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Round Tripping

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Crypto Recaps

Round Tripping

a weekly recap of the crypto ecosystem

tolks
Jul 23, 2022
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Round Tripping

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tl;dr: further confirmation of seller exhaustion, scaling through zkEVMS (Polygon, Scroll, zkSync), Uniswap’s NFT platform, CRV’s stablecoin, and funding continues


BTC dominance 40% | ETH dominance 17% | DeFi TVL $84.5B |

Total Crypto Market Cap $1.06T | Stablecoin Supply $153.5B |


funding:

  • Halborn, Miami based blockchain security company, raises $90M series A

  • Hashflow, cross-chain interoperable DEX, raises $25M @ $400M valuation

  • Valkyrie launching an initial $30M venture arm focused on Israel startups

  • Tribe Capital launches crypto incubator program after raising $25M

  • Meow, corporate treasury exposure to yields in crypto markets, raises $22M

  • New fund Modular Capital raises $20M with DeFi sector as key focus

  • Famed art/luxury business Christie’s launches venture arm; invests in LayerZero

  • Meta launching digital fashion items in Avatar Store with DressX partnership

  • XLD Finance, DeFi infrastructure tools for emerging markets, raises $13M

  • Optic, NFT authentication/fraud prevention company, raises $11M seed

  • Centralized exchange KuCoin raises $10M

  • Arkive raises $9.7M to build DAO structured decentralized museum

  • StarkNet based decentralized oracle Empiric Network raises $7M

  • Lines, web3 wallet-to-wallet messaging platform, raises $4M seed

news:

  • Dubai outlines their metaverse plans of 40k virtual jobs, $4B added to economy in 5 years

  • BitGo adds $NEAR to institutional offerings; BitGo expands registration to Italy

  • BNP Paribas, France’s largest custodial bank ($13.4T), enters crypto custody space

  • Square Enix, gaming giant, to launch NFT project on DOT based Enjin platform

  • Valkyrie launching venture capital fund for “web 2.5”, middleware, investments

  • FTX in talks to raise another funding round and potentially acquiring Bithumb

  • Cobie deservedly dunks on Coinbase surrounding their ongoing token listing disaster that resulted in a manager’s insider trading arrest

  • FTX and Alameda propose early liquidity plan for Voyager customers

  • Animoca and various metaverse platforms form an interoperability DAO

  • Tesla sells $936M of their BTC holdings in Q2

thoughts & notes:

Markets, 3AC, & Tesla

The ongoing saga regarding 3AC’s collapse added another chapter as Kyle and Su spoke about their fund’s “regrettable” collapse in a surprising puff piece interview released through Bloomberg. The interview was likely a reaction to, and hopeful damage mitigation, after a 1,157 page legal document detailing 3AC’s history, operations, communications, creditor claims, and liquidation proceedings was released online Monday which was recapped well by wassielawyer below.

Twitter avatar for @wassielawyer
wassielawyer @wassielawyer
1/ Had a chance to skim through this document. Interesting points (which I will go through in more detail): (1) The yacht (2) Why 3AC went under (3) Kyle / Su being uncooperative (4) Tai Ping Shan
Twitter avatar for @tier10k
db @tier10k
3AC juice, dive into 1,000+ pages of degeneracy https://t.co/WtfafWV4yh
6:11 PM ∙ Jul 18, 2022
888Likes204Retweets

The most interesting and relevant information confirmed a few things including that their liquidation price was around 24k and their downfall was largely the result of losing ~$600M in LUNA combined with large positions in GBTC/stETH. The weekend of June 12th was the ultimate end of 3AC as BTC rapidly fell with Zhu saying, “after that day, when, you know, Bitcoin went from $30,000 to $20,000, you know, that, that was extremely painful for us. And that was in, that ended up being kind of the nail in the coffin.” As revealed on Wednesday, and a perfect addition to this insane timeline, Tesla may have nailed 3AC’s coffin shut as the company had been selling $926 million worth of BTC in Q2 which likely led to the cascading liquidations that teleported BTC from 30k to 20k. Incredible stuff.

On the bright side of this fiasco, the news this week is an additional confirmation of the enormous selling pressure that has occurred in recent weeks. Two weeks ago in Round Tripping, the core takeaway I wrote was under the title “selling pressure abated.” As I stated there, the market has absorbed extensive selling and “bottomed around 18.8k and 900 for BTC/ETH respectively as Celsius, 3AC, Voyager, BlockFi, BTC miners, and numerous others became forced sellers and offloaded billions of assets into the market.” Since then, the market has began to recover led by ETH’s impressive strength ahead of catalysts including the merge and scaling solutions taking shape. Adding close to another billion in BTC sell pressure from Tesla increases the likelihood that those previous levels have formed some sort of bottom. I mean, how much worse could it really get?

ZK Szn Approaching

As everyone is aware, reducing transaction fees and scaling ETH through L2s and rollups is paramount to its success and longevity. Scaling is done through optimistic or zk (zero-knowledge) rollups. Optimistic solutions such as Arbitrum and Optimism are the dominate L2s currently as ZK tech is extremely complex and difficult for developers to navigate. Fortunately, teams and protocols have been tirelessly working to implement zkEVMs lowering the barrier to implementing ZK scaling solutions. zkEVMs are powerful as they have the ability to run arbitrary solidity code on a zk rollup giving thousands of developers access to integrate scaling solutions. This week, three protocols announced zkEVM developments that will drastically advance ETH’s scalability/usability in the future.

  • MATIC launches their Polygon zkEVM L2 on testnet

  • Scroll, zkEVM based ZKRs, releases pre-alpha version of Scroll for testing

  • zkSYNC (token at some point) announces zkEVM rollup will be live on mainnet in 100 days (Friday, October 28th)

ZK technology and scaling is the most likely long term future of the crypto ecosystem and we’re just beginning to understand the immense impact the technology will have across every sector. ZK solutions not only enhance scalability and reduce fees as they also allow verifiable privacy. As such, monitoring the ongoing developments of ZK tech is paramount to market participants and Round Tripping has covered the space and will continue to do so in the future. Scroll, Polygon, and zkSync are just a few of the growing number of competing ZK solutions but are leaders (specifically zkSync) in the zkEVM space. For a deeper dive into the ZK field I would highly suggest reading The Zero-Knowledge Landscape I previously wrote in March.

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tokens & protocols:

  • UNI to launch NFT marketplace with full sudoswap (XMON) integration

  • Curve (CRV) hinting at its own new over-collateralized stablecoin is on its way

  • SUSHI launches crosschain swap AMM built on LayerZero’s Stargate(STG) tech

  • RUNE’s THORChain, cross-chain DEX, begins phasing out RUNE pegged ETH.RUNE & BNB.RUNE tokens from ETH & BNB

  • APE rallies following ETH and impressive, successful Otherside demo

  • LDO launching liquid staking stETH on L2s

  • Jaypeggers (JAY) thread explaining their protocol for NFT tax loss harvesting

  • Synthetix (SYN) partners with Jump Crypto

  • AAVE & BAL execute $1M treasury swaps for 16,907 AAVE & 200,000 BAL

  • AVAX data live on Dune; AVAX highlights 5 gaming companies building there

around the ecosystem:

  • Arthur drops part 2 of his musings on YCC, QE/QT, DXY, YEN, EUR & crypto

  • Miles breaks down ETH’s five stages of ongoing scaling developments

  • llamaintern providing a great walkthrough of Defi Llama’s tools & products

  • Delphi’s in-depth analysis on the future of crypto gaming

  • Great thread outlining the data to use when analyzing NFTs

  • s/o to @poordart for the amazing cover photo this week

tweets:

Twitter avatar for @CL207
CL @CL207
pants tucked into unisocks, wtf
Image
4:28 PM ∙ Jul 21, 2022
7,530Likes529Retweets
Twitter avatar for @HsakaTrades
Hsaka @HsakaTrades
>They're citing our shitposts in court documents
Image
4:39 PM ∙ Jul 18, 2022
2,074Likes228Retweets
Twitter avatar for @DegenSpartan
찌 G 跻 じ Goblin 𝙎𝙚𝙣𝙥𝙖𝙞 of the 𝙃𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙞 @DegenSpartan
i checked the chain, absolutely hilarious > owner fake bid of 100 ETH on the ens > account with 10 miladys shows up > bought the ens for 1.9 ETH on X2Y2 > 15 minutes later, sells back the ens into that 100 ETH bid on opensea to the original owner > bought 5 more miladys
Twitter avatar for @Bullkis1
Bullkis.eth @Bullkis1
When trying to outsmart the bots fail tldr: @franklinisbored placed a fake 100 ETH bid on his own ENS and triggered a bot to offer him 1.891 that he accepted. Big W turned into a big L when he forgot to cancel his own fake 100 bid before accepting the offer. https://t.co/ZY1J7vc3PE
1:53 AM ∙ Jul 21, 2022
727Likes69Retweets
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