TLDR Crypto 2024-04-11

The price of Bitcoin has dropped below $69,000 as investors wait for U.S. Consumer Price Index data that could influence the Fed's decision on interest rates. Although the market is divided on the possibility of a June rate cut, strong employment data suggests the Fed may maintain current rates, even as inflation is expected to show an increase.

Uniswap Labs received a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission warning the company that the regulator intends to pursue legal action. The company argues that tokens are not securities and that most tokens traded on the protocol are not investment contracts. Recently, there have been discussions about turning on the fee switch for the UNI token. However, this has not been implemented, and Uniswap Labs insists that UNI does not fit the definition of a security since there is no investment contract between the company and token holders.

Privy is introducing passkey-based login for users, which combines the security of biometric authentication with an enhanced user experience. The company recognizes the current limitations of passkeys, such as cross-device usability and partial browser support, and claims to have developed solutions to solve some of these roadblocks.

Ora Protocol’s IMO allows tokenizing AI models onchain, bringing revenue sharing to IMO token holders. IMOs serve three purposes: enabling sustainable open-source AI funding, aligning contribution incentives, and model value capture for holders. The $OLM IMO will tokenize the OpenLM model, a medium-sized language model that is performant on up to 7 billion parameters.

Liquid restaking tokens comprise 73% of EigenLayer deposits and are the next evolution of liquid staking protocols like Lido or Jito. With a 7-day withdrawal period on EigenLayer, the barrier to exit is high, making liquidity and price pegging to ETH critical to the success of LRTs. This article analyzes the liquidity, volatility, and volume of the top 5 LRTS – Ether.fi, Renzo, Puffer, Swell, and Kelp DAO – finding that they are not incredibly liquid but have been slowly improving. The LRT market has winner-take-most characteristics since liquidity and integrations are critical to an LRT’s broader success.

Though EigenLayer is the clear market leader in the restaking space, other ecosystems may introduce similar protocols that use SOL or TIA as collateral. As the first asset-agnostic platform, Karak may see a first-mover advantage, especially since it accepts stablecoins. At the same time, single-ecosystem protocols like Lido or Jito have historically performed better, and partnerships with liquid staking and DeFi protocols will prove critical in gaining adoption and integrations.

By incentivizing users to stay liquid and continuously bid, NFT marketplace Blur may have had the lowest floors, but at the cost of incrementally devaluing NFTs on its platform. Activity on the marketplace, which rewards users with BLUR tokens, was an effective strategy to capture market share and volume in the short term, but it was not strong enough to keep competitor Magic Eden from doubling its daily trading volume and becoming the leading NFT marketplace by revenue. Part of this is due to Magic Eden’s adoption of Bitcoin Ordinals instead of Blur’s focus on Ethereum mainnet.

The commoditization of blockchain infrastructure, enabled by more competitors and options in the modular stack, is catalyzing a new wave of customized, application-specific rollups. By leveraging components like data availability layers (Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA), rollup SDKs (Sovereign and RollKit), and shared sequencers (Astria and Espresso), developers can focus on optimizing applications without the burden of managing the entire stack. At the same time, infrastructure providers can increase demand for their products and protocols by decreasing the cost of using them by commoditizing the complements or tools an application relies on.

Users within the Pendle ecosystem can tokenize and trade future yields, engage in money markets to borrow against principal tokens (PTs), get insurance for asset protection, and more.

The fund operates on Ethereum with the transfer agent Securitize LLC, issuing monthly yield in BUIDL tokens, while using USDC for investments and redemptions.

A Deutsche Bank survey indicates increased positivity towards cryptocurrencies, with 40% believing Bitcoin will thrive in the future.

Coinbase’s L2, Base, has recently surpassed $40 million in revenue after exponential transaction volume growth.