1/ Stanford Blockchain Conference had been a top-notch week, with quality research discussions that lead and shape the crypto space.
Here are my selected highlights 🧵
- MEV
- L2
- ZKP
- AMM
- On-chain Orderbook
- LSD & Restaking
1/ HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Ordinals and BRC-20 had been the key catalysts for "the Year of Bitcoin" in 2023. But how should we position them in 2024?
Here's a thread on BRC-20 🧵
1/
@synthetix_io
has seen a surge in trading volume and fees lately - but what exactly is Synthetix doing?
Here's why we're excited about it, and why you should be paying attention too 🧵
🔔 EIP3525 just got approved. But what is it?
💡 ERC3525 = ERC20 quantitative operations + ERC721 compatible
0/16 🔻Below is a thread on the mechanism, competitive edges, and potential use cases of ERC3525🧵
1/ Bitcoin grew around 30% from 27k to 35k over the past month.
Apart from "digital gold" + Bitcoin ETF filings + institutional interests, what else can Bitcoin do?
Today, we're going to dive into the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem 🧵
1/ Since the boom of
@friendtech
and
@farcaster_xyz
, the crypto community has been finding the next gem in SocialFi.
@Beoble_official
has come to our attention with its ability to engage crypto communities. Let's dive in below 🧵
💡Came across projects designing tokenomics and rejected good business models simply due to bad tokenomics 👀
🏗️ Tokenomics is a Web3 fundamental.
✅ Good tokenomics can turn project from 8 to 10.
❎ Bad tokenomics can drag project from 8 to 2.
(1/20)🔻A thread on Tokenomics🧵
1/
@CurveFinance
has demonstrated resilience after the reentrancy attacks and it remains a backbone in DeFi.
Let's dive into their latest updates and some product highlights 🧵
1/ Sharing my key takeaways for
@EFDevconnect
🧵
- EIP-4844 Important Upgrade
- Plasma Return
- Based Rollup (L1 Sequencing)
- L2 GTM War
- Restaking Game Strong
- Intents for Everything
- FHE vs ZKP Debates
Inspired by my friends like
@jinglingcookies
@ahboyash
@0xlaiyuen
, I just started my reads channel 🤓
Going forward, I will share interesting threads, news, and alpha there. Pls feel free to subscribe!
1/
@ribbonfinance
has been an active player in crypto structured products. With the launch of
@aevoxyz
in 2023, they've stepped up their game in the options space.
Here's a thread of Ribbon Finance 🎀🧵
2/ Asian Market
- Regulations: Bullish for Asia due to regulatory friendliness compared to the US. In particular, HK, Dubai, and Japan governments have been more supportive towards crypto adoption over the past year
- Capital: HK and Singapore lead in terms of liquidity from
Currently at SBC 🇺🇸
Enjoy the technical / research-driven talks and convos.
Would love to meet more builders and researchers at Stanford!
If you’re building sth interesting / got great ideas in mind, pls dm me on twitter or
@dwfventures
on telegram.
4/ VC
VCs start targeting more Dapp investments, with the heat for infra slowing down. While infra is still receiving VC attention, the market is quite saturated with so much capital raised for the past 2 years. The room for infra investments is definitely squeezing, given many
It's time! The final showcase for the Hack-a-TON x
@DWFLabs
x
@AWSstartups
is just around the corner. We can't wait to host our judges and participants in Singapore and witness some amazing pitches!
🗓 Sept 11: 12:30 PM - 6:00 PM and Sept 12: 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM GMT+8
Livestream
1/ From a traditional ventures perspective, memecoin is always considered as a "non-fundamental play." However, the market has proved its mindshare power.
In this upcoming cycle. we believe memecoin is going to be the new GTM strategy for many ecosystems and projects 🧵
6/ Decent Traction (1/10)
The below statistics are provided by the Mantle team.
During testnet period, Mantle has processed over 15mm on-chain transactions and recorded 700k unique wallet addresses (as of 12 Jul 2023).
5/ Actual Adoption
The steep curve of L2 growth has attracted many developers to build DApps on top over the last 12 months. However, the problems of low user adoption and low liquidity / TVL are getting more transparent when the mainnets of major L2s are getting close.
3/ Projects
In Token2049, we saw a lot more big ecosystems as well as consumer / social / gaming projects than in developer-driven events like ETHCC and SBC.
While the US is known for its strong influence on infra development, Asia is the best place for community growth,
2/ Ordinal Inscriptions
Before diving right into BRC-20 tokens, it's important to understand how Ordinals work.
By default, one satoshi is a fraction of one Bitcoin, and 100,000,000 satoshis make up 1 BTC.
1/ Tevaera is pleased to announce a $5M fundraise led by Laser Digital, Nomura Group, with participation from industry leaders, to create a one-stop gaming ecosystem powered by
@zksync
's ZK Stack!
Read more:
2/ Introduction
Mantle is a modular L2 network built on the OP stack, with EigenDA as data availability (DA) layer.
EigenDA allows nodes to provide data availability services to the Mantle network and participate in Mantle's economic model via $MNT staking.
19/ DWF Investments
DWF Labs has invested US$15mm worth of $SNX, with further US$5mm set to follow. As an investor of
@synthetix_io
, we look forward to working closely with Syntheix and building a better future for defi.
3/ Modular Design
Unlike monolithic blockchain that handles all processes (i.e., execution, consensus, settlement, and data availability) at the same network layer, Mantle adopts modular design that each blockchain operations are performed on specialized layers.
5/
The competitive advantage of Ordinals NFTs is that they can be created directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Since the launch of Ordinals in Jan 2023, inscriptions activities have grown massively and Bitcoin NFTs also had a considerable boom.
3/
Ordinals enable individual satoshis to be assigned with a sequential number, allowing them to be tracked and transacted through inscriptions.
Each satoshi can be inscribed with data, such as pictures, text, or videos, through a Bitcoin transaction.
Although the market is slowing down a bit, it’s a normal market correction after 2024Q1.
These days are the best time to:
- Keep building
- Revisit your investment thesis and deployment strategy
- Look out for good deal terms
- Get your bag prepared for the next drivers
Seems like the market joined a quite calm and boring phase. We need more drivers for money inflow. Nice time for buidl, ok time for invest and raise.
Bleeding/flat mode for a next few months, then activity increase on the market, maybe ETHETF, and bullish again.
DYOR. See data>
8/
Although BRC-20 is a type of ordinal inscription, not all ordinals are BRC-20 tokens.
Standard bitcoin ordinals can be inscribed with any info, but BRC-20 tokens are always inscribed with JSON data.
In simple words, BRC-20 makes tokens fungible unlike the standard ordinals.
15/
Despite BRC-20 is still experimental and underdeveloped, the growth of research development and projects somehow reminds us the similar footsteps of Ethererum.
The increasing interests on BRC-20 from users, projects, developers, and investors prove their potentials.
11/ High staked TVL (3/10)
Majority of $SNX circulating supply is being staked, with up to ~84% staked TVL and US$650mm.
This is one of the highest among leading Defi protocols.
4/
After the transaction is mined, the inscribed data is permanently stored on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This allows each satoshi to be different from another, hence becoming non-fungible.
16/ Synthetix v3 Upgrade (8/10)
Synthetix v3 aims to provide “liquidity as a service" on any EVM-compatible chains like
@arbitrum
@0xPolygon
, fueling the next generation of permissionless defi protocols.
For more details of v3, please read to the below thread.
What is Synthetix V3, and why is it important?
V3 will completely overhaul Synthetix to become a liquidity layer that powers the next generation of on-chain derivatives and financial products.
Learn about Synthetix V3 through a 🧵 & blog post 👇
1/28
12/ Attractive Fees (4/10)
Unlike the typical package of 0.1% open position fee + high funding fees on many Defi protocols, Synthetix is known for one of the lowest fees on perps - 2/6bps on ETH and BTC.
This makes trading on Synthetix more tempting and sustainable.
After intent / modular / parallel EVM, here comes the new buzzword in town - gigagas.
Reth (aka Rust Ethereum) aims to achieve 1 gigagas per second in the future.
Currently, they achieved 100-200mg/s (versus ETH 1.25mg/s, Base 5mg/s, Arbitrum 7mg/s).
To do so, they will
We have made great strides in the world of blockchain scaling in the last 10 years.
It’s time to go further.
Reth’s path to 1 gigagas per second, and beyond…where we present our roadmap for scaling Ethereum.
8/ EigenDA - Increased Bandwidth (3/10)
With EigenDA, Mantle has a separate DA protocol to expand data bandwidth and activates faster improvement cycles for the network.
Cloud storage can stretch to accommodate demand, with underlying tech and distributed systems ready.
16/
At DWF Ventures, we're interested in exploring and supporting Bitcoin and BRC-20 related projects.
For projects, feel free to reach out to DWF Ventures on our website at
9/
If you use the Ethereum blockchain purely as a DA layer without any computation, it takes 80 kilobytes/sec. But for EigenDA, it potentially takes around 10 megabytes/sec in their first version.
That's a 125x improvement over Ethereum DA today.
1/
@TheYuliverse
OG404 is finally live! With the limited supply of 1,000 NFTs, the public sale sold out in 10 secs.
Let's dive into Yuliverse and OG404 below 🧵
15/ Optimism Rewards (7/10)
Synthetix perps' Optimism incentives program has just started.
What excites the defi community most? Synthetix is distributing ~5.3mm of $OP tokens to traders for 20 weeks, with integrators like
@Kwenta
and
@PolynomialFi
.
11/
On the other hand, Curve can dramatically reduce price slippage, being able to sustain much larger trades than on Uniswap.
For example, swapping 1,000$stETH to 1,000$ETH on Uniswap has 46% price slippage, while Curve only has 0.03%.
7/ Modularity - Operational Economics (2/10)
Through modularity, Mantle is able to benefit from overall operational economics and scalability. In particular:
- Mantle ORU would increase throughput and scale
- EigenDA would increase data bandwidth and lower gas fees
7/
Unlike the ERC-20 standard, the BRC-20 standard does not rely on smart contracts but instead leverages on ordinal inscriptions.
BRC-20 tokens can be deployed, minted, and transferred by directly inscribing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data onto satoshi tokens.
13/ Well-balanced Open Interest (5/10)
Thanks to the low fees, arbitrage traders can earn rewards for bringing markets back to neutral.
In turns, this effectively helps Synthetix perps maintaining the OI skew at 50/50 - much more balanced than many popular perps protocols.
10/ Trading Fees Growth (2/10)
Synthetix's main source of fees comes from perps - in particular
@Kwenta_io
on Optimism.
Monthly fees in Mar is US$5mm, almost 5x of the previous months'.
Just shared abt restaking and AVS on
@eigenlayer
at the HK Web3 festival yesterday.
What a coincidence that they launched mainnet today. Congrats to the team!
20/
Therefore, Bitcoin L2 x EVM compatible infrastructures may potentially bring traffic of both Ethereum and Bitcoin communities to each other. This could potentially be a powerful gamechanger.
13/
The implementation of multi-party computation (MPC) and Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) can reduce trust risks and improve correctness of off-chain transaction execution, effectively shortening the challenge period.
The wait period can be shortened to as low as 1-2 days.
.
@AaveAave
governance just approved purchasing US$2mm $CRV, supporting liquidity of stablecoin $GHO on
@CurveFinance
.
For Curve's influence on stablecoins, you can refer to the thread below 👇
1/
@CurveFinance
has demonstrated resilience after the reentrancy attacks and it remains a backbone in DeFi.
Let's dive into their latest updates and some product highlights 🧵
6/ BRC-20
In Mar 2023,
@domodata
used ordinals to build the groundwork for a new token standard, BRC-20.
BRC-20 is an experimental token standard for fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.
15/
Second example is Rollkit (a new framework developed by Celestia), which enables developers to build EVM compatible sovereign rollups and integrate Bitcoin as a data availability layer.
You can now run a sovereign rollup on Bitcoin.
Announcing the first research integration of Bitcoin as a data availability layer for sovereign rollups. 🧵
20/
Post merger, Mantle ecosystem will inherit ~US$2.4bn worth of BitDAO's treasury, including US$300mm USDC/USDT and 270k ETH.
Also, Mantle will benefit from the community / traffic acquisition brought by BitDAO.
We'd see more positive synergies going forward.
17/ Conclusion
In late Oct,
@DWFVentures
went to
@LuganoPlanB
. The event is Bitcoin-driven, therefore we had many great conversations with Bitcoin community members.
Prior to this, the team has also been to different ETH events.
10/ Pros of BRC-20
- Enhanced tokenization of Bitcoin beyond the "digital gold" theory
- Inherited security of the Bitcoin PoW system, hence technically more secure than Ethereum
- Fully on-chain - no additional file systems like IPFS are needed
10/ EigenDA - Lower Gas Fees (4/10)
Currently, the majority of transaction fees incurred on L2 goes towards paying for data on L1.
Ethereum’s DA is expensive because of the limited data bandwidth available.
18/
Through going to both Bitcoin and ETH events, we have noticed certain level of "segregation" and "independence" between the Ethereum community and the Bitcoin community.
Some Ethereum (Bitcoin) supporters would only choose to use protocols on Ethereum (Bitcoin) ecosystem.
12/ MPC + TSS - Faster Finality and Minimized Trust Risks (5/10)
A downside of ORU is the long wait time for finality (i.e., 7 days for Optimism and Arbitrum), creating friction for users and liquidity providers during withdrawals.
6/
If you take a look of Michael's latest loan positions, the liquidation prices considerably improved from $0.37-0.39 to $0.28-0.31. Therefore, the risks of $CRV liquidation have significantly been lowered.
You can refer to our calculations below.
6/
Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions refer to protocols built on top of Bitcoin base layer. Instead of altering Bitcoin codes directly, these protocols are developed to provide scalability to the Bitcoin network by processing transactions off the main blockchain.
18/ Constant Improvements (10/10)
Credit must be given to the Synthetix community, governance, and core contributors for continuing to innovate 🙌🏻
Some great news announced recently:
- Lower fees, higher OI caps, 50x leverage
- IPFS node
What could be next? Tokenomics review.
15/
EIP-4337 enables account abstraction without modifying the consensus rules. It eliminates the need for sending transactions, with users sending UserOperation objects to bundlers instead.