🐕 Weekly Recap: Memecoin Frenzy Dissipates

Happy weekend Defiers!

Memecoin mania appears to have subsided, with Solana’s fee revenue dropping to a year-to-date low as PumpFun adoption falls. PumpFun-related volume on DEXes has dropped 82% since June, while active users are down 55% in six weeks.

Memecoin launchpads on rival networks are also floundering, with SunPump’s revenue crashing 94% from its high despite launching less than four weeks ago, while EtherVista users are down 73% since debuting last fortnight.

However, the Open Network is bucking the decline, with TON estimating 53 million users claimed tokens as part of the two-week DOGS airdrop. The activity caused outages on the network, with TON anticipating further disruptions when Hamster Kombat and Catizen drop tokens later this month.

The crypto markets rebounded this week, with Bitcoin bouncing 11.9% and Ethereum up 8.5% over the past seven days, despite institutional outflows from crypto ETPs tagging a six-month high last week. The momentum was spurred by expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will soon reduce interest rates, inspiring MicroStrategy to buy $1.11 billion worth of BTC.

The drama surrounding Wrapped Bitcoin’s pending ownership structure is intensifying. Sky (formerly MakerDAO) is moving to fully offboard WBTC amid concerns that the joint venture set to take control over Wrapped Bitcoin is secretly controlled by Justin Sun, Tron’s controversial founder.

Coinbase is looking to capitalize on the drama, with the leading U.S. centralized exchange launching its Bitcoin-backed ERC-20 token, cbBTC, much to the chagrin of Sun. In other Coinbase news, the exchange now custodies 11% of both the supply of Bitcoin and staked ETH.

A Republican Congressman introduced a bill seeking to reconcile the regulatory divide between the SEC and CFTC on crypto. The bill calls for creating a committee of web3 industry stakeholders to advise the agencies on crypto. However, the first congressional DeFi hearing showed deep divides between Republicans and Democrats regarding crypto.

The developers behind FriendTech, the once-booming socialfi platform, appear to have shuttered the project by transferring control over its smart contracts to a burn address. The move follows FriendTech’s volume and user base crashing more than 99% from their highs.

NFTs continue to bounce back, with AI Art leading the charge, and Magic Eden is looking to maintain its lead among NFT marketplaces with boosted incentives. One cunning trader purchased a CryptoPunk worth $3.2 million for just $23,000 by buying up fractional shares from a defunct marketplace.

Web2 giants continue to deepen their web3 endeavors. Sony’s Soneium Layer 2 integrated Chainlink for its cross-chain infrastructure, while PayPal and Venmo now support transfers to ENS domain names.

Plus, Tether outperformed BlackRock last year with $6.2 billion in profit, Base adoption soars to new heights, ZKsync launches a governance mechanism, and Binance Labs invests in Open Eden as part of a real-world asset push.

Also, don’t forget to check out our podcast with Alex Cutler, the co-founder of Aerodrome.

Enjoy!

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eBTC - EtherFi’s New Bitcoin LRT

Our resident DeFi degens walk you through how to rack up points from multiple projects through EtherFi’s first Bitcoin staking token, eBTC.

Plus, they share their technical analysis examining the latest price action and market moves.

PODCAST & INTERVIEWS

Aerodrome Finance: Redefining AMMs on Base with Alexander Cutler

In this week’s podcast, Cami Russo was joined by Alex Cutler, the co-founder of Aerodrome, the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) on Base, the bubbling Ethereum Layer 2 from Coinbase.

Cutler discusses the project’s decision to join the Base ecosystem, the challenge of designing tokenomics including incentives to users, cherry-picking the best features from within the decentralized exchange space, the role of DEXes in on-chain finance, and the future of decentralization.

Blockchain Simplicity: NEAR Protocol's Vision For Scaling, AI, and Chain Signatures

The Defiant spoke to Kendall Cole, co-founder of Proximity Labs, a research and development team support builders on Near Protocol, to discuss the latest innovations on Near.

The discussion explores Near's unique approach to sharding, the benefits of chain abstraction for users, and Near’s AI pivot.

We Need To Talk About $ETH

In our latest episode of Crypto With Cami, Aerodrome’s Alex Cutler and Joe Lubin, the CEO of Consensys, give us their takes on how growing Layer 2 adoption is impacting the Ethereum base layer and what it means for the price of ETH.

Friday

Solana Fees Sink To 2024 Low As Memecoin Frenzy Subsides Activity on PumpFun and across Solana’s DEX ecosystem have taken a dive in recent months.
Sky Proposal Calls For Fully Offboarding WBTC Over Justin Sun Concerns BA Labs believes the joint venture set to take control over Wrapped Bitcoin is downplaying the scale of Justin Sun’s involvement.
New Bill Seeks To Reconcile Regulatory Division Between SEC and CFTC The bill would establish a 20-person committee of web3 stakeholders tasked with advising both the SEC and CFTC on crypto.
Binance Labs Invests in OpenEden to Boost Development of RWAs Overseas OpenEden is the largest tokenized Treasury issuer outside the United States.
Raydium Launches Burn-and-Earn Feature for Coin Creators to Lock Liquidity Token creators can permanently lock liquidity to earn trading fees.
TreasureDAO Accused of “Grant Hopping” as it Mulls Move to ZKsync The Arbitrum-based blockchain gaming ecosystem wants to migrate over to ZKsync for its upcoming L2 launch.
Stablecoin Users in Five Emerging Economies Favor Ethereum: Survey A report from Castle Island Ventures, Brevan Howard, Visa, and Artemis found that stablecoin adoption continued to rise in spite of the last bear cycle.
Crypto Markets Rally as MicroStrategy Buys More Bitcoin MicroStrategy purchased 18,300 BTC for $1.11 billion.
Wormhole Brings World ID to Solana Until now, Ethereum-based protocols were exclusively compatible with Worldcoin’s biometric identity protocol.

Thursday

‘Fractal Mania’ Continues With Token up 300% in Four Days Over 30% of Bitcoin miners are participating in Fractal’s merge-mining mechanism.
ZKsync Launches Three-Body Governance System ZKsync’s three-pronged governance system seeks to balance checks and balances with decentralization.
Grayscale Launches First Ripple Trust in the U.S. Grayscale’s XRP Trust is the latest ETP launched by the digital asset investment firm.
Markets Rise After U.S. Wholesale Inflation Report Investors anticipate the U.S. Federal Reserve will soon reduce interest rates.
TON Forecasts Outages As Hamster Kombat and Catizen Airdrops Loom TON predicts the upcoming airdrops could distribute tokens to up to "hundreds of millions" of users this month.
Sony To Integrate Chainlink For Cross-Chain Interoperability For Soneium L2 Soneium also launched support for Chainlink’s data feeds on testnet and joined Chainlink’s Scale program.
Coinbase Begins cbBTC Rollout Coinbase is looking to capitalize on the controversy surrounding Wrapped Bitcoin's ownership restructure with its Bitcoin-backed ERC-20 token.
Worldcoin Says It Isn’t Under Investigation In Singapore Singapore’s deputy prime minister said local authorities are investigating unlicensed sales of Worldcoin accounts and tokens.

Wednesday

Ethereum Layer 2 Atlas Launches Private Testnet Atlas supports Solana Virtual Machine smart contracts.
Magic Eden Offers 50% Diamond Bonus For Buying NFTs or Ordinals The additional reward is for users who purchase NFTs or ordinals through the Magic Eden mobile wallet.
Polymarket Shows Heated Presidential Race After Trump-Harris Debate Cryptocurrency was not mentioned during the presidential debate.
Multi-Million Dollar CryptoPunk NFT Sells for 10 ETH The buyer cleverly purchased fractionalized shares for the rare CryptoPunk at a steep discount.
SunPump Activity Plummets as TRX Falls Out of Top 10 Less than 1,000 memecoins are now being created daily on the Tron-based launchpad.
Tether Made More Money Than BlackRock Last Year Tether bagged $6.2 billion in profits during 2023.
Crypto Casino Rollbit’s Token Soars, But Transparency Concerns Linger The project’s RLB token is among the top-performing altcoins of the past month, but onlookers question Rollbit’s revenue.
Coinbase Holds 11% of Bitcoin’s Total Supply – How Worried Should We Be? The top U.S. centralized exchange also holds 11% of staked ETH.
Crypto Markets Trade Flat After U.S. Inflation Report Annual U.S. inflation fell to 2.5%, the lowest since February 2021.
Base Activity Soars To New Highs Despite Onchain Summer Wrapping Up Base’s second Onchain Summer campaign attracted more than 2 million participants.
AI-Focused ASI Alliance Aims To Onboard Cudos As Fourth Member Cudos plans to merge its token with ASI and bring thousands of GPUs to the project.
BitGo Taps LayerZero For Multi-Chain WBTC Rollout BitGo aims to launch Wrapped Bitcoin onto dozens of new chains using LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token standard.

Tuesday

AI Art Outpaces the Rest of the NFT Market NFT prices are slowly creeping up despite low volumes, with AI art leading the charge.
First-Ever DeFi Hearing Ends With U.S. Lawmakers At Odds Members of the House Financial Services Committee are divided on how to regulate DeFi.
FBI Warns Against North Korea’s Social Engineering Attacks on DeFi North Korea is estimated to have raked in billions worth of crypto from state-sponsored hacker groups.
Bitcoin Price Surges as ETFs Record Inflows After 8-Day Slump Institutional investors are tentatively increasing their BTC exposure.
SwissBorg Leverages Morpho Vaults For USDC Earn Product The launch marks the first CeFi integration for Morpho's Vaults.
Aave Launches EtherFi-Dedicated V3 Deployment The launch marks Aave’s second iteration dedicated to facilitating stablecoin borrowing against a specific asset.
PayPal and Venmo Integrate Support For ENS Names The market cap of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin is down 17% in two weeks.

Monday

‘VC Chains’ Lead DeFi TVL Growth The Sei, Sui, and Aptos ecosystems are enjoying significant growth despite the general market downtrend.
a16z Unveils New Cohort of Crypto Startups The selected projects include AI, DeFi, infrastructure, and consumer-facing projects.
Institutions Sold $726 Million of Crypto Last Week, Highest Since March Bitcoin bore the brunt of ETP outflows at $643 million.
Crypto Markets Inch Higher Ahead of U.S. Inflation Data August’s Consumer Price Index data will be released on Wednesday, with PPI following on Thursday.
Fractal Ships Bitcoin Sidechain But Faces Pre-Mine Controversy Onlookers are unhappy with Fractal pre-mining 50% of the supply of its FB token.
FriendTech Transfers Control Over Its Contracts To Burn Address FriendTech effectively shuttered the project after the once-booming platform's adoption evaporated.
EtherFi Partners with Scroll for Crypto Card Settlement EtherFi’s upcoming credit card allows users to borrow USDC against their crypto.

🐕 Weekly Recap: Memecoin Frenzy Dissipates

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