Germany, are you done?

Weekly Jul 11, 2024

Welcome to Stay on-chain!

Dear readers, the weekly roundup will take a break for the following two weeks. Fear not, we won’t leave you alone! Two special editions are on the way for both Thursdays, and we’ll be back with the routine roundup on Aug, 1st.

Meanwhile, enjoy today’s edition!

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All in all, the situation didn’t change much from the past week where we outlined the major blockers and catalysts for the cycle we’re in. Certainly, seeing the fear & greed sub-30 is a strong indicator of fear.

Mt. Gox is set to distribute $8B in BTC to creditors, and they’ve already begun to do so. Apparently, Bitstamp and Kraken customers are getting their share of the pie soon. Meanwhile, the German government has almost run out of BTC after relentlessly dumping $3B every day during the past week.

The consensus is that the FED is going to start cutting rates in September, and FTX creditors should be getting $16B in cash by end of year. The future looks bright, for those eager to wait.

After the bloodbath we’ve witnessed, many alts are starting to catch a bid - such as TIA & OM. Whilst there’s little reason to believe BTC, ETH, and SOL could be lower in a year from now, many of these alts are going to witness massive unlocks and asymptote to zero.

Couple of interesting reads: has this cycle topped? and a bullish scenario by Travis Kling

Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and why it matters

Compound Finance and Celer Network have seen their domains hijacked in the past few hours. Moreover, other major crypto front-ends are at risk since they’re using the same registrar as the aforementioned (Squarespace). What does that mean? Essentially, that exploiters gets access to the domain, and are able to redirect traffic to a phishing website to steal users funds.

There’s an important distinction to make: while the smart contracts governing the protocol itself remains safe, the front-end that makes it easy to interact with those smart contracts is not. Think of the front-end (i.e. the website) merely as a way to access a protocol, not as the protocol itself. You could nevertheless still interact with the protocol directly should you be savvy enough

Try that yourself! Go to Etherscan, open a random contract like this one governing the UNI-USDT liquidity pool, and check out the functions on Contract > Write Contract. Those are the functions you call unbeknownst when using Uniswap’s front-end.

So, how to protect yourself? First of all, social proof goes a long way. As much as we’re all degenerate gamblers here, we care for one another. Within minutes, you’ll see warnings of the hijacking on the communities you’re in and from the protocols themselves (always double-check more than one social network, they can get hacked as well!). Secondly, consider using IPFS, an alternative to the traditional & centralized HTTP/S protocols that makes the internet decentralized in a peer-to-peer fashion. You can read more here, but in essence, it makes hacker’s jobs much harder. Using IPFS, you’d have to exploit the majority of the network instead of just one entity as it’s the case with HTTP/S.

Stay safe out there!

What is IPFS?

According to Forbes, Argentina (276% cumulative inflation YoY) has the highest rate of crypto adoption in the Western Hemisphere — 𝕏/LDNCryptoClub

Germany, are you done?

The German government seized 50,000 BTC in January — the loot comes from Movie2K, a defunct piracy website. At that time, BTC was worth pennies.

Yet, the way they’re managing it is debatable: since a few days, they’ve been making major headlines as they’re sending out BTC to exchanges every few hours. From $3.6B, they’re now down to just $577M per Arkham. This, as you may imagine, sparked quite some fear in the markets together with Mt.Gox starting to distribute $8B in BTC.

There are quite a few ways they could’ve done better: striking OTC deals, selling into high-volume & high-euphoria phases, and so on. Even Justin Sun proposed to facilitate an OTC deal to take these coins off the market.

On the bright side, they’re almost out of ammo, and within years we’ll probably be talking about this episode as one of the worst financial decisions this government took. But to each its own.

Joana Cotar, a German politician and Bitcoin activist, urged its government to refrain from dumping all its holdings so hastily advocating for how they could benefit from the seized BTC.

As a cherry on top, someone sent to the government’s wallet an inscription saying “Taxation is robbery”.

Crypto.com exchange market share in the US reaches 31%, recovering towards 2022 peak at 44% — The Block

Ether ETFs, wen?

We’re almost there. ETF issuers handed the SEC their latest S-1 forms (necessary to begin trading) on July 8th, and are now waiting for further guidance from the agency. Even though final S-1 drafts could be required by the SEC, the ETFs launch is still expected during the next week.

19b-4 forms, necessary to inform the SEC when launching a new ETF, were approved back in May. Cmon Larry, save our bags.

Happens on-chain

  • MASA token & subnet launch on Bittensor — Medium
  • Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER has partnered with DFW Labs — 𝕏/DWFLabs
  • MakerDAO’s endgame is coming ‘in a few months’ — 𝕏/Crypto101Pod
  • Most miners aren’t profiting hence they turn of their machines, making the hash rate of the Bitcoin network drop — The Block

Traditional rails

  • BitMEX exchange pleads guilty to Bank Secrecy Act offense — The Block
  • SEC drops Paxos investigation and decides BUSD isn’t a security — Fortune
  • Microstrategy to split its stock 10:1 — CoinDesk
  • The deadline for Solana ETFs approval is in Mid-March 2025 — 𝕏/EricBalchunas
  • Singapore court awards $2.2M to Fantom for losses incurred on the Multichain bridge — fantom.foundation
  • Celsius Network is suing users who withdrew money as much as 90 days before the platform went bankrupt — 𝕏/medx0
  • Leo Messi and Ronaldinho are shilling Solana memecoins — 𝕏/krugermacro
  • At least four people have been mugged (one of which at gunpoint) so far at EthCC Brussels — 𝕏/jtriley_eth
  • Arkham Intelligence CEO said at EthCC they’ll introduce paid features to the platform — The Block
  • Polychain says former general partner Niraj Pant (Ritual Co-Founder) made a secret deal with portfolio company Eclipse Labs prior to its funding, allocating himself 5% of the token supply — CoinDesk
  • Malaysian miners allegedly stole $722M worth of electricity between 2018 and 2023 — Protos
  • Goldman Sachs to launch three tokenization projects by end of year — 𝕏/NateGeraci

Tech go up

  • PYTH Network launches ‘Express Relay’ service aiming to eliminate MEV — The Block
  • There’s a L2 set to launch on TON using Polygon’s CDK and AggLayer — CoinDesk
  • Wormhole introduces native USDT transfers for 7 networks — 𝕏/wormhole
  • Hamster Kombat unveils HamsterChain, TON L2 focused on Tap-to-earn mini-games — 𝕏/HamsterChain
  • Starknet blockchain to enable staking by end of year — CoinDesk

VCs go brrr

  • Rome protocol raised $9M to serve Ethereum L2s through Solana — crypto-fundraising.info
  • Coinbase has invested $1M into Ampleforth, creator of inflation-tracking stablecoin SPOT — The Block
  • Notcoin, 1inch, and Sign launch accelerator for Telegram and TON ecosystem — The Block

Airdrops

Upcoming Calendar

  • July, 12: ETHFI airdrop claim
  • July, 15: STRK unlocks 4.92% of its circulating supply
  • July, 25: ALT unlocks 42.08% of its circulating supply
  • July, 27: Trump will be speaking at Nashville’s Bitcoin 2024 convention
  • August, 3: W unlocks 33.3% of its circulating supply
  • September, 18-19: Token2049 in Singapore
  • September, 20-21: Solana Breakpoint in Singapore
  • December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

Moreover, Japan’s crypto scene is going to be busy this summer

  • Infinex, backed by Synthetix’s founder Kain Warwick, is set to bring a CEX-alike user experience to DeFi by creating a hub where decentralized applications seamlessly interact with each other. Right now, you can participate in their ‘Craterun’ campaign — infinex.xyz
  • Aptos aficionado? Say no more. By LPing wUSDC/zUSDC on Cellana, you can earn a 27.09% APR paid in CELL tokens.
  • Optimism’s superfest brings 1.5M OP in incentives — 𝕏/Optimism

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Disclosure: Authors may own crypto assets named in this newsletter. Stay on-chain is meant for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult your investment, tax, or legal advisor before making investment decisions.

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Jakob

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