Finishing: Mars Finance
Mars Crypto Daily April 17, 2024
1. Today's news
Venture capitalists have poured billions of dollars into the DePIN space, and some of them have put their entire money into the DePIN protocol. Although the total market capitalization of DePIN projects is now in the tens of billions of dollars, the problem facing the industry is that there are relatively few customers. Analysts point out that DePIN projects with great potential are those where the need for the underlying service is clearly discerned, meaning that the customer is already there.
CryptoQuant posted on platform X that BTC's exchange withdrawals reached its highest level since January 2023, indicating that BTC has entered an important accumulation phase. In addition, recent data suggests that there is a possibility that the price will rise after the market cools down (BTC has fallen by 10% in the last week). Analysts noted that the open interest in BTC contracts on derivatives exchanges decreased from $18 billion to $14.2 billion, showing a reduction in leveraged trading. This is after a period of high trading activity and could mean that the market has stabilized temporarily.
Merlin Chain announced on the X platform that it has now opened the airdrop query page corresponding to Merlin's Seal points, and users can report related questions within 24 hours.
According to QuickNode and Artemis' Q1 on-chain report, total investment in Web3 companies increased by 55% in the quarter, showing a return in VC interest in cryptocurrency. In addition, the number of Web3 VC investment transactions also increased by 36% compared to the previous quarter. Among them, artificial intelligence (AI) and gaming-related Web3 protocols accounted for the lion's share of the investment.
B² Network, a BTC Layer 2 project, has announced the official launch of its mainnet. At present, users can use the official bridge and meson.fi bridge assets to enter the B² Network, ecological projects and assets will gradually deploy the mainnet, and Buzz activity asset extraction and mining activities will start one after another.
The Snapshot page shows that a financial proposal by Sushi DAO was approved with 98.79% support in the implementation vote. The proposal proposes to transfer more than $40 million in DAO-controlled treasury assets to a new vault managed by Sushi Labs, and ensure that all future airdrops are sent directly to "Sushi Labs" rather than "DAO".
Sushi DAO aims to position Sushi as a leading DEX through Sushi Labs, focusing on innovative products, structured operations, and the following core growth pillars: Sushi Labs will drive innovative product development, bringing value to xSushi and the Treasury through airdrops and fee increases;
Governance will receive updates to outline the responsibilities of Sushi DAO and Sushi Labs, enabling both to operate more efficiently; Provide continuity of leadership and operations team contributors to support Sushi Labs in enhancing its ability to build new products and services.
According to on-chain data analyst Ember Monitoring, it is expected that there will be a net outflow of about 924 BTC from ETF custody addresses after the U.S. stock market opens tonight, including:
Outflow: Grayscale (GBTC) and Ark Invest (ARKB) outflow of about 1,470 BTC;
Inflows: The remaining nine ETFs saw inflows of about 546 BTC.
Currently, eleven BTC spot ETFs hold a total of 840,208 BTC (about $52.72 billion).
CoinGecko released the Q1 2024 Cryptocurrency Industry Report, the highlights of which are as follows:
The total crypto market capitalization continued to grow by 65% in Q1, reaching a high of $2.9 trillion in March;
Driven by the approval of the US spot Bitcoin ETF, the price of Bitcoin surged 69% in Q1, with an average daily trading volume of $34.1 billion, an increase of 90% from Q4 2023;
As of April 2, the US spot Bitcoin ETF AUM reached $55.1 billion;
CEX spot trading volume reached $4.29 trillion, which is the highest quarterly trading volume of the top 10 spot CEXs since December 2021;
As of March 2024, Binance has a market share of 50%;
Ethereum re-staking on EigenLayer increased by 36%;
The total market capitalization of the top 10 Solana on-chain meme coins increased by 802% to $9.36 billion;
NFT trading volume reached $元️ 4.7 billion, of which Blur accounted for 28%;
The share of DEX transactions on the Ethereum chain fell below 40%, with the indicator falling to an all-time low of 30% in February.
Magic Eden announced on the X platform that the team is creating a simple, intuitive Runes trading platform.
P2 Ventures, a blockchain-focused venture capital firm, has pledged $50 million to support startup founders or power projects in the Polygon ecosystem. According to a press release, P2 Ventures' investment will be funded to the founders through Hadron FC, a founders program with branches in Dubai and New York. The program will provide mentorship, legal and regulatory assistance, networking opportunities, and "comprehensive support in the complex process of entrepreneurial development and financing." （CoinDesk）
According to official information, the Ethereum interoperability protocol Omni Network has opened airdrop claims and staking, and trading on the Binance platform will start at 8 a.m. ET.
RootData data shows that GameFi projects raised more than $2 billion in Q4 2021, but the amount raised declined for six consecutive quarters after Q1 2022. However, this trend eventually reversed after the third quarter of 2023, and since then the GameFi space has grown for three consecutive quarters and reached $268 million in the first quarter of 2024.
UniSat posted on platform X that UniSat Plug-in version v1.3.0 was released, which supports viewing and sending Runes assets on the testnet. In addition, Runes' UniSat OpenAPI has been launched, with features such as retrieving information for a specific Runes, listing the holders of a specific Runes, listing Runes on a specific address, and accessing the full stream of events related to Runes.
jupiter officially announced the launch of its LST token, JupSOL, in a social media post.
Officially, the validator has 0% fees and 100% MEV rebates, and is currently entrusting an additional 100,000 SOL to increase the yield of JupSOL. This could make JupSOL the most productive LST in the entire Solana at the moment. The more SOL participating in the stake, the more it will enable Jupiter to send more transactions and be less affected by network congestion.
According to Coinglass, the value of long liquidations on centralized exchanges on Saturday was more than $757 million, but the Bitcoin position was only $261 million. While it is true that most crypto assets fall into the "risky" category for traders, Bitcoin is arguably the least risky cryptocurrency, with the largest market cap and a proven track record of institutional adoption. On the other hand, things like Dogecoin are more speculative, with Dogecoin down nearly 30% from Friday's high to Saturday's low. On Sunday, Bitcoin's dominance, which is the share of Bitcoin's market capitalization relative to the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies, jumped to 52.86%, the highest level since April 2021.
Andreessen Horowitz's latest batch of funds raised $7.2 billion in funding, according to Bloomberg, and the company has created a master fund vehicle that is known to be about half of the target funds for its growth fund. Thereinto:
1. Raised $3.75 billion for the main fund vehicle;
2. Raised $1.25 billion for the AI Infrastructure Fund;
3. Raised $1 billion for funds on AI applications;
4. Raised $600 million for its "American Vitality" strategic fund;
5. Raised $600 million for a second gaming fund.
According to official sources, Safe disclosed the details of SAFE tokenomics, mainly including a maximum supply of 1 billion tokens, with an initial circulation of 427,000,000 tokens, and the overall distribution of SAFE covers 5 categories: 15% of core contributors, 15% of the Safe Foundation, 5% of the ecosystem, 5% of users, and 60% of the community treasury, and it is reported that the redemption period of SAFE tokens is up to 8 years.
2. Selected articles
After the Bitcoin halving, the Runes protocol will be launched, and the farm BOB will launch the halving rune transaction. Bearish in the short term, but bullish in the long term. The Rune Protocol features 4 years of free minting and a limit of 1 coin per transaction. The rune hype will cool down, but there will be a second and third wave in 2023. The Rune Protocol solves the problem of NFTs and tokens on Bitcoin with a compelling story. Runes will become an important part of the crypto ecosystem. BRC20 is the new rune protocol that can store bitcoins and rune tokens. The rune game is underway, with multiple pre-run protocols airdropping rune tokens on Bitcoin halving blocks. The Rune series has a market cap of $549 million, with multiple protocols and tools available. BTCFi is still in its early stages, and the opportunities will be plentiful.
Runes is a new Bitcoin fungible token standard that will launch on April 19. It employs Bitcoin's security framework and can be created and traded through regular Bitcoin transactions. Similar to ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, but simpler. Runes has the advantage of not using witness data, and the use of OP_RETURN fields simplifies the process of creating tokens, making it more network-friendly. It's also more flexible, with open minting, fair distribution, and the option to mint all supply to a single address. Runes has the potential to become a mainstream Bitcoin token standard, especially after integrating with the Lightning Network.
Last week, BTC prices corrected and altcoins dived, but the Meme sector saw several projects that bucked the trend and skyrocketed, among which Wizard and Puppet Monkey performed the most. The Wizard WZRD token rose by more than 600%, and the Puppet Monkey PUPS token rose by more than 1200%. Both projects are the most native and popular meme images in the BTC ecosystem. A Taproot Wizards NFT in a 4MB block sparked an event that detonated the BTC community in the West and is considered one of the Ordinals spirit totems. PUPS and Rune Pups are NFT projects in the BTC ecosystem, with a market cap of $237 million and 1 billion, respectively. The PUPS token has skyrocketed due to the influence of the European and American communities, forming a huge "puppet empire". The latest trend is the emergence of "IP matrix" gameplay represented by PUPS in the inscription market. PUPS will migrate to the Runes protocol, which may detonate the entire crypto market after the BTC halving.
3. Project interpretation
The Bitcoin NFT market has fallen recently, but "runes" are still highly anticipated. Other popular chains only have Base, which is difficult. New projects include Prometheans, Starlight Runes, and Everyday Satoshis, with different artistic and mining methods. The Rosentica NFTs will be distributed to holders, and the Ordinals ecosystem will also receive a portion. Opal Protocol issues benefits to Runestone holders, and KarmaStoneOCM issues its own Token $KARMA. It is recommended to choose Bitcoin NFT projects carefully, focusing on influence and community quality. GGXYZ Studio launches Bitcoin P2E game, details not yet announced. When choosing a rune project, consider the influence and community quality, and cut the UTXO reasonably to avoid missing the project minting time. It is advisable to refer to the documentation and wish you all a great profit in Rune Season.
SEI is a high-speed L1 network based on Tendermint Core that uses Twin-Turbo consensus and transaction parallelization to improve transaction efficiency and throughput. It plans to launch a V2 upgrade in 2024 with support for EVM smart contracts and the ERC-20/721 standard, as well as a parallel stack. SEI's native token is SEI, with a total supply of 10 billion, distributed to ecosystem reserves, validators, private investors, and more. Users can participate in governance through staking, and the Sei ecosystem includes DeFi, liquid staking, wallets, and NFTs. Sei's goal is to be the fastest digital asset exchange network, with plans to launch parallel stacks in the future to facilitate the growth of the ecosystem and validators.
Paradigm led Monad's $225 million funding round sparked market interest in "parallel EVM". Parallel EVM improves the parallel processing capability of EVM virtual machines through elastic computing and I/O asynchronous operation, and is the infrastructure for the web2 market in the EVM ecosystem. While layer 2 is more suitable for Mass Adoption, it can now only move to the more technical hardcore parallel EVM track. For more industry analysis, subscribe to my Substack column.
4. Investment and financing
On-chain financial platform Centrifuge has announced the successful closing of a $15 million Series A funding round that will be used to accelerate the widespread adoption of institutional DeFi. The round was co-led by ParaFi Capital and Greenfield, with participation from IOSG Ventures, Circle Ventures, Arrington Capital, The Spartan Group, Wintermute Ventures, and others. The new funds will be used primarily for product development, on-chain utility building, ecosystem growth, and talent acquisition.
Since its inception in 2017, Centrifug has bridged the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance (DeFi) by building a secure, compliant, and high-end platform. To drive on-chain utility, Centrifuge plans to build an institutional-grade RWA lending marketplace on the Base chain and integrate with Coinbase Verification to allow institutions to quickly and securely access real-world assets (RWAs). The marketplace will provide instant liquidity and borrowing power for real-world assets without giving up compliance or regulatory requirements.
Nebra, a blockchain and zero-knowledge proof research firm, announced the closing of a $4.5 million funding round led by Nascent and Bankless Ventures, with participation from Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation, Kartik Talwar of ETHGlobal, Nick White of Celestia, and Sandy Peng and Haichen Shen of Scroll.