This week, Paradigm announces a new $850mm fund to invest in early-stage blockchain startups (Bloomberg), ether ETFs could start trading as soon as the end of the summer (Axios), MicroStrategy raises another $700m in latest convertible note offering (Coindesk).
This week, Paradigm announces a new $850mm fund to invest in early-stage blockchain startups (Bloomberg), ether ETFs could start trading as soon as the end of the summer (Axios), MicroStrategy raises another $700m in latest convertible note offering (Coindesk).
💫 Optimism Fraud Proofs Go Live on Mainnet
🌞 CRV Slips as Founder's $140mm position approaches liquidation
This week was one of the bloodier ones of the year, with major altcoins down double digits WoW. While BTC and ETH managed maintain single digit losses, sectors such as rollups and alt L1s were down between ~12% and ~20%. In spite of the blood across the board, TON saw a nearly 10% increase in price likely due to excitement around new Telegram-based applications like Hamster Kombat and Yescoin. Ton TVL also saw a 25% rise this week. Bearish price action could be a result of investor sentiment being low in crypto markets, as risky public equities pushed the S&P500 and Nasdaq 100 to all-time highs this week.
There were two big macro updates on Wednesday. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the month of May, while the Federal Reserve announced their decision on interest rates. The CPI print for May indicated that inflation was unchanged month-over-month, which received a positive reaction from the market. Later on Wednesday, the Fed announced that target interest rates would be staying unchanged between 5.25-5.50% , and that they would be eyeing one rate cut in 2024 instead of the three rate cuts previously expected. On this generally positive news, the Nasdaq 100 and S&P500 finished the week with back-to-back record highs as investors continue to shift to riskier assets.
Meanwhile, at the second annual institution-focused State of Crypto Summit by Coinbase, BlackRock CIO of ETF and index investments, Samara Cohen, stated "A few years ago we thought private permissioned blockchains would lead. We now realize public blockchains are better" (X/hhorsley). Institutions are also putting their money where their mouth is. Fidelity announced this week their partnership with J.P. Morgan Onyx to tokenize a money market fund on Onyx’s Tokenized Collateral Network (TCN). We are continuing to see institutions entering and exploring the blockchain design space. If Samar Cohen’s vision is true, permissioned blockchains like JP Morgan’s Onyx may end up as only a testing ground for products that ultimately make it to public mainnets.
Ethereum scaling comes in many different flavors. In the past it has included plasma chains and sidechains, before ultimately coalescing around the rollup-centric roadmap. Today, the Layer 2 market is vibrant and competitive. This year alone has seen a 2x in TVL across select major L2s as EIP4844 reduced gas fees and major network Blast went live.
There has been some discussion around whether or not these Layer 2 rollups should even be considered rollups in their current state since they are missing some essential technological components. One major criticism has been to optimistic rollups as they have (had) not implemented fraud proofs, a key component of their design. Shortly after the mainnet launch of EIP4844, Vitalik criticized the Ethereum community for being lenient on these rollups. He stated that by the end of 2024, he hopes the community will “only treat a project as a rollup if it has actually reached at least stage 1” (referring to the ‘stages’ scale created by L2Beat.com).
Optimistic rollups are called ‘optimistic’ because they assume all transactions that are posted to the securing Layer 1, Ethereum in this case, to be valid. In theory, there is supposed to be a 7 day challenge period where users can challenge invalid transactions. These challenges are known as fraud proofs and they are critical to the integrity of rollups.
This week, Optimism released permissionless fraud proofs on mainnet, the first major optimistic rollup to do so. By way of comparison, Arbitrum One, the other major optimistic rollup considered in Stage 1, has implemented fraud proofs but the system remains permissioned.
The Optimism team brought up some interesting lore to go along with the announcement. Historically, they had the OVM (Optimistic Virtual Machine), but they decided to get rid of it - about 100,000 lines of code - and start from scratch. Now they have remade the entire system to be EVM-equivalent with multiple clients and proofs so there are no single points of failure.
This year, the market capitalization of Optimism’s governance token, OP, has been consistently sliding lower. It started out the year at around $3.5B before rising up to nearly $5B in March. Since then, the market cap has slid down more than 50% to $2.1B. Despite the negative price action, key fundamental metrics like daily transactions and daily active addresses have actually increased by about 50% since the start of the year. The rollup market will be one to watch as other rollups built on Optimism’s OP Stack (like Base and Blast) integrate fraud proofs on their mainnets.
Other news from rollups:
Curve Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, made headlines this week due to a series of events involving its founder, Michael Egorov, and the platform's soft liquidation mechanism. Michael Egorov, the founder of Curve Finance, faced significant liquidation pressures on his loans due to a sharp drop in the CRV token price. He had borrowed various stablecoins from DeFi platforms like Inverse, UwU Lend, Fraxlend, and Curve’s LlamaLend using CRV tokens as collateral. The liquidation of Egorov's positions was substantial, with reports indicating that $140 million in CRV across different protocols was at risk of liquidation.
Curve Finance's Lending-Liquidating Automate Market Maker Algorithm (LLAMMA) successfully handled the liquidation, ensuring that it occurred without resulting in "bad debts" — debt that cannot be repaid or liquidated profitably. The LLAMMA mechanism deposits collateral into multiple bands across the automated market maker (AMM), allowing for continuous liquidation of collateral if needed. This mechanism gave time for liquidators to prepare funds and liquidate the user’s position without leaving any bad debts.
The CRV token price plummeted by over 28% in response to the liquidation, sparking concerns in the DeFi market. Egorov actively managed his debt positions, executing multiple liquidations, repayments, and withdrawals across various DeFi platforms. He praised Curve Finance's soft liquidation mechanism for its successful handling of the situation, stating that it gave time for liquidators to prepare funds and liquidate the hacker's position without leaving any bad debts. These events highlight the complexities and risks involved in DeFi lending and the importance of robust mechanisms like LLAMMA to mitigate these risks.
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