🟣 Bonk. - Blockworks Newsletter

Gm!

For those who were following along all weekend, the OpenAI saga felt like it was from a movie script. It started with the firing of CEO Sam Altman and the resignation of co-founder Greg Brockman as carried out by the board with Mira Murati as the replacement CEO.

Then, a reverse UNO card was played, as most employees threatened they would all quit unless Sam and Greg were taken back. Just as we thought justice was being served, radio silence from the board was followed by the hiring of Emmett Shear, former Twitch founder, as the interim CEO. While Sam and Greg had their foot on the gas with respect to shipping new updates, Emmett is much more cautious about the development of AI which is inline with the board’s point of view, according to some sources.

There were so many twists and turns in this plotline it had me on the edge of my seats all weekend. You thought DAOs were a disaster? Well so is centralized governance.

WLD (Worldcoin) saw wild price action as the events unfolded. Sam fired as CEO, which makes the leader look incompetent? WLD drops 12% in a few hours. Looks like Sam is coming back? WLD pumps 20%.

In other news, Argentina’s presidential election concluded this weekend, with Javier Milei defeating Sergio Massa. Milei is a large proponent of Austrian economics and a Bitcoin advocate, and ran on a campaign to replace the peso with the U.S. dollar and shutting down the central bank.

While this may be good for Bitcoin nation state adoption, if you take one doom scroll down X with videos related to Milei you see him say some pretty wild things. And a wave of populist movements around the globe is typically not a good sign for stability. So there are mixed feelings here.

Also, I can’t go without shouting out the biggest gainer this weekend: BONK. The largest meme token on Solana has seen more onchain volume than most altcoins on Ethereum and is up 100% from Friday’s low. Are we in the presence of this cycle’s DOGE? With Solana’s current momentum, it’s definitely a possibility. NFA.

Let’s have a good week shall we?

– Westie

Solana has been on a tear lately, with DEX volume going bonkers in the past three weeks. In the prior seven days, over $2B of volume was traded across the DEXs shown above, making Solana the fourth-largest chain based on DEX volume, behind Ethereum, Arbitrum, and BNB Chain. Ethereum still facilitates ~5x more volume, but Solana is definitely on the right track. One aspect the chain might struggle with is low liquidity for a vast share of Solana-based tokens, making it infeasible to trade with size. However, liquidity should start improving as the wealth effect deriving from SOL price appreciation begins taking place, and investors rotate capital into native assets on the chain to chase higher market beta.

The BTC hash rate has steadily increased since the end of September, and the blockchain has recently seen some renewed interest through Ordinals—Bitcoin’s version of NFTs. Ordinals made up ~55% of Bitcoin transactions in the past seven days, and from the beginning of November, daily transaction fees have shot up from ~$745K to around the $10M mark, surpassing Ethereum for the first time in 2023. The recent fee surge seems to be driven by an Ordinals project, Taproot Wizards, announcing a $7.5M financing round with the purpose of attracting more talent to build on the blockchain, as well as Binance listing ORDI on November 7. ORDI is the first token created in accordance with the BRC-20 fungible token standard.

Having said all of that, it’s worth pointing out that although the BTC hash rate has been up only in recent months, mining pools are currently quite centralized, with the two largest pools accounting for ~57% of mining pool-derived blocks over the past seven days.

GovHub: October Update

This past month had a flurry of highly important governance votes across the crypto landscape. We leverage GovHub—our powerful governance aggregator—to provide deep insights into the most important proposals in crypto.

Pyth Network: Pull, Not Push

Pyth is a low latency pull-based oracle. In a future that looks increasingly high frequency, with various alt L1s and L2s that have significantly shorter block times than Ethereum, and an explosion of “high-frequency” protocols such as oracle or CLOB perp DEXs, Pyth’s low latency oracle product looks much better positioned to capture a significant amount of market share in comparison to competitors.

A spicy salvo launched in the monolithic vs modular debate

“The whole point of a public blockchain is lost if you are not resistant for the worst-case scenarios,” Polynya says

Argentina elects pro-Bitcoin president Javier Milei

Milei has been an outspoken critic of Argentina’s central bank and a vocal supporter of Bitcoin and crypto

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.

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