samourai wallet co-founders face up to 25 years in prison
Largely known for their educational efforts and the CoinJoin feature on their wallet, Samourai co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill have been arrested and charged with money laundering and unlicensed money transmitting business counts by U.S. federal prosecutors, risking up to 25 years in prison. The accusations stem from the CoinJoin feature, allowing users to mix their coins reducing traceability on the Bitcoin network, with Samourai collecting fees for offering the service.
FDV is not a meme: Who’s going to buy our alt-coin bags? — 𝕏/wassielawyer
Binance’s former CEO faces up to 36 months
Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, is set to appear in court on April, 30 to face charges for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, facilitating illicit transactions on Binance, and failing to introduce compliant KYC measures on the exchange. While guidelines suggest 12 to 18 months for the counts CZ is accused of, and a plea agreement seemed already in place, the DOJ is doubling down arguing that given the severity of CZ’s action he should spend 36 months in prison and pay a $50M fine.
Some insights from Token2049 Dubai conference — 𝕏/DWFventures
Jupiter’s meta-acceleration strategy
The leading aggregator on Solana, Jupiter, has announced ambitious plans to improve its user experience on mobile, unify liquidity, and bring more companies on-chain. To achieve this, they’ll be leveraging a $100M JUP fund and plan to roll out the initiative in the second half of the year.
🪂 AIRDROPS
AVAIL airdrop claim is live until May 4th — availproject.org
Aptos x Flipside Grail challenge, $100,000 up for grabs — 𝕏/flipsidecrypto
PRYSM airdrop coming for TIA & DYM stakers — 𝕏/Airdrops_one
The SHARK airdrop went live on Jupiter — jup.ag
Renzo’s REZ airdrop claim is going live on April, 30
Scroll introduced retroactive points program, bridge to earn — scroll.io
Predictions for the next incoming airdrops — 𝕏/Polymarket
The proposal for NIM’s RollApp deployment on Dymension is live, a potential requirement for NIM’s drop — dymension.xyz
LayerZero confirms TGE in the first half of the year — 𝕏/LayerZero_Labs
🏦 TRADFI
Tether divides into 4 core divisions — tether.io
Now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange is expected to complete payments to creditors by October 2024 — CoinTelegraph
Two SEC lawyers resigned after SEC sanctioned for “gross abuse of power” in crypto case — Bloomberg
Mango Markets exploiter Avi Eisenberg has been convicted — The Block
FTX estate is set to auction another lot of locked SOL tokens — The Block
Paraguayan deputy presented a bill to legalize and recognize Bitcoin as legal tender — 𝕏/BitcoinMagazine
None of Tesla’s $634M BTC was sold in Q1 2024 — 𝕏/WatcherGuru
Hong Kong’s BTC and ETH spot ETFs to begin trading on April, 30 — 𝕏/EricBalchunas
Swiss Bitcoiners are asking their central bank to add BTC as collateral — The Block
Tether will freeze wallets using USDT to evade Venezuela’s oil export sanctions — CoinDesk
Binance sued in Canada for securities law violation — Cointelegraph
⛓️ DEFI
Renzo’s ezETH wicks down 50% amidst leveraged farmers unhappy with REZ tokenomics, later revisited by the team — 𝕏/0xrooter
ZKasino teams rugs $35M ETH — 𝕏/arndxt_xo
Mantle and Antalpha Prime announce cross-chain wrapped bitcoin, FBTC — Medium
Injective releases INJ 3.0 tokenomics upgrade, increasing deflation factor by 400% — blog.injective.com
🛰️ TECH
Ankr launched AI-focused Layer 1 blockchain Neura on public testnet — The Block
Stargate is voting to launch its V2 — snapshot.org
Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Starkware, and ZkSync to integrate Avail for DA — The Block
💰 VC
Aligned Layer raised $20M Series A to leverage ZK-tech and EigenLayer — CoinDesk
Shiba Inu raised $12M for its new privacy-focused blockchain — The Block
Carv raised $10M Series A to help gamers monetize their data — TechCrunch
🗓️ UPCOMING CALENDAR
April 28th: Io.net (DePin) TGE
April 29th: Friend.tech launching v2 — 𝕏/friendtech
April 30th: Hong Kong’s BTC and ETH spot ETFs begin trading — 𝕏/EricBalchunas
May 22nd: Bitcoin Pizza Day
Crypto AI projects upcoming launches — 𝕏/AIMedaResearch
Modular projects upcoming launches — 𝕏/ayyyeandy
Curve pools on Optimism and Arbitrum are printing. The crvUSD-OP-CRV LP is currently paying a 127.59% APR in OP tokens, while the crvUSD-ARB-CRV LP has a 56.01% APR paid in ARB.
Users are divesting from Renzo’s ezETH, causing it to depeg due to thin liquidity. As an ETH holder, you can buy it to arbitrage the peg and redeem it later for ETH as soon as withdrawals open (ETA is May ~ June). Depending on the redemption date, you’re looking at a 30 ~ 60% APR on your ETH, with ezETH trading at a 3.75% discount.
Points farming is hot, why not profit from it? Whether you’re looking to farm points or lend capital to those looking to do it, Airpuff is the right place. You can earn up to 56.40% APR lending your ETH, or 45.94% APR lending your USDC. Here’s a thread to get you up to speed.
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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.