The Web3 gaming firm Immutable disclosed that the SEC has issued them a Wells notice (immutable.com), Spire Labs secured $7 million in funding to advance Ethereum scaling with its “Based Stack” rollup framework (The Block)
This week, the Web3 gaming firm Immutable disclosed that the SEC has issued them a Wells notice (immutable.com), Spire Labs secured $7 million in funding to advance Ethereum scaling with its “Based Stack” rollup framework (The Block), and dYdX and Consensys announce mass layoffs of 35% and 20%, respectively (CCN).
🌞 Glow's $30 Million Raise and DePIN Potential
💫 Solana restaking takes off as Jito launches restaking product
Digital asset markets over the past week have turned to the downside, with many major assets down over 10% over the past 7 days. This comes in spite of BTC nearly breaching all time highs early last week when it surpassed $73,000. Sui was the sole winner over the past week, despite being down over 20% from recent all time highs set in mid-October.
The crypto world is bracing for high-stakes volatility as the U.S. presidential election looms. Investors are jittery about the binary nature of the election outcome, with polls showing a tight race between Trump and Harris. This uncertainty has spilled over into crypto, where traders are positioning cautiously. Polymarket has Trump at 57% chance of winning, while offchain competitor Kalshi the odds at 51-49 in favor of Trump. As Polymarket's trading volume exceeded $100 million this past week, mainstream media has scrutinized both the platform's legitimacy and the reliability of its prediction odds ahead of the election - (eg. Fortune).
Simultaneously, the U.S. Treasury, in their quarterly presentation to the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC), included nearly 30 pages about the Treasury’s vision of tokenization. The presentation acknowledged the demand for treasuries brought by stablecoin usage, while also emphasizing the need for CBDCs to replace private stablecoins in underpinning tokenized transactions. The presentation states that “stablecoins will need to be regulated like narrow banks or money market funds to prevent contagion”. The presentation also goes over the ‘promise of tokenized financial market infrastructure’, something we at Artemis dove into back in July.
Glow, an Ethereum-based solar infrastructure protocol, raised $30 million in a funding round led by Framework Ventures and Union Square Ventures. The protocol utilizes DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) technology to incentivize solar farms to outperform traditional energy grids. This model rewards energy producers with GLW tokens based on output, aiming to achieve 100% renewable energy. The success of Glow could set a precedent for DePIN technology, which merges blockchain incentives with real-world infrastructure. This innovative approach highlights how crypto can address climate change while also presenting a new use case for decentralized systems.
According to data form Dune, Glow has already generated millions in protocol fees, with a surge in recent months.
These fee metrics would put Glow on top of other leading DePIN projects like Geodnet, Helium and Akash which, in aggregate, generate about $500k in monthly fees.
What is Glow?
Glow is tackling a critical issue in solar infrastructure: optimizing subsidies to maximize renewable energy impact. The protocol employs a unique approach by requiring participating solar farms to dedicate 100% of their electricity revenue to a shared incentive pool. This pool distributes carbon credits
and GLW tokens, creating a self-selection mechanism where only solar projects needing these incentives opt-in. Projects that are already profitable independently would prefer to keep their revenue rather than exchange it for credits and tokens. Glow's system establishes a market-driven equilibrium similar to Bitcoin's mining mechanism. In Bitcoin, the difficulty adjustment ensures only the most efficient miners succeed, driving the network toward higher efficiency. Likewise, Glow incentivizes solar farms to become more efficient and locate in areas with the highest climate impact. By competing for a fixed pool of rewards, this drives solar development to the most cost-effective and environmentally impactful areas, thereby reducing the cost per ton of carbon reduction over time.
As the energy sector grapples with growing electrification demands, AI, and the imperative for decarbonization, innovative coordination mechanisms like Glow are crucial. Glow represents an ambitious attempt to harness crypto networks to efficiently allocate capital and maximize climate impact. Glow leverages a two token model, the native GLW token, an inflationary token used to incentivize stakeholders, and the GCC token, which is also Glow’s main product: the Glow Carbon Credit. GCC supply has inflected and cumulative supply is growing exponentially.
As the DePIN space continues to mature, Glow will certainly be a project to watch.
The Ethereum liquid restaking market currently has ~$9bn in restaked ETH, down from a peak of $15bn back in June 2024. Now the Solana ecosystem is looking to restaking to innovate on the current idle $60bn SOL staking market.
Solana liquid staking has struggled to take hold in the same way that it has on Ethereum, where over 30% of staked ETH is staked through liquid staking services like Lido. On Solana, a mere ~5% of SOL are liquid staked, while the remaining 95% are staked natively. This is partly be due to Solana’s lower staking requirements, and faster withdrawal times.
Even with such a low portion of SOL in liquid staking platforms, there is clear demand for liquid staking tokens, as evidenced by the constant growth in LST TVL since 2021. Jito has proven to be a winner in this space. Despite arriving late to the market, Jito has been able to amass 50% market share. Jito is able to give Jito stakers an additional yield generated through MEV captured via their Solana client, Jito Solana.
Now Jito is entering the fledgling Solana restaking market first entered by Solayer. Solayer has amassed $300m in deposits since launching earlier in 2024. Jito is once again starting from behind in this market, at 8% market share.
Although both Solayer and Jito are both competing in the restaking market, they have different approaches. Jito is focused on leveraging restaking to create Node Consensus Networks (NCNs) that secure ‘exogenous’ applications such as oracles, bridges and Layer 2s. On the other hand, Solayer targets ‘endogenous’ applications, or dApps. While both protocols are seeking to attract the same pool of capital, they will put it to use in different ways which may help them target specific users. This is still a very young space and we are excited to see how it will develop.
Subscribe to our newsletter and understand what’s happening on-chain.