Another L1, but it's valued $2.25B

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Since the August 5th bloodbath, markets have been pretty uneventful. Majors have seen little volatility, except for BNB, TRX, and ADA adding some color (who bids them remains an open-ended question).

MATIC saw a nice run, supposedly because of the incoming transition to POL on September, 4th — which should speed up development on their unification layer ‘AggLayer’. Likewise, FTM rose on Sonic’s (formerly Fantom) incentives program fueling speculation.

Given we’re in the middle of summer, this price action shouldn’t surprise us — however, as we slide into the latest quarter of the year unburdened by Mt. Gox and German coins, it’ll be interesting to see how the elections and the FTX cash distribution are going to play out price-wise.

Story Protocol, the IP chain worth $2.25B

Korean founders with a big ego — that reminds me of LUNA, but let’s hold off with prejudices. Story protocol raised $140M in total, with its latest round (an $80M Series B led by a16z) making quite some noise. The main critique is: how can an ‘IP-focused’ L1 be worth a $2.25B valuation?

Story’s focus is on tokenizing intellectual property, allegedly a multi-trillion-dollar asset class — hence enabling its usage on DeFi apps, or simply storing it on the blockchain to prove its existence with a timestamp. One of the bets of Story’s founders is to leverage IP rights against AI giants, training world-class models based on the internet’s data.

As much as blockchains can unburden and disintermediate creators by making it easier to register IP, the legal aspect is bound to remain ‘off-chain’. Meaning, you’ll have to take people to court if they violate your IP, whether it’s on-chain or not.

EIgenLayer ‘bullying’ its partners?

CoinDesk argued, in a very controversial piece, that EigenLayer sent a list of its employees’ addresses to partner projects — even if they didn’t ask for it, enabling a dynamic where they felt forced to reward them in their airdrop allocation fearing an eventual preferential treatment for those that did. Eventually, the total amount airdropped to employees was worth $5M at the top — even though most didn’t sell.

Following the drama surrounding the Ethereum Foundation in May, with some of its members accepting advisorship roles at EigenLayer, the company prohibited employees to receive further airdrops addressing the clear conflict of interests. The CoinDesk article was followed by a company statement.

Tron reinvents itself as a meme chain

In a curious twist of events, Justin Sun’s blockchain conquered the spotlight in the past few days. Generally speaking, Tron’s only purpose is to hold the majority of USDT’s supply ($58B!) — yet, the pump.fun fork SunPump.meme has seen an incredible rise in activity generating $548K in revenue on Wednesday (beating PumpFun!). The leading memecoin is SUNDOG, currently boasting a $210M, topped at $250M. As a cherry on top, SunPump just announced its partnership with the polarising firm DWF Labs.

Editor’s opinion is that this is just an unsustainable narrative, that might go on for a while but inevitably fade into irrelevance considering Sun’s lack of transparency and shady management.

To put things into perspective, a mere 3% of wallets made over $1,000 using pump.fun. 66% of wallets lost money per this Dune dashboard. As it often happens, the Casino, or those selling pickaxes if you will, are the ones winning.

Drift launches ‘BET’ prediction market on Solana

Someone was bound to do it, and Drift was first. As much as Polymarket had the lead in on-chain prediction markets, few liked the fact that it was on Polygon: a desolated land, hard to reach and use.

Surprisingly, BET offers tighter spreads on election markets despite launching few days ago and not offering liquidity incentives at all (whilst Polymarket does). Furthermore, you can choose between 30+ supported assets as collateral to bet, and liquidity on BET earns yield as if it was supplied on Drift’s lending market — a nice addition.

This is inevitably going to speed up TGE plans for Polymarket — rules are clear, those that don’t release a token are bound to fade into irrelevance. OpenSea already made that mistake.

🌽 Corn: Ethereum L2 to empower BTC holders

Through memeatic storytelling (and a dope trailer), Corn raised a $6.7M Seed Round led by Polychain to develop an Ethereum L2 that uses BTC as a gas token. To tackle the ‘wrapping issue’, Corn is looking to issue BTCN — backed 1:1 by BTC, and not bound to a single centralized custodian (which is the case for the troubled WBTC).

In an effort to offer higher yields to BTC holders, Corn looks to issue a second inflationary token, CORN — to follow veTokenomics similar to those of CRV.

An interesting question emerges: what does the market want? Efficient DeFi apps to put BTC at work, regardless of the blockchain it’s on, or rather complex and (initially) slow & expensive solutions built atop BTC?

Happens on-chain

• MakerDAO disabled WBTC as collateral for DAI, and its borrowing and usage as collateral on SparkLend leaving unaffected existing positions — 𝕏/MakerDAO

• Justin Sun removes 12,000 BTC (~ $732M) collateral for USDD without DAO approval, making it almost entirely backed by TRX (Rings a bell? cough Luna) — Protos

• Mt. Gox transfers $74.5M BTC to Bitstamp, distribution seems mostly done — 𝕏/intangiblecoins

• Swiss Stake AG, the company behind Curve Finance, is requesting $6.3M CRV yearly allowance to continue development — 𝕏/CurveFinance

• Kinto now offers access to stock trading on-chain, featuring NVDA, COIN and others — 𝕏/KintoXYZ

• Coinbase to enable 1:1 EUR to stablecoin EURC conversion — The Block

• Asset manager Franklin Templeton brings tokenized money market fund to Avalanche — The Block

• Tether to launch USDT on Aptos — tether.to

• Tether to launch UAE dirham-pegged stablecoin — The Block

• ‘Serial rugger’ who made over $200K on Pump.fun releases interview — 𝕏/NFTNate_

• Dumpy.fun to launch squeezy.lol in effort to trigger short squeezes à la GME — DLnews

Traditional rails

• SEC expressed concerns about SOL being a security, causing ETF requests removal — The Block

• Trump says he’d offer Musk a cabinet or advisory role if elected president, Elon jokes about D.O.G.E — 𝕏/wallstreetbets

• Trump is endorsing crypto initiative by two of his sons — truthsocial.com

• FTX’s exec Ryan Salame asks to void his guilty plea — CNBC

• Binance restarts India Business after 7-months long ban — Cointelegraph

• Binance intends to hire an additional 1,000 people by end of year — The Block

• Grayscale unveils investment trust for AVAX — The Block

• South Korea’s national pension fund bought $34M worth of MSTR shares in Q2 — The Block

• Following HashDex, Franklin Templeton files S-1 for mcap-weighted ETF holding both BTC and ETH under ‘EZPZ’ ticker — The Block

• Italian bank ‘Banca Sella’ starts offering Bitcoin services on its banking platform — 𝕏/BitcoinMagazine

• Hong Kong lawmakers are calling for DAOs regulation — The Block

• El Salvador launches Bitcoin certification program to upskill 80,000 civil servants — 𝕏/bitcoinofficecsv

• Malaysian authorities destroy over 900 bitcoin mining rigs amid power theft crackdown — The Block

Tech go up

• Optimism disables permissionless fraud proofs two months after activation due to several vulnerabilities — The Block

• Aave V3 debuts on ZkSync Era mainnet, front-end not updated yet — 𝕏/aave

• Arbitrum DAO approves temperature check on ARB staking — The Block

• Starknet to let STRK holders vote on the introduction of a staking mechanism — 𝕏/Starknet

• Telegram to launch its own wrapped Bitcoin, tgBTC — 𝕏/ton_blockchain

• Bitcoin staking platform Babylon to start phased mainnet launch this week — CoinDesk

• Basenames are now live — 𝕏/base

• Galxe launches alpha mainnet of its L1 Gravity Chain — The Block

VCs go brrr

• Risk management firm Chaos Labs raised $55M Series A led by Haun Ventures — 𝕏/Chaos_labs

• Fabric raised $33M Series A led by Blockchain Capital and 1k(x) to develop hardware solutions designed for cryptography — crypto-fundraising.info

• Sorella Labs raised $7.5M Seed Round led by Paradigm to address Ethereum’s MEV problem — crypto-fundraising.info

• Arch secures $5M in funding to make crypto lending great again — Fortune

Airdrops

• Swell revealed details on its TGE and airdrop, set to happen in October — 𝕏/swellnetworkio

• Someone released a marks rank checker for the Scroll airdrop — scrollstat.xyz

• Sonic (formerly Fantom) introduces ‘gems’ incentives campaign and bounty program fueling $FTM speculation — 𝕏/0xSonicLabs

• Puff’s Chapter 6 rewards are out — puffthedragon.xyz

• Orderly’s $ORDER goes live on the 26th, with staking on the same day — 𝕏/OrderlyNetwork

• Telegram’s DOGS airdrop is going live on the 23rd — t.me

Upcoming events

• September, 4: MATIC to migrate to POL

• September, 10: Harris and Trump debate leading to presidential elections

• September, 10: Optimism Granite hard-fork

• September, 18-19: Token2049 in Singapore

• September, 20-21: Solana Breakpoint in Singapore

• September, 29: Chengpeng Zhao released from prison

• September, 30: Supposed deadline to make $EIGEN transferable

• December, 5-6: Emergence conference in Prague

• Security first. Aave offers a 9% APY for supplying their stablecoin GHO on Arbitrum, or 28.2% APR if you stake it on Ethereum (in this case, you risk slashing, hence the higher yield).

• The USDY chakra pool on Mantra is currently paying out an astounding 466.67% APR. On top of that, you’ll get 5.35% in USDY yield. Note that here your deposit is locked until Mantra launches its mainnet, and rewards are bound to be diluted over time as more people join the pool.

• PYUSD, backed by PayPal, is incentivizing lending pools on Kamino and Drift. There you can earn respectively 15.67% and 17.23% APY.

• Good ol’ Avalanche: secure a 21.57% APR providing liquidity for the USDT/USDC pair on TraderJoe

• Fell in love with JLP? Storm.trade offers SLP, similar to JLP but on the Ton Blockchain, averaging a 58% APR on your USDT.

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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.