Weekly Roundup (8 March)

DeFi News

• Over $115B of $ETH has been staked on the Beacon Chain, of that amount, EigenLayer is responsible for over $10B of the TVL

• Ondo Finance, an RWA protocol, has introduced Ondo Global Markets, a platform to bring all publicly traded securities onchain with native access to traditional securities exchange liquidity

• Wormhole, a crosschain messaging protocol, has released an airdrop checker for its $W token airdrop, with 6.17% of the $W token supply has been allocated for the event

• Saga, a Web3 scalability protocol, has opened claim for its Community Genesis drop, with 6% of its total supply having been airdropped to eligible users in this event

• Injective, an L1 blockchain for financial applications, has launched inEVM on mainnet, allowing Ethereum developers to build dApps that are composable across Cosmos, Solana and EVMs

• Blast, a native yield L2, has gone live on mainnet for a week and is steadily maintaining its TVL of $2.69B despite $ETH withdrawals being currently enabled

• Astar, Japan’s most popular smart contract platform, has launched Astar zkEVM, and is the first chain utilizing Polygon’s AggLayer tech

• Robinhood, a popular stocks and crypto trading platform, has integrated Arbitrum to its Robinhood Wallet for swaps

• StarkWare, the pioneer of STARK Proofs, has announced Stwo, a new ZK prover that implements the Circle STARK protocol

• Tangible, an RWA tokenization protocol, has launched re.al, a permissionless L2 for RWA tokenization. In the coming weeks, a token migration from $TNGBL to $RWA and the introduction of a new stablecoin will be taking place in the coming weeks

• Vector Reserve, an LPD protocol, has introduced vPoints as a way for users to aggregate EigenLayer Points and LRT rewards to $vETH, $svETH, and $sVEC holders

• Parsec, an onchain analytics terminal, has launched a Blast L2 blockchain explorer named Voyager

• Ambient Finance, a DEX on Blast, has introduced Ambient Points to quantify user contributions to protocol growth for a potential airdrop

• Fantom Foundation, an Ethereum L2, is seeking to recover and liquidate a third of the $210M assets lost to the Multichain Foundation last July

Governance Proposals

• Origin DAO is voting to transition its LST aggregator to an LST token focused on peg stability and composability

• Index DAO is currently discussing improvements to $INDEX’s utility, products, and tokenomics. The DAO is also discussing the creation of $icAI, an AI index, and $icL2, an L2 index instrument

• ENS DAO is discussing expanding to Solana ecosystem

• Uniswap DAO has passed a temperature check vote to move forward on a proposal for protocol fee sharing with $UNI stakers

Upcoming Catalysts

• Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade on mainnet will take place on March 13th, and the upgrade is expected to reduce L2 transaction and data availability costs

• Aevo, an options and perps trading L2, has set $AEVO TGE for March 13th

• Humans.ai, a PoS AI network, will be revealing its AI-verse ecosystem on March 8th

• Stacks, a Bitcoin L2, will complete the voting on the proposal for Nakamoto Release on March 10th. This update will bring substantial architectural change for the blockchain

• Metis, an L2 blockchain, is set to launch a decentralized sequencer pool soon

• $APT will unlock 6.74% of the circulating supply worth $337.86M on March 13th

News

• The SEC has delayed its decision on BlackRock’s $ETH ETF and is seeking for public comment on its PoS mechanism’s susceptibility to fraud and manipulation

• BlackRock has expanded trading of its spot $BTC ETF to Brazil

• Binance has launched Futures NEXT, a platform for predicting next token listings, and are also set to launch JPY spot trading pairs for $BNB, $BTC, and $ETH globally

• MicroStrategy is currently raising $700M in funds to buy more $BTC and add to their current $BTC holdings worth $13B

• Deutsche Börse has launched a crypto trading platform for institutional clients

• Revolut launched Revolut Ramp, allowing its users to top up their Metamask wallets with their digital bank account

• Coinbase has entered into the top 100 spot on the Apple App Store for the first time in two years

• Grayscale has introduced Grayscale Dynamic Income Fund, a crypto staking fund enabling exposure to multi-asset staking

• Figment and Apex Group set to launch $ETH and $SOL staking ETPs for Swiss customers

• Bitstamp has received in-principle regulatory approval to operate in Singapore

• BlockFi has reached an $875M settlement with FTX, and Pantera is seeking to purchase discounted $SOL from FTX

• DCG files motion to dismiss $3B New York AG lawsuit

• 22 crypto firms have applied for exchange licenses in Hong Kong, among them OKX, Bybit, Bullish, Crypto.com, Huobi, Matrixport, and Gate

• Worldcoin is being investigated by Spain and South Korea for privacy concerns

• OKX has integrated Uniswap API for gas-less swaps