🟣 Navigating the late summer crypto lull
Amusements, innovations and experiments
Macauley Peterson & Donovan Choy
September 05, 2024
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Sullen September
AltLayer conjures Wizard
An EtherVista view
Chart: L2 fees
The late summer malaise shows no signs of abating in this first trading week of September. Bitcoin and ether ETF inflows have slowed to a trickle, leaving Grayscale’s GBTC and ETHE exitooors with free rein to post red numbers day after day.
But cheer up, wayward trader, BTC is still 125% ahead of where it was this time a year ago, after a very similar-looking summer of 2023. Then, as now, BTC fell about 10% below its 200-day moving average. Then, as now, it hit local tops about three months apart earlier in the year, crashed in August and drifted sideways for what seemed like an eternity.
Now, however, bitcoin has the halving at its back, an interest rate-cutting cycle ahead of it, a US dollar in a downtrend and ETFs that are sure to eventually pick up some slack.
From where I sit, the tenebrous timeline is therapeutic. As Mark Twain might say, there’s a heap of marvels stirring behind the curtain.
Summoning Wizard
AltLayer has introduced Wizard, a platform designed to streamline the deployment and management of EigenLayer Actively Validated Services (AVS) for developers. Currently in public alpha, Wizard’s goal is to reduce AVS deployment time from months to minutes.
AltLayer expects this to serve as a modular approach to launching bespoke versions of a generalized AVS. For example, a gaming-focused rollup might need a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) service for randomness, which can now be selected and deployed through Wizard.
AVSs, supported by EigenLayer's restaking mechanism, leans on Ethereum's security to ensure reliability. AltLayer’s focus on EigenLayer differentiates it from competitors like Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) providers Caldera and Conduit. While AltLayer emphasizes restaking for security, Caldera and Conduit focus on performance optimization and seamless integration with Ethereum and rollups built on top of it.
Rollups using AltLayer currently tout $11.33 billion in total value locked (TVL). By providing templates for AVS configurations, Wizard aims to further scale decentralized applications.
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Ethereum rollup rent:
Ethereum L2 rollups continue to pay all-time low "rent" to the L1 for settlement, largely thanks to EIP-4844 Proto-Danksharding which went live on March 13, 2024. Base generated $2.5 million in fees but paid merely $11.1k for settlement in the month of August. In the same month, Arbitrum raked in $2.2 million in fees but paid $76k for settlement.
— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)
The Aptos ecosystem is accelerating, with both the network and core projects gaining notable volume, transactional activity and deposits. Aptos’ TVL has grown significantly, rising 263% year-to-date from $116 million at the start of the year to over $425M today. Ondo Finance’s tokenized US Treasurys product, USDY, has surpassed $15 million, bringing RWAs to Aptos and highlighting the realities of new innovative financial products that bridge tradfi and decentralized platforms.
EtherVista
Memecoins are like the musical equivalent of the latest Taylor Swift chart hit. You wish they’d just go away, but however hard you ignore it, they just keep coming back in your face.
The latest meme token generator is "EtherVista." The Windows OS-themed platform launched earlier this week on Ethereum, to the delight of financial degenerates everywhere with cash to gamble. It’s being called a "pump[dot]fun" competitor, but it’s really a lot more like a Uniswap v2 DEX with fixed ETH fees per swap that go to LPs and the token creator.
Millennials and Gen X-ers know that is a Windows 98-themed user interface, not Vista!
EtherVista’s VISTA token is a "value-compounding deflationary" currency with a one million capped supply. These are not my words, but the sophisticated technical terms found in EtherVista’s white paper (yes, there is a white paper).
It’s deflationary because ETH fees collected by EtherVista are used to burn VISTA, with already 2-3% of its supply burned.
Like Solana’s pump.fun, EtherVista employs a "fair launch" model where the liquidity of token creators are locked for five days to deter explicit rug pulls. That’s nice, except that rug pullers are probably also sitting on dozens of wallets and frontrunning retail liquidity.
At the time of writing, the Dexscreener page for EtherVista tokens displays already 179 tokens launched, littered with the kind of zany names that Bill Gates would be proud of: Blue Screen Of Death, WINDOWS XP, VISTASHIB, WINDOGE VISTA, Hasta La Vista, MSPAINT.EXE, Linux…you get the idea.
VISTA is currently trading at a $27.6 million market cap and is already listed on tier-3 CEXs such as Gate.io, MEXC and BingX.
EtherVista is also the second-highest gas guzzler on mainnet in the last 24 hours, behind Uniswap. With only $95 million in daily trading volume, it’s a reminder of how painfully slow Ethereum’s primary hub of liquidity is, and why pump.fun succeeded on Solana.
— Donovan Choy
The Aptos ecosystem is accelerating, with both the network and core projects gaining notable volume, transactional activity and deposits. Aptos’ TVL has grown significantly, rising 263% year-to-date from $116m at the start of the year to over $425m today. Adoption of Aptos technology such as Block-STM by teams such as Sei, Polygon, Monad and Thala validates its technical design choices and demonstrates real-world performance stress-testing.
This month's PPGC mainly focused on two subjects. First is a discussion about the Ahmedabad Hard Fork and the PIPs included with it (PIP-30, PIP-36 and PIP-45). The second subject revolves around the MATIC-POL transition and the stakeholders it primarily impacts.
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AltLayer’s new platform offers developers templates and tools to rapidly deploy Actively Validated Services.
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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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