An Ape's Prologue Weekly (18 January)
Important DeFi News
Ethereum core developers have deployed the Dencun upgrade on Goerli testnet, mainnet deployment for it is expected in Q1 2024
AltLayer, a decentralized protocol for rollups, announced its $ALT token airdrop involving EigenLayer users and $TIA stakers. The token will be also available to farm on the Binance Launchpool starting from January 19th over a six day period
Jupiter Exchange, Solana’s leading DEX aggregator, will launch $JUP on 31st January, with 40% of its supply to be airdropped to its community over four rounds
Ondo Finance, an RWA tokenization protocol, $ONDO token has gone live today, launching with 14.3% of its supply circulating
Injective, a Cosmos L1 blockchain, has successfully launched its Volan Mainnet Upgrade featuring an RWA Module, greater cross-chain interoperability, and reduced token inflation
Frax Finance, issuer of the $FRAX stablecoin, is set to debut its L2 blockchain Fraxtal on the first week of February, with Frax’s liquid staked $ETH, $frxETH, serving as the gas token for the chain
MakerDAO, a stablecoin protocol, has advised its users on Starknet to transfer or migrate their $DAI before the chain’s Regenesis network upgrade
Manta Network, a modular L2 blockchain, released tokenomics for $MANTA with 5.6% of tokens to be airdropped to eligible users upon TGE
Starknet, a ZK-Rollup L2 on Ethereum, has recently distributed $STRK tokens as payment to developers who made open source contributions, fueling speculation that the token may launch soon
Blast, a native yield Ethereum L2, launched its testnet along with a developer airdrop competition named Big Bang. The protocol currently holds $1.34B in TVL from 100k users
Monad, a parallel execution L1 blockchain, is set to integrate LayerZero, granting it connectivity with over 50 chains upon launch
Chainlink, a decentralized oracle project, has integrated Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol, CCTP with its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, CCIP for secure cross-chain $USDC transfers
Wormhole, a crosschain messaging protocol, launched Native Token Transfers, allowing for native-to-native $ETH and $wstETH transfers across 7 EVM chains
KelpDAO, a liquid restaking protocol, has added $sfrxETH to its list of accepted LSTs in anticipation of the upcoming EigenLayer cap raise on January 29th
The BNB Foundation has burned $636M worth of $BNB in its 26th quarterly token burn
Governance Proposals
Arbitrum DAO has approved an allocation of 45.8M $ARB worth $87M to a Long Term Incentives Pilot Program
Uniswap DAO is discussing deploying Uni V3 liquidity incentivization packages to increase its DEX market share and liquidity across various chains
AirDAO has successfully voted to deploy 100% of its treasury to Aave and Compound and to use its profits to buyback and burn $AMB
TrueFi DAO is proposing raising $stkTRU staking rewards from 0 to 5k $TRU per day
News
Grayscale, BlackRock, and Fidelity dominated 90% of Bitcoin ETF market in the first three days of spot Bitcoin ETF trading
ProShares has filed for five leveraged and inverse $BTC ETFs while Grayscale has filed for a $BTC covered call ETF
Circle, the company behind $USDC, has filed for IPO within the US. Meanwhile, Tether’s $USDT currently makes up over 70% of stablecoins in circulation
50k $BTC worth $2B has been moved after being dormant for 11 years
South Korean brokerages suspended foreign spot $BTC ETFs in reaction to a notice issued by its Financial Services Commission
Solana has announced the launch of its second generation Saga phone
Google Cloud has joined Flare Network as a validator and infrastructure provider
Anichess, a decentralized chess game, announced a partnership with Chess.com and Magnus Carlsen
The Near Foundation will be reducing its workforce by 40%
Gamestop will be winding down its NFT marketplace on February 2nd
Venezuela has ended its Petro cryptocurrency five years after it was launched
Do Kwon’s trial has been pushed back to March from its original date of January 29th