Round Tripping
a weekly recap of the crypto ecosystem
as always, thanks for reading and follow me here
tl;dr: private markets slowly aligning with public sentiment, cross-rollup liquidity and composability are key to scaling, flared gas BTC mining shifting narratives, and OP/VELO airdrops are live.
BTC dominance 46% | ETH dominance 17.5% | DeFi TVL $106B |
Total Crypto Market Cap $1.22T | Stablecoin Supply $155B |
funding:
Binance VC arm raises $500M for incubation, early-stage, and late-stage
SoftBank leads $66M series B in blockchain infrastructure provider InfStones
Canonical Crypto raises $20M for its first fund
Akatsuki, Japanese gaming firm, raises $20M for NFT & GameFi investments
Merge, crypto payments infrastructure, raises $9.5M seed round
WAX blockchain raises $10M to further develop NFT ecosystem
Utopia Labs, DAO payrolls, raises $23M series A
Hydra Ventures, DAO investing in investment DAOs, announced and launched
Six different crypto startups raised between 3M-6.5M this week:
Dework (DAO management), Liminal (wallet startup), Big Whale Labs (wallet privacy), Cloudwall Capital (risk management), Alloy (institutional DeFi), and Size (sealed OTC bid auctions for vested tokens)
Animoca acquires mobile gaming firm Notre Game adding to previous acquisitions Grease Monkey Games and Eden Games
news:
Fidelity to continue expanding digital asset offerings & hiring spree
Japan passes stablecoin bill ensuring redemption/backing at face value
Zerion releases 10 chain compatible mobile wallet for web3 apps
Chainlink price feeds are now live on Solana, first non-EVM chain integration
Alchemy, dev infrastructure provider, announces support for Solana
FTX readies war chest for acquisitions to expand its suite of products
Chipotle partners with Flexa to accept crypto at its U.S. based locations
Binance sponsors upcoming The Weeknd tour and commemorative NFTs
FTX passes Coinbase in CEX spot marketshare
Kucoin launches non-custodial web3 wallet
Crusoe Energy, flared gas BTC mining, previously raised $350M in April and this week announced expansion to Middle East countries Abu Dhabi & Oman
I’ve previously written multiple times about BTC flared gas mining, highlighting it’s ability to form positive, deserved narratives and deeper growth throughout the industry while creating additional revenue streams
thoughts & notes:
Cross Rollup Composability
With the Optimism token airdrop complete (along with VELO its main AMM), the race to scale L2s, reduce transaction fees, and acquire users is upon us. One of the previous negative externalities regarding L2 scaling was the fragmentation of users, liquidity, and assets across the various competitors. This problem was also applicable over the past year to the various L1s that were attracting TVL and growth, but has been largely solved through the Bridge Wars covered in previous Round Trippings.
L2s are currently integrating similar bridging solutions to ensure cross-rollup liquidity and asset transfer, but benefit from a shared settlement layer. All L2s built on the same underlying L1 have the ability to build easier, trust-minimized bridges between them compared to cross L1 and L2 solutions such as SYN and Layer Zero, a point Alex Beckett explains in his excellent post, Composability in a Rollup Ecosystem.
Further solidifying the above is Immutable X and StarkWare’s StarkNet recent announcement of their L2 partnership. In that post, they outline the ability to establish cross-rollup NFT liquidity highlighting the need to, “ensure that there is robust interoperability between rollups…through the construction of seamless and trustless asset bridges…as these rollups share a settlement layer (L1 ETH), bridging is possible without compromising asset security.” As an increasing number of L2s begin deploying to mainnet and distributing tokens over the coming months to acquire users, composability and liquidity between them will be a core focus for L2s and market participants.
Token News:
OP (Optimism) token launches — currently $1.37 with a ~$5.85B FDV
VELO token is live — Velodrome Finance the AMM of Optimism
ZCash NU5 upgrade is live — transactions now private by default on network
ETH testnet Ropsten moving to PoS on June 8th
StarkNet partners with Braavos wallet for direct StarkNet L2 integration
BTRFLY releases Pirex, a futures marketplaces for yield generating tokens
LDO announces liquid staking for DOT is now available
Maple Finance (MPL) introduces staking
JPEG’d (JPEG), NFTxDeFi collateral, launches the Citadel for CVX/CRV rewards
futureverse.xyz announced — PoS, EVM compatible blockchain with a dual-token economy integrating Fluf World and Altered State Machine
Celer Network (CELR) launches xAsset V2 for omnichain asset compatibility
Astroport’s ASTRO token airdrop for terra 2.0 outlined
$90M exploit of Mirror Protocol on Terra goes unnoticed for seven months
around the ecosystem:
ultimate web3 blockchain development stack through freecodecamp released
North Rock Digital’s research on ETH’s “generational” value post-merge
model and analysis on CRV/CVX subsidized stable pools of various sizes
bunchu.eth outlines guiding principles for proper wallet management
0xHamZ with a discussion on L1s as Money
Andrew with a good analysis on VC token dumping & what to watch for
tweets:
