🟣 Fresh scaling efforts
Curve’s new fee switch and new rollup moves from old chains
Macauley Peterson
June 28, 2024
Brought to you by:
Welcome back to 0xResearch. Here's what we’ve got for you today:
Curve fee switch
Tezos going "modulithic"
MegaETH, minimal latency
Polymarket presidential bets
Bitcoin is once again testing the bottom of the current range, with $60k remaining a key level to watch. Not much is new on that front since earlier this week.
Curve pays in USD
On Thursday, Curve Finance veCRV rewards began to be paid out in crvUSD, following a governance vote to activate a fee switch.
The change affects users who lock CRV to earn a revenue share either directly with Curve or via yield aggregators such as Convex, Stake DAO and Yearn.
Previously, Curve distributed fees in 3crv, the LP pool comprising USDT, USDC and DAI.
CrvUSD has proven fairly stable since launching in May 2023, with only brief periods below $0.995. However, only about 121 million crvUSD are currently in circulation, putting it at #16 among stablecoins by market cap.
Tezos rolls up
Tezos (XTZ) is iterating on a rollup strategy for scalability, composability and interoperability.
The new approach is being dubbed "modulithic" — integrating the strengths of both monolithic and modular blockchain designs.
The base layer acts as a lightweight, decentralized settlement layer, with a "canonical" L2 rollup providing vertical scaling. This rollup will inherit the security and censorship-resistant features of the L1, much like Ethereum rollups are designed to do.
A key difference in Tezos' strategy is its support for multiple execution environments, which facilitates atomic transactions across smart contracts written in various programming languages, including JavaScript and Python.
For instance, a smart contract written in Solidity can interact with one written in Python, and output results to a third written in JavaScript within the same transaction. This capability simplifies the development process and opens up new possibilities for cross-platform integrations.
That’s novel, but will it be enough to overcome Tezos’ declining developer count and token price, which has dropped the network out of the top #100 crypto assets?
MegaETH
MegaETH, developed by MegaLabs, announced a $20 million raise from a seed funding round, which drew participation from notable figures in the Ethereum space such as Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin and Sreeram Kannan.
MegaETH touts "real-time transaction processing" with claims of 1 ms latency. The platform's goal is to achieve a massive 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). If true, that would position MegaETH as a front-runner in addressing scalability issues.
A public testnet is still months away, but the project shares some similarities with existing L2 solutions like the OP Stack.
MegaETH operates with a single active "sorter" at any given time, which, like a sequencer, is responsible for transaction ordering.
Both use proof systems to ensure transaction validity and security.
A key difference is that MegaETH has more node specialization and specific hardware requirements. Full nodes in MegaETH will have lower hardware requirements than provers or sorters, for instance.
Like Monad, it plans to use an ultra-optimized EVM execution environment that pushes the limits of throughput, latency and resource efficiency.
Thank you to our sponsor:
From modularity to restaking, to the intersection of AI and crypto, to the long-awaited consumer-facing apps to the most recent Bitcoin-related innovations.
We’ll be breaking down all of these and more with the help of a few of the thought leaders in crypto at Permissionless.
Polymarket presidential election winner 2024:
Following last night's US presidential debate, prediction platform Polymarket has seen a pronounced shift in the odds for the election winner, favoring Donald Trump.
President Biden had been stable in the 30-40 cent range in the weeks leading up to the debate, but suffered a significant drop after the 90-minute TV event began, reaching as low as 14 cents earlier today.
When this market eventually resolves, the shares corresponding to the actual outcome are paid out at $1 each, while all other shares become worthless.
We acknowledge TON’s highly unique distribution relationship with Telegram, Telegram’s ambitions as a super app and developer platform rivaling the scale of WeChat as a TON growth driver, and the TON chain’s relatively high scale and speed vs. popular EVM chains today. However, we believe the TON ecosystem is at a very early stage; its native smart contract language may be prohibitive to attracting meaningful developer activity, and that Telegram’s distribution is overstated. Its viability as a developer platform and super app is far more challenged than the market appreciates.
Liquity v2 will bring to market a new stablecoin, BOLD, with redesigned mechanisms to return protocol-generated revenues back to BOLD liquidity providers. The tokenomics and mechanisms behind v2 should offer more sustainable long-term incentives for participation in the protocol.
VanEck’s proposed Solana Trust may have a tough time getting past the SEC given its structure and the regulatory precedent.
Miners may not be as tied to bitcoin as they once were, but maybe that’s exactly what investors want.
|
|
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.
recent research
Research
In this report, each analyst on the Blockworks Research team lays out their highest conviction thesis for 2025.