🥳 Weekly Recap: ETF Euphoria Spreads

In this week’s alpha newsletter, our resident DeFi degens walk you through how to generate returns of up to 32% farming stablecoins on Prisma Finance, a liquid staking token-focussed collateralized debt protocol on Ethereum. Plus, we explore all the hottest yields from across web3.

For this week’s podcast, Cami Russo spoke to Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, to learn more about the spot Bitcoin ETF applications pending a decision from the SEC.

The idea of a Bitcoin ETF has been around since 2013, with early proposals like the one from the Winklevoss twins facing repeated rejections by the SEC. However, the recent optimism stems from BlackRock's involvement in the application process.

This prominent financial institution's interest has reignited hope for the ETF's approval and sparked a new rally in the cryptocurrency market. Investors see the ETF as a way to bridge the gap between traditional finance and crypto, potentially increasing Bitcoin's value and adoption.

The Defiant sat down with Michael Wagner, the CEO of Star Atlas, a Solana-based web3 game, to learn more about his project and the experience of building on Solana. Wagner touches on navigating the bear, Star Atlas’s tokenomics, and the broader blockchain gaming sector.

• Grayscale Solana Trust Shares Surge To Insane 784% Premium Shares in Grayscale’s Solana Trust have more than doubled in the past week, surging to nine times the price of the Solana token. GSOL shares are trading at a record $202, up from $87 at the start of the month.

• Kujira Surges 400% As Token Emissions End Kujira has been on a tear over the past month. Its KUJI governance token has rocketed up 430% in the past 30 days, while the total value locked (TVL) in the ecosystem has risen from $16M in early September to $86M today.
• Poloniex Now Among Top 10 Largest Cex Hacks With $125 Million Loss Poloniex, the centralized crypto exchange owned by Tron founder Justin Sun, was hacked for an estimated loss of about $125M. The amount drained makes the exploit the seventh largest in CEX hack history.
• Coinbase Launches On-Chain KYC Verification to +100M Users Coinbase just launched one of the largest efforts to bring decentralized identity to the mainstream. The largest U.S. exchange by volume on Thursday introduced Coinbase Verifications, allowing over 100M users to attest to account and country credentials on-chain.
• Avalanche’s On-Chain Activity and Users Declined In Q3 Activity declined on Avalanche last quarter, with both transaction volume and active addresses on Avalanche’s flagship “C-Chain” receding compared to Q2 2023. According to data from Nansen, daily active users peaked at 86,000 in Q3, compared to 117,000 during the previous quarter.
• Scroll Rockets Through Layer 2 Rankings Amid Origins NFT Campaign Activity on Scroll is picking up, with the network ranking third among Ethereum Layer 2s by throughput just one month after launching on mainnet. Scroll’s throughput tagged a new high of more than 5 transactions per second (TPS) on Nov. 9 after increasing 138% in one week, according to data from L2beat.

• Ether Surges Above $2,000 On BlackRock ETF Hopes Ether is trading above $2,000 for the first time since April after it came to light that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm with nearly $10T in AUM, has registered an entity called the iShares Ethereum Trust in Delaware.
• "I Don't See a Reason for the SEC to Deny the ETH ETF," said Bloomberg Analyst Eric Balchunas U.S. securities regulators would likely have to approve a spot Ether ETF, said Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas. He said the Securities and Exchange Commission will likely have to approve an ETF linked to the spot price of Ethereum's native token, Ether, because it has already approved Ether futures ETFs.
• Blur Token Doubles As NFT Market Picks Up Blur, the leading NFT marketplace by volume, is seeing renewed interest from crypto investors amid rising trading volumes across the non-fungibles sector. BLUR has surged over 150% since hitting an all-time low of $0.15 on October 12.
• Lightspeed Faction Debuts $285M Venture Fund Lightspeed Faction, a joint venture with Lightspeed Venture Partners, launched its first fund on Nov. 9 after raising $285M to invest in early-stage web3 startups. Faction announced the news on Nov. 9, noting it hopes to act as a long-term capital partner for emerging blockchain projects.
• Crypto Markets Rally On Renewed Spot Bitcoin ETF Hype On Nov. 8, James Seyffart, a Bloomberg analyst, tweeted that the SEC could approve applications for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds until Nov. 17. Seyffart said the eight-day window falls outside of the allotted comment period for the applications — during which they cannot receive approval.

• Linea Kicks Off ‘DeFi Voyage’ Campaign Roughly three months after launching its mainnet beta, Linea, the Ethereum Layer 2 network built by Consensys, the company behind MetaMask and Infura, launched its DeFi Voyage campaign to promote adoption.
• Binance Launches Web3 Wallet To Bridge CeFi With DeFi Binance launched a self-custodial wallet supporting integrations with the centralized Binance App in addition to popular DeFi protocols. Binance said the offering is designed to facilitate transactions across both CeFi and DeFi services.
• ETH Supply Trends Down After Two Months Of Inflation The supply of Ether is again flipping deflationary after users a sharp uptick in demand for Ethereum blockspace. Data from Ultra Sound Money shows that Ethereum’s burn-rate offset the issuance of new coins by 1,960 ETH ($3.7M) over the past seven days.
• Crypto Critic Nouriel Roubini is Launching a Token Nouriel Roubini, a prominent economics and former outspoken crypto critic, has shocked onlookers by announcing plans for a digital token. Roubini's fintech company, Atlas Capital, unveiled the Atlas Climate Stablecoin — a stable token backed by various real-world assets.
• Wintermute Threatens Near Over $11.2M Soured Stablecoin Deal Wintermute, a crypto market-making firm, said it plans to take legal action against the Near Foundation and sister project Aurora Labs for allegedly trying to back out of an $11.2M deal between the companies.

• Free NFT Inspired By The Simpsons Crosses $2M In Trading Volume A recent episode of the long-running cartoon, The Simpsons, parodied metaverse and NFT hype. As the episode aired, Springfield Punks, a collection of 3,405 NFTs from Italian artist Rino Russo, went live and quickly sold out.
• Kraken Exploring Options for Layer 2 Blockchain Network Kraken, the major U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, is reportedly looking into partnering with top firms to build its own Layer 2 network. Possible partners include Polygon, Matter Labs, and the Nil Foundation, among others.
• Avalanche Builder Ava Labs Lays Off 12% of Team Ava Labs, the blockchain-development firm behind the Avalanche blockchain, laid off 12% of its team. Emin Gun Sirer, Ava Labs’ founder, said the company is “fortunate to have significant runway and resources at [its] disposal” to sustain operations moving forward.
• Grayscale Chainlink Trust Shares Rocket To 200% Premium GLINK, shares in Grayscale’s Chainlink Trust, have rocketed to a 200% premium compared to the spot LINK markets. The news comes after LINK more than doubled in price over the past three weeks amid the broader crypto market recovery.
• Aave To Vote On Restoration Plan Following Market Freezes Anecdotal reports from crypto users around the world and research from a major hedge fund indicate Tron now leads the stablecoin sector by user base. While Tron is a centralized blockchain, users in emerging markets are flocking to the network for its low-fee transactions.
• Aave Floats New Plan To Restore GHO Peg The community for Aave, the leading DeFi lending protocol, will soon start voting on a proposal to rectify recently identified security vulnerabilities across its v2 and v3 deployments. The proposal would also restart several markets paused by the protocol on Nov. 4.
• Arbitrum Community Greenlights Staking Mechanism The Arbitrum community passed a revamped proposal to launch staking for ARB holders on Nov. 6. The approved plan will use ARB from the project’s treasury to fund staking rewards, for which two-thirds of the community supported an allocation of 100M tokens.

• Bank of England Unveils Stablecoin Rules The Bank of England has released stablecoin regulations that will take effect next year. Under the proposed rules, the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will implement policies released by the governmentlast week, starting with fiat-backed stablecoins in early 2024.
• ApeFest Attendees Report Severe Eye Injuries After UV Light Exposure Multiple attendees of ApeFest, a closed event exclusively accessible to holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, report they were admitted to hospital after being exposed to extreme ultraviolet lumination at last weekend’s event in Hong Kong.
• Cardano Blockchain Plans to Adopt Polkadot's Substrate Framework Cardano plans to use the underlying framework of Polkadot, a competing Layer 1 chain, also created by an Ethereum co-founder, Gavin Wood. Cardano plans to use Substrate for the development of its forthcoming multi-chain "partner chain" infrastructure.
• Arbitrum Governance Divided Over $2.4M Research Coalition Arbitrum token holders are split on a $2.4M proposal to fund a research coalition, with some community members raising concerns its cost is excessively high.