Tech
The protocol: use the printer for money
One thing blockchain teams got right at a long time ago: co-opting the money printer, from initial coin offerings, or ICOs, in the late 2010s, to today’s “token generation events,” or TGEs. In the old days, stocks were sold by investment banks to clients lucky enough to get a share. Nowadays, most interesting projects simply throw newly produced tokens to users as a reward and start trading. This week there were airdrops by the cross chain bridge team Wormhole and the “synthetic dollar” project. Ethenawhose tokens suddenly have a combined circulating market capitalization of over $3 billion.
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DOLLARS IN SUMMARY: In February, The Protocol wrote about the perceived risks around the Ethena crypto projectwith its new USDe token – called “synthetic dollar” with attractive returns (currently 35%) from financing perpetual futures positions on derivatives exchanges. Apparently there are many believers in the project, or at least many speculators. On Tuesday, Ethena airdropped about 750 million ENA tokens, or about 5% of the overall supply, for first-day circulation market capitalization of approximately $1.2 billion. (The fully diluted valuation, based on total supply, is about $12 billion.) The success of the airdrop may reflect the current appetite for risk-taking among cryptocurrency traders and the indomitable will of crypto alchemists. structured cryptocurrency finance to test the waters for products of ever-increasing complexity. A separate project, the Cega derivative protocol, was unveiled earlier this weekGold rusha basket options strategy involving the ether of the Ethereum blockchain (ETH) tokens and Tether’s gold-backed XAUT tokens as underlying assets, along with a security component that protects users’ capital from a 30% decline in asset prices,” as reported by Omkar Godbole of CoinDesk. “The product offers an annualized percentage return of up to 83% to investors investing in ETH, Lido staking ether (stETH), wrapped bitcoin (wBTC) or the USDC stablecoin in the options strategy vault, Cega said Yield is paid in the form of staked coins, so ETH stakers receive ETH in yield, providing asymmetric upside in a bull market.” The hope, of course, is to avoid any asymmetric downsides.
BLOB, BLOB, BLOB. The Ethereum blockchain completed its milestone just a couple of weeks ago Dencún updateincluding the highly anticipated proposal EIP-4844 that created a dedicated space for data storage, known as “BLOB“, as part of a plan to reduce fares and relieve congestion at the same time. But it didn’t take long for a new project to come along and block the so-called blob space, sending fares soaring and providing the nascent blob market with the his first major effort test reported last week from our Margaux Nijkerk, Ethereum gas fees for blobs increased “after a project called Labels created a new way of inscribing data, or coining inscriptions, onto blobs of data, called ‘blobscriptions.'” In a blog post On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that the Blobscriptions episode had pushed the new blob fee market into “price discovery mode,” but added that data fees still remained much cheaper than how much they would have been with the old system of parking data as “calldata” in a normal Ethereum transaction.
About Buterin, it also has riff on meme coins. “One response to this conundrum is to shake our heads and virtue signal how much we thoroughly detest and oppose this stupidity. And to some extent, that is the right thing to do,” she wrote. “But at the same time, we can also ask another question: If people value fun, and financialized games seem to at least sometimes provide it, then could there be a more positive-sum version of this whole concept?” Spoiler alert: His answer wasn’t yes/no. (Now go Here for our riff last week on the meme coin frenzy on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 chain, Base.)
Last week’s top picks from our Protocol Village column, highlighting the main updates and innovations in blockchain technology.
Diagram showing how Celestia’s Blobstream works. (Celestia)
1. Celestiaa blockchain data availability project, he said Blobstream product – to stream Celestia data root commitments using a lightweight on-chain client, has been deployed on Arbitrum One. According to the team: “Developers will soon be able to deploy Orbits with Celestia underneath on Arbitrum One and Base, the first modular DA integration with working Nitro fraud proofs.”
2. Degenerationa community token in the Farcaster ecosystem, and Syndicate, a Web3 infrastructure provider, were launched Chain of degeneration, an ultra-low-cost L3 for the $DEGEN community built with Arbitrum Orbit, Base for settlement, and AnyTrust for data availability. According to the team: “The chain’s native gas token is $DEGEN, making it one of the first community tokens with its own L3.”
3. Picasso Networkan interoperability network rooted in the Cosmos, announced an integration between IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol) and Ethereum, “enabling Seamless asset and data transfers between Ethereum and Cosmos” for the first time, according to the team: “Picasso has chosen Osmosis, the DeFi Hub, as the primary destination for Ethereum assets and liquidity within the Cosmos. This integration is a step forward in bringing “IBC everywhere” and serves to connect some of the deepest liquidity reserves and most promising projects in the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems.” The team plans a Solana-IBC connection later this month.
4. Helpfula modular blockchain solution designed to unify Web3 and optimize data availability (DA). collaborated with dWallet Network“a pioneering decentralized, non-collusive, multi-chain layer to bring programmable native Bitcoin to rollups in the Avail ecosystem,” according to the team: “Leveraging the newly unveiled dWallet primitive, smart contracts using rollups built on Avail DA will be able to programmatically manage native BTC for the first time while preserving user ownership.”
5. EXCLUSIVE VILLAGE PROTOCOL: THE Virtual Society Foundation (VSF) is introducing the Somnia Project, consisting of L1 and omnichain protocols tailored for the metaverse, “with the goal of uniting disparate virtual realms into a cohesive society capable of accommodating millions of users,” according to the team. “Developed in collaboration with Improbable, the Somnia blockchain boasts transaction speeds >100,000 TPS, with sub-second finality and affordability, addressing the fragmentation plaguing the metaverse landscape and ensuring equitable distribution of value among creators. The details of the project were released Wednesday along with a litepaper. The VSF, presented last weekwas started by Improbable, a UK startup focused on the that metaverse raised $150 million in 2022 from investors including a16z and SoftBank.
We were writing about various meme coin trading frenzies throughout March, for one thing Solanaand then away Basic. Or maybe it was really just a big meme coin trading frenzy? In any case, it would be pretty hard for us to feign surprise at this point that the dog-themed SHIB and DOGE ended up as the two best-performing tokens of the month in the benchmark Coin Desk 20 index. Ethereum’s ETH was a little more muted, gaining just 3.9% as the blockchain’s biggest Dencún update everything went as smoothly as could be expected. Solana’s SOL was a big winner, earning 43%:
Bitcoin, the oldest and largest cryptocurrency, rose 14%, extending its winning streak to seven consecutive months and easily beating the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of US stocks and the price of gold:
June 11-13: ApexXRP Ledger Developer Summit, Amsterdam.
8-11 July: EthCCBrussels.