Round Tripping
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as always, thanks for reading and follow me here
tl;dr: potential fireworks in the sky & markets this weekend, latest on 3AC, BlockFi, & Voyager, ETH difficulty bomb (& hopefully merge) to September, and FTX everywhere
BTC dominance 40.5% | ETH dominance 14% | DeFi TVL $72B |
Total Crypto Market Cap $904B | Stablecoin Supply $154B |
funding:
Prime Trust, crypto infrastructure firm, raises $107M to expand products
OP Crypto targeting $100M fund for backing early-stage fund managers
Kaiko, blockchain analytics firm, raises $53M
PolySign, crypto infrastructure & custody firm, raises $53M
Protagonist raises $33M+ for Solana DeFi investing
Kyve Network, decentralized data storage, raises $9M valuation @ $100M
Zigazoo, web3 NFT integrated social media platform for kids, raises $17M
Soba, no-code platform for developing web3 mobile games, raises $13.5M seed
Dynamic, wallet authentication and identity, raises $7.5M seed
AltLayer, ETH scaling solution, raises $7.2M seed
MoHash, DeFi protocol bringing real world assets on-chain, raises $6M seed
news:
Facebook rolling out NFT feature for select US creators, expansion later
ConsenSys & StarkWare partner to bring ZK rollups to MetaMask & Infura
3AC issued default notice by Voyager as they seek to recoup ~$670M+ lent
Nansen releases Solana NFT integration into their data platform
Anchorage Digital launches ETH staking for institutional clients
FTX walks away from potential Celsius deal as $2B asset hole is found; FTX internally deliberating on best path to purchase Robinhood; FTX potentially buying BlockFi for $275M, $25M for company, $250M for debt
thoughts & notes:
Markets
Another turbulent week in markets as bankruptcies, litigations, and insolvencies continue taking shape. BTC enters the weekend down another ~9% and sits below 20k as the whales and market makers push late Thursday night to 20.4k, saving the monthly/quarterly levels, has been quickly retraced. ETH fell another ~14% this week but somehow continues to rest above the once crucial 1k level. Unfortunately, short to mid term pain still lies below 19k/1k and it’s increasingly likely we’ll visit the next levels down around 14k and 600 for BTC & ETH respectively.
In one of Arthur’s previous posts titled Floaters, he outlined the case for fireworks across both the sky and crypto markets this holiday weekend.
“…there is one particular weekend that strikes me as a likely candidate to host the final showdown between panic sellers and a bidless market — the weekend of July 4…July 4 falls on a Monday, and is a federal and banking holiday. This is the perfect setup for yet another mega crypto dump.”
Arthur supports his hypothesis with the combination of tightening liquidity continuing to batter risk assets and the inability of crypto funds to raise fiat satisfying their redemption requirements through selling liquid assets as fiat can’t be deployed until markets open again July 5th. I’m empathetic and increasingly open to this view as weekends are historically low volume and sporadic in crypto and our market leading tokens (BTC/ETH) slowly sold off into the weekend even as legacy markets closed Friday green. Be cautious over the holiday weekend (enjoy it!!) and hopefully the 19k/1k levels remain in tact when legacy opens again three long days from now.
Ongoing *Things*
With the backdrop of what could occur this weekend, let’s check in on the lenders (Celsius, Voyage, BlockFi) & fund (3AC) largely responsible for our current prices.
According to a Bloomberg report on Friday, 3AC filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy which is intended to protect its US assets while their previously reported liquidation is carried out in the British Virgin Islands. While the writing has been on the wall for weeks now, this is further confirmation of 3AC’s staggering downfall. The exact numbers are difficult to confirm, but it’s likely that as little as ~3 months ago 3AC was still managing close to ~$10B. Three short months later and that ~$10B has turned into insolvencies, bankruptcy filings, and litigations fighting over the scraps left.
Voyager, as of Friday afternoon, has “made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards.” Voyager fund themselves in this hole as they previously lent and unsecured 15,250 BTC and $350M worth of USDC to 3AC. An official notice of default has been issued and the aforementioned regulators in the Virgin Islands appointed Teneo to handle 3AC’s liquidation process on behalf of Voyager.
Previous rumors of BlockFi selling to FTX for $275M were rampant on Thursday, BlockFi’s CEO has since come out on Twitter saying they are false. While it’s hard to currently believe anything these lending companies say, there’s been no official word since then and BlockFi’s fate remains in limbo. What’s clear is the precipitous fall they’ve endured in a few short months as evidenced by the chart below. As recently as June 8th, BlockFi was looking to raise ~$500M at a $5B valuation and will now be lucky to receive half of what they were previously hoping to raise for their entire business.
tokens:
ETH Gray Glacier hard fork delaying difficulty bomb to September is finished, roughly aligning with common consensus for merge in mid September
Cosmos (ATOM) enabling Interchain Security between August & September allowing app specific chains to secure themselves through ATOM validators
Compound (COMP) releases code for COMP III, a multi-chain lending protocol
Polygon (MATIC) announces Avail, a custom scaling solution for EVM chains
Axie (AXS) reopens Ronin ETH bridge after $600M hack on March 29th
LOOKS partners with Coinbase Wallet for direct integration
Stargate Finance (STG) launches ETH pool farming on ETH, Arbitrum, and OP
Frax (FXS) proposal to buyback $20M worth of $FXS using Fraxswap passes
marginfi, “a single interface to trade across DeFi”, launches on SOL mainnet
Arbitrum pauses Arbitrum Odyssey until Nitro upgrade is released (TBD)
Nansen’s stETH report — On-chain Forensics: Demystifying stETH’s Depeg
around the ecosystem:
Nic Carter’s essay Setting the record straight; a eulogy for BTC maximalism
Messari’s report covering RUNE, THORSwap and the THORChain network
a16z proof of concept for zero-knowledge information sharing
Arthur is back with Number Three covering the CeFi lending blowups
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