Solana goes offline, SOL pumps
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Welcome to Stay on-chain! As always, we've got your back. Solana has experienced yet another outage, Dymension launched at a $6B valuation and there’s a new NFT token standard in the scene. Let us explain everything.
In today’s edition:
Market performance
News roundup
Extra content from great minds
Farms of the week
Venture Capital
Meme of the week
By the way, make sure to join us on Telegram 👾
The markets are looking good once again! Bitcoin saw a strong 6% increase this week, hitting $45,000, with Ethereum following suit. Despite Solana experiencing a 5-hour outage, its token is pumping nevertheless. This week's top performer is Dymension's DYM, launching at a whopping $6 billion valuation, but we'll dive into that later. On the other hand, XMR took a hit after being delisted by Binance. A notable highlight is the DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL), which surged by 9.5% in just one week—an uncommon occurrence indicating increased deposits into DeFi protocols. Despite the fear and greed index not reaching the greed zone, there's evident demand in the market to buy the dips.
Solana goes offline
Yes, Solana experienced another outage. It's been nearly a year since the last one, but unfortunately, it occurred again. This disruption stopped block progression, preventing transactions from being processed.
The chain restarted after approximately 5 hours offline. While the exact cause isn't fully determined yet—core contributors are still investigating—it appears that the failure may be linked to the recently added "Berkley Packet Filter" mechanism used for deploying upgrades and executing programs on Solana.
Enter new Dymension, DYM launches at $6B valuation
Rumored to be the newest Ethereum competitor, Dymension is a settlement layer that advocates for modular blockchains, a paradigm shift that has been capturing everyone’s attention lately. As much as it was overshadowed by Solana’s outage the launch went great — and DYM now trades at a $7B valuation, as speculators see it as the next TIA and aren’t eager to miss the boat two times. Stay on-chain’s opinion if you got any? Stake your DYM, collect airdrops, and chill.
Tired of your 9-5? Join this raffle, you might win a Mad Lad NFT worth around $18K.
Stride launches stTIA: liquid staking for Celestia
To sum it up, Stride is for Cosmos what Lido is for Ethereum. A liquid staking solution that just works. As a cherry on top, Stride just launched stTIA for Celestia’s token, and did not save on user acquisition. As a way to drain liquidity (i.e. vampire attack) from MilkyWay (the first LST for Celestia), Stride is incentivizing holders with STRD tokens (5% of the supply) for the next 140 days — see here for some math.
Got change? Smolrefuel allows you to get some ETH in exchange for other token if you run out of gas.
Binance to obey regulations, delists XMR
As compliance requirements keep getting tighter and tighter, crypto businesses are forced to make harsh decisions. For this and other reasons, Binance announced the delisting of XMR, ANT, MULTI, and VAI. The news caused XMR to nosedive 40%, even though half the dip was bought shortly after. Interestingly enough, XMR and ANT perpetual contracts remain active.
Wormhole is launching its W token
Wormhole, the well-known bridge, has announced the launch and airdrop of its token. The token will have the ticker "W" and will have a maximum supply of 10 billion, initially with 1.8 billion in circulation. This launch is part of Wormhole's plan to gradually hand over governance of the protocol to W holders. The token will be distributed among guardian nodes, the community, the ecosystem, core contributors, foundations, and strategic partners, as shown in the pie chart below.
Last November, Wormhole secured $225 million in funding, reaching a valuation of $2.5 billion. Notable investors include Multicoin Capital and Coinbase Ventures. Another big player involved is Jump Trading, which acquired Wormhole entirely after its $323 million exploit in 2022.
Stables aren’t stable: AAVE’s stablecoin GHO has almost returned to peg. Here’s a dashboard to track its metrics.
ERC-404, the new NFT token standard
This story starts with traders getting rugged and a protocol being made in just 26 hours. The result is something really innovative: a token called ERC-404, a mix of two existing token types – ERC-20 and NFTs. It’s named after the common website error message and Pandora is the leading project developing it.
Let’s jog your memory. ERC-20 tokens are fungible tokens, easily replaceable by any token. NFTs, on the other hand, are non-fungible, i.e. unique. ERC-404 combines both standards, creating what's called a "semi-fungible token." It might sound conflicting, but bear with me.
Here's how it works: Imagine a project offering 100 tokens and 100 NFTs. Each token is tied to an NFT. If you buy less than a whole token, the associated NFT gets burned, and you only get that fraction of the token. But if you gather more fractions, summing to 1, a new NFT gets minted in your wallet.
So, it lets you buy and sell parts of NFTs, represented as tokens. Even if the NFT temporarily disappears, the tokens should still hold their value because they can be combined to recreate the whole NFT.
This design offers two big benefits. First, it makes NFTs liquid for the first time, as long as there's a pool of liquidity for the associated tokens. You can sell any NFT anytime without needing to find a buyer. Second, it allows fractional ownership of NFTs, making it possible for people to invest in expensive NFTs, even if they can't afford the whole thing.
Tether rakes in record profit of 2.85B in Q4 — Tether.to
Ethereum developers target March 13 for the Dencun upgrade
The SEC has new rules for DeFi actors that manage more than $50m — The Block
MicroStrategy bought an additional 850 BTC (~ $37M) — 𝕏/saylor
Fidelity has a 1 to 3% BTC allocation in one of their Canadian funds — 𝕏/Matt_Hougan
AltLayer announces airdrop for TIA stakers — Altlayer.io
Argent hints that Starknet’s $STRK airdrop is coming — 𝕏/argentHQ
Movement announces their ZK Move-EVM Ehtereum L2, featuring parallelization and Celestia DA — 𝕏/movementlabsxyz
Restaking on Cosmos may be coming soon — 𝕏/PersistenceOne
Wormhole integrates Dymension’s RollApps — 𝕏/wormholecrypto
EigenLayer deposits have been no caps until tomorrow — Eigenlayer.xyz
Pike Finance launches cross-chain money market using Wormhole & Circle’s CCTP. NFT collection Pikenians does 4x on airdrop speculations — Pike & Tensor
GoDaddy partners up with ENS domains — 𝕏/Deltaone
MilkyWay announces points program — 𝕏/milky_way_zone
Pyth Oracle to airdrop PYTH to ecosystem dApps — The Block
The Spartan Group’s founder on crypto surviving high interest rates.
Some bullishness about ETH
The Mantle playbook. Leverage mETH’s 7.2% APY, and get EigenLayer points, an undisclosed bonus, and Mantle’s protocols incentives on top of it. Here’s how it works.
Bullish Celestia, but only in the short term? You can profit from the milkTIA arbitrage, with a ~ 70% APR. Buy milkTIA on Osmosis at a discount, unstake it on Milkyway in 21 days, pocket the difference & repeat. We expect this gap to widen as Milkyway announces the $MILK snapshot and mercenary farmers exit milkTIA.
Farm STRD incentives: doubled in the first 60 days out of 150, Stride allocated respectively 3M and 2M STRD to stTIA holders. Rewards will be vested linearly over six months. Whilst the returns are higher, this is a longer play than the milkTIA one. Stride announced they’re in talks so that stTIA qualifies for airdrops, but don’t take it for granted, so consider the opportunity cost.
Deposit mETH on Circuit’s vault to earn a 23.34% boosted APY. Whilst definitely enticing, this is a lesser-known project. Coupled with the Mantle Playbook, that could very well be a killer (but risky) strategy.
Manta Pacific’s STONE, backed by ETH 1:1 and redeemable in late March be bought at a discount due to its temporary illiquidity — as of today, you can get it for a 5.6% discount and redeem it for ETH in a couple of months (42.6% APR)
Please note: Both the milkTIA arbitrage and STRD farming could be executed using a delta-neutral position, meaning that you’ll short the equivalent of your volatile assets (milkTIA, or stTIA) so as to not be exposed to the price action. Doing so would make the strategy slightly profitable (or not at all), as funding rates for shorting may vary greatly.
Beacon Accelerator raised $150M from undisclosed investors. Description: Web3 accelerator founded by Web3 pioneers with the mission of nurturing the next 100 Web3 unicorns.
Oobit raised $25M in a Series A round led by Tether and Titan. Description: mobile payments app that facilitates cryptocurrency transactions for users, allowing them to pay for purchases with crypto at any store equipped with Visa or Mastercard POS terminals.
Nibiru raised $12M from Kraken Ventures, NGC Ventures, Tribe Capital, and others. Description: DeFi hub, proof-of-stake blockchain and a member of a family of interconnected blockchains that comprise the Cosmos Ecosystem.
Superform Labs raised $6.5M in a Seed round led by Polychain Capital. Description: permissionless cross-chain yield marketplace designed for DeFi protocols, allowing them to list their vaults or asset pools.
OMEGA raised $6M from Borderless, Lightspeed Action, Bankless Ventures, and others. Description: Omega is revolutionizing Omnichain and Bitcoin DeFi by enabling users to leverage cross-chain digital assets for enhanced yield through decentralized and secure modular DeFi opportunities.
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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.