🦍Weekly Recap: Crypto Roars Back On ETF Hopes

In this week’s alpha newsletter, our resident DeFi degens walk you through how to earn up to 8.3% APY staking SOL on Marinade Finance.

Cami Russo spoke with Darren Langley, the general manager of Rocket Pool the third-largest Ethereum liquid staking provider behind Lido and Coinbase.

Langley delves into Rocket Pool’s backstory, what it takes to validate Ethereum, the utility of the project RPL token, and the increasing concerns surrounding the centralization of rival liquid staking protocols.

Cami Russo gives her reaction to Bloomberg’s newly released documentary, RUIN: Money, Ego and Deception at FTX.

While the film offers a decent account of the fraud perpetrated by Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s former CEO, the documentary also falls short in several critical ways.

Bitcoin is up 30% over the past 30 days, and the CEO of Blackrock is pumping our bags on national television. With an ETF seemingly closer than many investors were prepared for, the market has surged over the last weekend as investors look to front-run Blackrock’s spot Bitcoin ETF.

So is this just another suckers rally? Or has another bull run finally begun?

VC Reveals Secrets to Fundraising

We spoke to Danilo Carlucci, Founder & CEO at Morningstar Ventures, to learn more about his firm’s investment strategies for navigating the downtrend.

Carlucci discusses how Morningstar’s strategy adjusted its capital deployment, what the company is looking for in builders, and which investments he is most excited about.

AVOID These Crypto Investment MISTAKES

The Bitcoin fear and greed index is at levels we haven’t seen since late 2021. When investors exhibit excessive greed, it often signals an impending need for a market correction.

I’m not saying Bitcoin will certainly drop down from its current levels, although it’s important to exercise caution. So here are five common mistakes to avoid when investing in cryptocurrencies.

• Polygon Launches MATIC To POL Token Migrations Polygon enabled MATIC holders to migrate their assets to its new POL token on Oct. 26. POL will underpin Polygon’s forthcoming revamped staking layer.
• Lens Protocol’s V2 Migration To Begin On October 30 Lens, the decentralized social media platform from the team behind Aave, is migrating to its V2 mainnet. The process is set to begin on Oct. 30 and aims to deliver a more composable and developer-friendly ecosystem.
• Fed's Barr Calls for Stablecoin Regulation (Again) Michael Barr of the Federal reiterated his calls for greater regulation of stablecoins at the Economics of Payments XII conference Thursday. "Stablecoins, as I have said in other remarks, need to be regulated,” said Barr. “When an asset is pegged to a government-issued currency, it is a form of private money."
• DYDX Token Soars After Becoming a Layer 1 Token for the dYdX Chain The DYDX token is soaring as it gains functionality with the launch of the new dYdX Chain. DYDX’s network token revamp ushers fresh functionality for the token, as it will be now staked with validators to preserve network security and aid with the governance of the network.
• LayerZero Deploys stETH Bridge Without Approval From Lido Governance Lido is fiercely debating whether to support cross-chain stETH transfers to Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Scroll via a new bridge deployed by LayerZero Labs. “The proposal for the Lido DAO to support the bridge must still go through the necessary checks, discussion, and governance process,” Lido said.
• Vodafone Partners With Chainlink To Demonstrate Blockchain’s Potential In Global Trade Telecom giant Vodafone’s Digital Asset Broker (DAB) revealed that it has conducted a proof of concept in collaboration with Chainlink Labs, Sumitomo Corporation, and InnoWave to alleviate issues pertaining to the global trade ecosystem. Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol was used to reduce inefficiencies across the supply chain.
• LUSD Supply Shrinks As Redemption Woes Continue Liquity's LUSD stablecoin LUSD has seen a substantial drop in market capitalization as the rate of trove redemptions accelerates. In the past month alone, the total supply of LUSD has dropped by almost 40 million tokens.

• Arbitrum’s Orbit Is Ready For Mainnet Deployment Arbitrum Orbit, the highly-anticipated custom blockchain solution from Offchain Labs, is ready for mainnet deployment. Using Orbit, developers can now permissionlessly construct their own chains atop Arbitrum’s Layer 2 infrastructure.
• Fantom Launches Testnets For Sonic Upgrade, Estimates 6,700% Throughput Gain Fantom launched testnets for its upcoming revamped tech stack, Sonic, on Oct. 24, with the team claiming Sonic’s throughput will compete with major credit card companies and banks. In a blog post, Fantom Foundation estimated Sonic can support up to 2,048 transactions per second (TPS) and an average finality of around 1.1 seconds.

• No, Hamas Isn’t Raising Millions Through Crypto Elliptic is the latest on-chain research firm to dispel claims that cryptocurrency is a major source of funding for Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization. “No public crypto fundraising campaign by a terrorist group has received significant levels of donations, relative to other funding sources,” Elliptic said.
• Maestro Trading Bot Exploited For $500K Users of Maestro, a popular cryptocurrency trading bot, lost 280 ETH ($500,000) worth of various memecoins after a recently deployed router contract was exploited on Oct. 24. Maestro announced plans to issue full refunds to affected users.
• Arthur Hayes Says BTC Is Rallying Over US Military Spending, Not ETF Hype Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of the BitMEX derivatives exchange, published an essay attributing the crypto market rally to the costs associated with hawkish U.S. foreign policy and not spot Bitcoin ETF anticipation. “Added to Ukraine’s tab, America’s military budget is set to truly explode,” Hayes said.
• Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Invests in Nocturne Labs' $6M Seed Funding Round U.S.-based startup Nocturne Labs secured $6M in seed funding, in part provided by Vitalik Buterin. Nocturne Labs aims to provide the ability to transact privately within the Ethereum ecosystem. The series of investments was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.
• Variant Doubles Down On AI Artist Botto Venture capital firm Variant has boosted its stake in Botto, the AI-powered decentralized autonomous artist. Botto's AI generates thousands of fragments of artwork each week, and the community votes on the best pieces to list for sale on the SuperRare marketplace.
• Polygon Deploys POL Token On Ethereum Polygon's new POL token is live on the Ethereum mainnet. Polygon announced the news on Oct. 25, comprising a major milestone in the project’s ongoing “2.0” overhaul. POL will power Polygon's upcoming revamped staking layer.
• India Bucks Downtrend By Topping Chainalysis Adoption Index India topped Chainalysis’s 2023 Geography of Cryptocurrency report. The annual report scores 155 countries based on flows to centralized exchange volume, peer-to-peer trading volume, and DeFi transaction volume.

• DeFi Sector Heats Up Amid Broad Market Rally DeFi assets have staged a quiet rally, with many tokens outperforming both BTC and ETH. Both the market cap and TVL of DeFi tokens rallied to three-month highs, sitting at $49.4B and $40B respectively.
• Friendtech Hit By Selloff As SocialFi Whales Move To New Bitcoin City Some prominent Friendtech users have sold their keys and moved over to New Bitcoin City (NBC), a rival SocialFi platform that runs on a Bitcoin-based Layer 2 network. NBC has seen around $1M in inflows over the past day, pushing its TVL above $3M.
• Bitcoin Surges To 17-Month High Amid Spot Bitcoin ETF Progress BTC is trading at its highest level since last May as researchers tip that the highly anticipated spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund from the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, may be seeded this month.
• dYdX Exchange Open-Sources Code in Anticipation of Transition to Cosmos App Chain Decentralized exchange dYdX announced it is open-sourcing its code ahead of its migration to a Cosmos-based appchain. The news follows dYdX Trading restructuring into a Public Benefit Corporation.

• BlackRock Plans to Seed its Spot Bitcoin ETF in October Eric Balchunas, the Senior ETF Analyst for Bloomberg, pointed out that the world's largest asset manager is planning to seed the fund this month. While Balchunas said he doesn't "want to read that much into it," he also said, "it happens when ETFs are preparing to launch."
• Liquity Token Rallies 75% As Fees Spike Liquity, a decentralized lending protocol, has seen its utility token, LQTY, surge by over 75% in the past 30 days despite a sluggish market, which can be largely attributed to an arbitrage opportunity stemming from MakerDAO's DAI Savings Rate.
• Uniswap Visa Card Proposal is Facing Opposition Among UNI Token Holders A Uniswap governance proposal from Fiat 24 bank about issuing a Visa card with the unicorn logo is facing opposition so far, with majority of token holders voting no. Fiat24 is a Swiss bank that operates solely on the Arbitrum blockchain. The bank proposed to release a co-branded Visa debit card with Uniswap.
• Worldcoin to Start Paying Orb Operators in WLD by November Worldcoin will start phasing out USDC to pay Orb Operators in its native WLD token as early as November, according to an Oct. 22 announcement. Worldcoin described its move from USDC to WLD as part of a "transitional phase" for the project.
• Celestia Prepares For Imminent Mainnet Launch Celestia, a project dedicated to building a modular blockchain ecosystem, is set to launch its Mainnet Beta in the coming days. The project’s Github repository shows a Mainnet milestone with a due date of October 31.