Wormhole airdrop generates wealth effect
Wormhole airdrop generates wealth effect
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Welcome to Stay on-chain! This week saw Bitcoin hitting all-time highs, with meme coins stealing the show to altcoins and Wormhole spilling the beans on one of the most awaited airdrops in 2024. Sit back, relax, and let us sift through the noise.
By the way, make sure to join us on Telegram 👾
This week the markets have been on a rollercoaster ride, with prices swinging wildly, and causing up to $1B of liquidations on Tuesday. Bitcoin hit a new all-time high, breaking past $69,000. Ethereum, recently outperforming Bitcoin, and all altcoins are in the green, yet Bitcoin's dominance remains strong. It's the season for memecoins too, with PEPE and WIF ripping hard, even surpassing major crypto projects in terms of market cap.
The Stay on-chain wallet is performing well, up 43%, though it's still not doing as well as Bitcoin in YTD terms. We're confident this won't last long, as we believe our focus on major altcoins will outperform Bitcoin in the long run. This week, we've moved some of our USDC into Solana-based coins. We've set up a new Solana wallet and, with $142 USDC bridged, bought some SOL and WHALES. For those interested in the details, head over to our Google sheet where we explain every move.
Check out Rabby Wallet — the best EVM wallet we use for everything on-chain. Use our referral code to give Stay on-chain a boost. Thanks for the support!
Wormhole is airdropping $W
Wormhole, a cross-chain bridge, is airdropping its $W token to its application users and community members. They are distributing over 617 million tokens, which is about 6% of the tokens supply, to 400,000 wallet holders. The total supply of $W is set to be 10 billion tokens, while the circulating supply at launch will count to 1.8 billion tokens. The token is currently trading around $2.3 in pre-market on Bybit.
Wormholle took a snapshot of user activity on February 6 to determine for the airdrop eligibility. You can check if your wallet is eligible here.
Ethereum’s upgrading to Dencun on the 13th
Scheduled for March 13, the Dencun upgrade is set among other things to reduce fees for Ethereum rollups up to 90%, improving its scalability issue noticeably. However, mainnet fees won’t be affected by this update — with a simple swap costing up to $200 in recent days. The most popular rollups, such as Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, are set to adopt the new EIP-4844 standard on launch day, reducing fees straight away. Whilst Ethereum upgrades have often seen a sell-the-news pattern as upgrades roll out, this might change as Bitcoin just reached all-time highs while Ether did not, paving the way for a catch-up in the short to medium term.
Want to track the Bitcoin ETF inflows? There you go.
Meme-coin season is here
It seems like there's a meme coin coming for every meme out there. The big hits are WIF and BONK, both of which are on the Solana blockchain. For a short time, the market cap of the two has even surpassed that of top crypto projects like Sei, Celestia, and Arbitrum. A major highlight of this week is WIF (which features a dog wearing a hat) being listed on Binance. Other coins like PEPE, Dogecoin, and Shibainu have also been doing well. It's a booming time for meme coins.
Solana is actually the primary blockchain where these coins are being traded, with trading volume reaching $15 billion, setting new records, and beating EVM chains like Arbitrum.
Grayscale launches Proof-of-Stake focused fund
Grayscale, the company behind the biggest Bitcoin spot ETF GBTC, is back at it. The Grayscale Dynamic Income Fund (GDIF) is going to be their first actively managed fund, composed of uniquely Proof-of-Stake (PoS) tokens to be staked on the respective networks to generate yield: Aptos, Celestia, Coinbase Staked Ethereum, Cosmos, Near, Osmosis, Polkadot, SEI network, and Solana. Announced during the flash crash of the other day, the news has been well received by markets, with tokens like APT rallying 10%.
Your size is not size: Tether market cap has reached $100B, and is now the third most capitalized crypto asset.
Jupiter introduces six launchpad candidates
Jupiter is the one-stop shop on Solana: there you can swap, trade, provide liquidity, and soon enough participate in launchpads. JUP holders will be, in fact, able to vote which projects get to launch their token on Jupiter, and get rewarded with a share of the project’s token (as Jupiter charges a 1% fee of the total supply) — to do so, JUP holders will have to lock their tokens for a minimum of 30 days. After a troublesome launch, JUP has now recovered sharply, nearing its all-time high today — showing strong interest in the new voting mechanics. Head here to evaluate the first six candidates!
Bitcoin Ordinals are gaining traction
NFTs have always been an Ethereum thing, with Solana catching up recently. Yet, in the past 7 days, Magic Eden generated $101M in volume second only to Blur, with $168M. Magic Eden is the leading platform for Bitcoin NFTs, so-called Ordinals — with collections listed on it getting quite some traction: NodeMonkes, Bitcoin Puppets, NatCats. Nonetheless, the most capitalized Ethereum NFT collection has a $2B mcap, whilst the bigger one on Bitcoin just a ‘mere’ $400M. Word of advice? Don’t sleep on Ordinals.
First cycle? Catch up on the last one, and learn valuable lessons.
Coinbase introduces Smart Wallet
Launched as the next iteration of the Coinbase wallet and clamored as the ‘most important product’ since the Base blockchain, the Smart wallet introduces a whole new approach. Besides being able to use your Coinbase balance on-chain, its novelty is the lightning setup: setting it up takes 10 seconds. Try for yourself here. Besides, you don’t need separate extensions or applications to make it work, nor to save your seed phrase anywhere, but rather secure it using traditional measures like 2FA. P.S. Create your wallet and mint the early adopted badge, the gas fees are on Coinbase!
🏦 TRADFI
SEC delays Blackrock and Fidelity spot Ethereum ETF — SEC
Pantera is raising funds to buy FTX’s massive SOL stake — Bloomberg
Wall Street Journal accused of defamation over Tether-Bitfinex article — Coindesk
Revolut launches direct crypto purchases into Metamask — Coindesk
Microstrategy offers $600M Convertible Senior Notes — microstrategy.com
The Nigerian government is suing Binance for $10B — gazettengr.com
Athens exchange group evaluating SUI as a way to bring its order books on-chain — prnewswire.com
⛓️ DEFI
Robinhood Wallet integrated Arbitrum for token swap — The Block
Ethena’s USDe is launching on Injective, the first non-EVM chain — Blog
Friend.tech is hinting at an airdrop in March — 𝕏/friendtech
Stride introduces stDYM — 𝕏/stride_zone
Mantle’s meme-coin Puff to end its #1 mint later today — puffthedragon.xyz
Tether developed a coin recovery tool — tether.to
Optimism-based chain have undergone the Delta update reducing fees — The Block
Astar zkEVM launches with Polygon’s AggLayer integration — 𝕏/AstarNetwork
Fraxtal, Frax L2, is live — 𝕏/hearthereum
🛰️ TECH
Dymension introduces permissioned RollApps — 𝕏/dymension
Metis is teasing the launch of their decentralized sequencer — 𝕏/MetisL2
📱 WEB3
Spain blocks Sam Altman’s Worldcoin — Financial Times
💰 VC
AI-focused blockchain startup IO Research raises $30M — Reuters
Mirana Ventures invested $8M in the Telegram Open Network — Blog
ZK-EVM RollUp Taiko raised $37M — 𝕏/taikoxyz
High yield, tokenless protocol, on a tokenless blockchain. Three birds, one stone. Earn a 26.48% APR on the ETH-wstETH LP on SyncSwap, given wstETH is Lido’s version of staked Ether, the impermanent loss is nearly non-existent.
Feeling modular? Dymension recently launched liquidity pools, with yields like 161.83% APR for the DYM/ATOM LP, or 184.67% APR for the DYM/USDT LP.
There’s a huge frenzy around the newly launched Hooks on Init Capital, the premier lending protocol on Mantle, which has free on-ramps if you’re withdrawing from ByBit. There you can currently earn a 16.58% APY on your wETH, plus a 1.24% nice bonus in MNT tokens.
Want to be part of the Stay on-chain community? Join the crew on Telegram, and follow our latest announcements here.
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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.