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Markets Pull Back Post-Shapella: DeFi Week of Apr. 23

The markets are cooling after a euphoric rally leading up to the execution of Ethereum’s Shapella upgrades, which activated Staked Ether withdrawals for the first time. While the markets defied doomsayers’ predictions that a flood of freshly withdrawn Ether entering circulation would tank its price, the post-Shapella honeymoon period also appears to be subsiding.

Polygon continues to prove itself as a popular Ethereum scaling solution among large enterprises and institutions, with Franklin Templeton, the subsidiary of a $1.4T asset manager, launching its U.S.-regulated mutual fund, FOBXX, on Polygon last week.

Activity has tripled on LayerZero, a cross-chain interoperability protocol, since Arbitrum completed its highly anticipated airdrop last month. The spike in adoption may be partly attributed to opportunistic airdrop hunters looking for the next big payday.

The NFT downtrend also shows no signs of relenting, with blue-chip collections including CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club posting double-digit losses over the past 30 days.

In other news, top U.S. centralized exchange, Coinbase, filed a lawsuit demanding that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission respond to a petition the exchange filed last July.

The petition asks the SEC to employ formal rulemaking processes to develop clear regulatory guidelines for the crypto sector. Crucially, Coinbase could challenge the SEC should it reject the petition, but the SEC is still yet to respond despite 10 months passing since the petition was filed.

We also reported on Google’s latest forays into web3, with Google Cloud both expanding its startup accelerator program and announcing a “multi-year strategic alliance” with Polygon this past week. The news comes after two years of collaboration between the two firms.

And in this week’s podcast, Tegan Kline spoke to Ethereum Name Service founder, Nick Johnson, to learn all about what’s coming up next for ENS and Johnson’s journey from working at Google to becoming a web3 founder.

Enjoy!

🔒 PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS GET THE FULL VERSION OF THE WEEKLY RECAP BELOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT OF INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM FOR WEB3!

Podcast

Ethereum Name Service: Nick Johnson’s Journey from Google to Ethereum, ENS Roadmap, & Cancel Culture

This week, Tegan Kline spoke with Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer behind the ENS – the Ethereum Name Service.

Since we last chatted with Nick in 2021, he has made ENS a household name across the crypto industry and beyond. Nick and I get into the details behind the ENS roadmap, including the latest V3 announcement, what it was like for Nick to go from Google to the Ethereum Foundation to founding ENS and the inside scoop on last year’s drama with Brantly and the current culture at ENS and so much more. But first, Nick is going to tell us the founding story of ENS and how he managed to go from working at Google to Ethereum to founding ENS.

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PEPE COIN, GENSLR COIN, WOJAK COIN, TRUMP COIN, REKT COIN, STONKS COIN — WHEN DOES IT STOP?

Pepe Surged 77% in 24 hours. Babydoge, zkPepe, McPepe, pepe.Bet and babyPepe are also all up. You’ve got a new Trump token, a Biden token, even a GARY GENSLR token. So what on earth is happening in the world of Memecoins?

Friday

News

  • $1.4 Trillion Investment Firm Launches Tokenized Mutual Fund on Polygon Franklin Templeton, the subsidiary of a global investment firm with $1.4T in assets under management, launched its on-chain money fund, a stablecoin alternative, on the Polygon network on Wednesday. The Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) is a U.S.-registered mutual fund that executes transactions and records share ownership using the Stellar blockchain.

  • California DAO Bill Seeks to Provide Legal Clarity, A16z’s Jennings Said Called AB 1229, and introduced by California assemblymember Matt Haney, the bill would establish a business entity structure for DAOs. The structure, called a decentralized nonprofit organization (DNPA), would provide a framework for DAOs to establish a legal entity, pay taxes, and provide limited liability to their participants.

  • MakerDAO To Shutter SocGen’s $30M Credit Line MakerDAO, the second-largest DeFi lending protocol, plans to shut down the credit vault launched for a subsidiary of Societe Generale, France’s third-largest bank, after the firm paid down its debts last month.

Thursday

News

  • Cosmos’ Shared Security Model Gets Vote Of Confidence The first proposal to allow a blockchain to derive its security from the Cosmos Hub, a major blockchain worth over $3B, has received near-unanimous support. Neutron, the blockchain looking to outsource its security to the Cosmos Hub, bills itself as a smart contract platform geared towards DeFi. The Cosmos Hub will receive 25% of transaction fees and miner extractable value (MEV) from the Neutron chain, as well as 7% of the supply of its NTRN tokens.

Business

  • Google Cloud Boosts Web3 Presence With Polygon Partnership Google continues to deepen its participation in the web3 industry, unveiling a new partnership with Polygon and expanding its web3 accelerator program over the past two days. On Thursday, Google Cloud said it has entered a “multi-year strategic alliance” with Polygon to provide tooling and infrastructure to developers building on Polygon’s PoS Chain, zkEVM, and Supernets scaling solutions.

  • Arbitrum Teams Up With AltLayer In Layer 3 Push Despite Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem being far from realizing its full potential, market leader Arbitrum is already setting its sights on Layer 3. Arbitrum entered the Layer 3 arena in March with the launch of Arbitrum Orbit, describing the protocol as “a permissionless solution for any developer to build a Layer 3 blockchain using Arbitrum technology.” On March 27, Arbitrum selected AltLayer, a web3 infrastructure provider, as the first rollups-as-a-service provider supporting Orbit.

Wednesday

Markets

  • NFT Collectors Capitulate As Downturn Drags On The NFT market continues its rough patch, with holders selling their digital assets at a substantial loss and marketplaces seeing both volume and users plummeting. Losses on secondary sales are averaging 1,000 ETH ($1.9M) per day, with spikes as high as 3,000 ETH, according to NFTstatistics. In the past 30 days, blue-chip NFTs like CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Moonbirds have experienced drops of 18%, 16%, and 13%, respectively.

  • CAKE Plummets On Syrup Pool Unlocks The governance token of PancakeSwap, DeFi’s second-largest exchange with $2.6B in trading volume over the past week, has taken a beating this week after a large number of tokens entered circulation. CAKE is down over 24% in the past seven days. 0xGeeGee, a crypto trader, told The Defiant that CAKE dropped this week after a large number of tokens were unlocked from a mechanism called Syrup Pool this week.

News

  • Rocket Pool Adoption Surges After Atlas Upgrade Rocket Pool is enjoying a surge in adoption following the successful deployment of its Atlas upgrade last week, which halved the amount of collateral that “minipool” operators must provide from 16 ETH to 8 ETH, significantly lowering the barriers for participating in Ethereum staking. Users are currently staking 500,600 ETH via Rocket Pool, an increase of 11% since the April 17 upgrade went live, according to Dune Analytics. The platform is the fifth-largest staking provider behind Lido and centralized exchanges Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken.

  • LayerZero Usage Triples After Arbitrum Airdrop Cumulative transactions on LayerZero, a cross-chain interoperability protocol, have tripled since Arbitrum airdropped $1.7B of ARB tokens to its users last month. LayerZero launched in March 2022 and reached nearly 2M cumulative transactions roughly a year later. In just the past month, however, users have pushed through almost 5M transactions.

Tuesday

News

  • Coinbase Sues SEC In Bid For Regulatory Clarity Coinbase is taking legal action against the SEC, demanding clear rules for the digital asset sector. On Monday, Coinbase filed a narrow action in federal court seeking to compel the SEC into replying to the rulemaking petition it put to the SEC last July. The petition asked the SEC to use its formal rulemaking process to establish regulations governing the crypto industry “If the SEC says no to our rulemaking petition…then Coinbase would be allowed to challenge that decision in court,” the company said in a blog post.

Markets

  • Crypto Markets Plummet As Shapella Euphoria Fades Coinbase is taking legal action against the SEC, demanding clear rules for the digital asset sector. On Monday, Coinbase filed a narrow action in federal court seeking to compel the SEC into replying to the rulemaking petition it put to the SEC last July. The petition asked the SEC to use its formal rulemaking process to establish regulations governing the crypto industry “If the SEC says no to our rulemaking petition…then Coinbase would be allowed to challenge that decision in court,” the company said in a blog post.

  • XEN Token Accounts For 11% of Ethereum Gas Consumption An obscure smart contract has been guzzling gas on Ethereum. XEN Torrent is responsible for over 11% of the transaction fees paid on Ethereum over the past 24 hours, making it the second-largest gas consumer after Uniswap’s router contract. And yet, not many people have heard of XEN despite its appearance among the household names driving Ethereum usage. The token is up nearly 500% in the past month, however.