Weekly Notes 13
11-09-2023 to 17-09-2023
Developments
On September 13th, the courts approved FTX in their mission to liquidation of select crypto assets. Initially they will have a $50M per week sales limit, going to $100M per week in the second week after approval.
In the amended proposal, FTX will only notify the U.S. Trustee, the committee, and the Ad Hoc committee, giving them a 10 day prior notice.
The courts approved FTXs plans to liquidate select crypto assets. Initially they will have a $100M per week sales limit, which can be increased to $200M per week in the second week if given approval.
SOL is a large holding of the FTX estate and has been the centre of sustained selling pressure and OI increases as market participants short the token ahead of the decision in a couple days. It's important to note a lot of this $1.16B SOL position is locked, linearly unlocking until 2028.
In addition to the FTX estate’s top 10 Crypto assets shown below, they also own 38 properties that have been appraised at between $185 - $214 million cumulatively and have successfully secured ~ $2.6 billion in cash since FTX’s initial bankruptcy.
As of current, 36,075 customers have filed claims across FTX.com and FTX US for a total $16 billion in funds.
Mountain Protocol has announced the official launch of its protocol and $USDM, a short-term US treasuries backed stablecoin, which provides users daily rewards in the form of rebasing that reflects the rate on US treasuries(currently above 5%).
$USDM is pegged to $1 and seeks to collapse the walls that prevent people from outside of the US from accessing the high yield that treasury bills offer. It also has the potential for other protocols to use it as a foundation for liquidity in other protocols (ie. borrowing/lending).
Note that USDM is not available to US customers.
Mountain Protocol also announced a funding round led by Castke Uskabd Ventures which sees the participation of other notable VC’s like Coinbase Ventures, New Form Capital, Daedalus Angels among others.
A proposal has been posted for voting to Arbitrum’s snapshot to decide on the amount of Arbitrum ($ARB) to be granted to eligible protocols.
The proposal provides several amounts:
Up to 75 million $ARB (5.88% of current $ARB circulating supply)
Up to 50 million $ARB
Up to 25 million $ARB
0 (A vote against the proposal)
The voting is in favour of allocating the 50M ARB at the moment.
The criteria for a protocol to receive a (corresponding) grant is as follows:
Sushi has announced the launch of its decentralized exchange on the Aptos network. This will be the first non-EVM compatible chain that Sushi has launched on. It will also bring the total chains that SushiSwap is deployed on up to 30.
Remilio Corporation has sued three individuals identified to have been involved with the diversion (theft) of $1 million in fees generated from the Bonkler NFT and the compromising of 3 Twitter accounts.
One developer who worked on the Bonkler NFT diverted the $1 million and also coordinated with two other team members to successfully seize codebases and also compromise three social media accounts which they attempted to ransom for a share of Remillas (which remains intact).
Remilla Corp and its leader Charlotte Fang are now suing these individuals for an amount to be determined at court.
Synapse Launches Testnets of SIN and Synapse Chain
Synapse launched testnets of the Synapse Interchain Network (SIN) and Synapse Chain.
Synapse Interchain Network is a optimistic PoS interchain network for trustless communication and settlement between chains. Synapse Chain is an optimistic rollup that serves as data availability for the Interchain Network, where network agents stake tokens, confirm transactions and submit fraud proofs.
Franklin Templeton Spot Bitcoin ETF Application
Franklin Templeton has applied for a Spot Bitcoin ETF with the SEC, adding to the growing list of other titans like BlackRock and Fidelity who have applied previously. The BTC would be custodied with Coinbase and would trade on the Cboe BZX Exchange.
HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world with $3 trillion in AUM, is reportedly partnering with Fireblocks to create a cryptocurrency specific custody solution.
Fireblocks has previously developed custody technology for other notable Banks like BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas.
The ability for users to outsource custody of their Crypto to centralised systems - although somewhat opposing Crypto's intial goals of decentralisation - may invite otherwise skeptical and concerned users to cautiously enter the space.
The SEC Chair Gary Gensler has stated that the SEC is still reviewing its decision on Grayscale’s application for a Bitcoin ETF - as well as other applications for Bitcoin ETF’s.
Previously, the SEC rejected Grayscale’s application on the basis that the products did not have the necessary safeguards to prevent “fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices”. This decision by the SEC was then overturned after a lawsuit was won by Grayscale against the SEC on August 29th.
LayerZero, an omnichain interoperability protocol, announced a partnership with Google Cloud to act as their oracle for cross-chain messaging. The Google Cloud oracle is a purpose built verifier that will verify the authenticity of each LayerZero message by default unless a developer decides otherwise.
Ryan Zarick, the co-founder of LayerZero, has said that there is “no way an attack [on LayerZero] can happen without [Google Cloud] being compromised as well” - LayerZero effectively inherits the security that backs a Google service like Google Cloud.
MetaMask will be usable with non-EVM chains like Solana, Cosmos (and more) via Snaps. Snaps allows developers to create new user experiences for MetaMask wallets - the relationship between Snaps and Metamask can be likened to that between the Chrome browser and the Chrome Extensions service.
So far, over 34 “Snaps” have been deployed and have allowed customers to interact with a number of protocols, chains and services.
The BNB Chain collective has launched the opBNB mainnet an EVM compatible chain built on OP Stack.
The launch comes after opBNB’s testnet achieved 4,000 transactions per second, a block time of ~1 second and also passed stress tests to ensure high availability and robustness all while maintaining a high level of security.
The mainnet launch will seek to carry these features and while also promises gas fees as low as $0.005.
opBNB settles transactions on the BNB chain and only has one sequencer as of now but are actively developing a decentralized sequencer mechanism. The future will also see interoperability between BNB Greenfield (a decentralised storage solution) and opBNB.
A Binance address has used the most gas on the Ethereum chain periodically over the past day, consuming 117.3 $ETH (32.77% of the chains overall gas consumption). To compare, the second highest consumer on Ethereum, Uniswap, has only used 24.67 $ETH.
The address is a Binance wallet collection address that accumulates user’s crypto that has been deposited onto the exchange. So far it has accumulated ~$200 million worth of crypto.
CoinEx exchange was hacked for at least $55 million dollars. Reportedly, the North Korean Lazarus Group is responsible after hacked CoinEx funds - 180,000 $MATIC - were sent to an address involved in the recent $41 million Stake hack that the FBI determined to be the Lazarus Group.
Trending Assets
Top 300 Performers
HIFI was the top performer over the last week, and is up 82.20%, followed by ARK, up 71.63%. Notably, TON is up 30.65% and UNIBOT is up 28.72%.
Top 300 Losers
PRIME underperformed last week, and is down 17.79%. Similarly, STG is down 12.29%.
Below $100M MC by Performance, on chain
LINQ, up 88.08%, is the top performer for coins below $100M MC over the past week. FOLD also did well, and is up 46.53% over the past week.
Above $100M MC by performance, on chain
WLD performed well last week, and is up 19.24%.
Above $1B MC by performance, on chain
MKR, up 13.03%, and OP, up 8.98%, showed strength last week.
TVL
TVL Above $10M
Over the past week:
stUSDT, RWA on Tron, TVL is up 95.21%.
friendtech TVL is up 84.15%.
Binance Staked ETH TVL is up 59.81%.
Fees
Ethereum earned the highest fees over the past week, followed by Lido and friendtech. Notably, Opensea Seaport fees earned are down 54.91% and Uniswap V3 fees earned are down 39.40%.
Governance Proposals
AIP #28 - DWF Labs SPELL Token Loan and Purchase Plans
DWF requests a 4.62B SPELL (1.8m USD) token loan and a 1m USD worth of token purchase at a 15% discount, locked for 24 months coming from future SPELL emissions budget.
[FIP - 285] sFRAX Governance Proposal
Proposal regarding Staked FRAX (sFRAX), which allows users to deposit FRAX stablecoins into a smart contract (Standard ERC-4626) and earn interest (denominated in FRAX stablecoins) on their holdings.
RFP-23: Delisting BUSD as a Supported Asset
Proposal to delist BUSD as an asset on BNB Chain, since Paxos has halted the creation of new BUSD tokens.
[ARFC] Aave Treasury Proposal for RWA Allocation
Proposal for Aave Treasury to allocate $1M of USDC to the Anemoy LTF, a short-duration US treasury bill pool on Centrifuge.
Articles / Threads
Synthetix Perps Rewards: Optimism Trading & Lido Incentives Extension
Synthetix will be relaunching their trading incentives program starting on the 13th of September for both the Optimism Perps Rewards Program (100k OP per week for five weeks) and the Lido stETH Perps Rewards (1500 OP per week) programs.
Offchain Labs & Espresso Systems
Offchain Labs will be partnering with Espresso Systems to bring decentralized and open shared sequencing technology across Ethereum rollups. Offchain Labs and Espresso will be working on Timeboost, a transaction-ordering design and technical integrations of the Arbitrum Stack.
Kwenta has listed UMA & ZRX futures markets.
JonesDAO will be using 255 ETH ($418.6K) and 15K AURA ($12.6K) in incentives to buy back JONES and implement a tokenomics overhaul. Buybacks will begin Q4 2023 and continue through Q1 2024.
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