Weekly Roundup (14 March)
DeFi News
Ethereum Dencun upgrade has gone live, drastically lowering L2 fees. The upgrade is live on Gnosis Chain and Base, while Arbitrum is set to support the standard today
Metis, an Ethereum L2, has initiated their decentralized sequencer upgrade, enabling fee sharing and enhanced network security
Optimism Foundation has sold $89M of $OP tokens in a private sale to an unknown buyer with a lockup period of 2 years
Fraxtal, Frax’s L2, has opened their Mainnet Bridge for public access
Grass, a network offering data bandwidth services, is set to be the first L2 Data Rollup and batching data to Solana
Vega Protocol, a decentralized infrastructure for creating markets, has launched their first-ever Points derivatives market, starting with EigenLayer points
Tensor Foundation, an NFT platform on Solana, has announced its governance token $TNSR, and will release toknomics details soon
Aevo, an options and perps trading L2, has launched their $AEVO TGE and airdrop, and is now listed on Binance
Unibot, a trading bot on Telegram, has seen the core team part ways with Unibot Solana
Starknet has announced a gaming committee with a $125M fund to advance their gaming ecosystem
Polyhedra Network, a ZK Web3 infrastructure provider, is set to launch its token $ZK soon
Entangle, a network interoperability protocol, has launched their token $NGL and released their roadmap, with their messaging solution set to launch in April
Artemis has released a sybil detection tool, scoring users across seven networks
LlamaLend, an interface for lending on Curve, is live
Nibiru Chain, an L1, has gone live on mainnet
Optimism has partnered with thirdweb to launch Superchain App Accelerator, a $3M fund to subsidize cost of building and using on any Superchain network
Governance Proposals
Maker DAO has updated their Endgame launch update, starting with a new brand, tokenomics, subDAOs, and new tokens in phase 1 set to start in summer 2024
Frax Finance DAO is proposing to reinstate fee sharing for $veFXS holders, directing 75% of it to users and 25% to their Treasury
Arbitrum DAO has proposed to use $444M to incentivize gaming growth on the network
Aave DAO is discussing doubling $GHO Borrow Rate to 15% and Discounted Borrow Rate to 10.5% which would increase stability of $GHO peg
Magic Internet Money DAO is discussing using their treasury $ARB to vote in Arbitrum’s STIP-Bridge forum
Upcoming Catalysts
Kamino Finance, a lending and liquidity protocol on Solana, will distribute 7% of $KMNO to eligible users, with the snapshot for Season 1 to be taken on March 31st
Nvidia’s GTC AI conference will be held from March 18th to 21st
Prom, a modular zkEVM L2, testnet to go live on March 16th
ETH Global London will take place from March 15th to 17th
BounceBit, a $BTC restaking L2, is live on testnet, and will launch its mainnet by April
friendtech, a social application, is set to launch V2 after April 20th
Swell, a liquid restaking protocol, is set to launch a zkEVM L2 for restaking
$CYBER will unlock 5.98% of the circulating supply worth $10.14M on March 15th
$ARB will unlock 76.62% of the circulating supply worth $2.23B on March 16th
$APE will unlock 2.55% of the circulating supply worth $35.26M on March 17th
$MANTA will unlock 2.66% of the circulating supply worth $25.73M on March 18th
$PIXEL will unlock 7.05% of the circulating supply worth $45.72M on March 19th
$IMX will unlock 2.46% of the circulating supply worth $122.74M on March 22nd
$ID will unlock 18.23% of the circulating supply worth $112.24M on March 22nd
News
The spot $BTC ETFs have seen $11.8B inflow, with BlackRock and Fidelity registering the greatest inflows. VanEck’s spot $BTC ETF also records $119M inflow after cutting their fees. In other news, BlackRock is planning to purchase spot $BTC ETF for its global allocation fund
Bitcoin surpasses silver as the 8th largest asset by market cap, even as miner revenue hits ATH of $79M a day. In other news, Lightning Network’s $USD capacity is at an all time high of $328M
Thailand’s SEC has allowed firms to invest in spot $BTC ETFs for institutional investors, and has approved income tax exemption for crypto earnings
SEC has pushed back the timeline on options trading for BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF
MetaMask has tested its first blockchain-powered payment card with Mastercard
Coinbase is planning a $1B bond sale to raise funds, and has also requested clearer crypto rules from the SEC
MicroStrategy is raising another $500M to buy $BTC
El Salvador’s $BTC treasury is $85M in profit
OKX has obtained an MPI license to operate in Singapore
Hong Kong has launched a sandbox for stablecoin issuers and begun phase 2 of their CBDC pilot, and South Korea is set to build a crypto management system to prevent tax evasion
EU has approved new sanction rules permitting the freezing of crypto assets
London Stock Exchange has begun accepting $BTC and $ETH exchange-traded notes