Welcome back to 0xResearch – quick hitting alpha for the crypto degens. Here's what we got for you today:
Banner day for BTC ETF
Coinbase smart wallet
Mina’s big upgrade
CoW Swap on Arbitrum
Bitcoin fund flows this week rebounded strongly so far, with almost $1 billion added to the suite of spot bitcoin ETFs. The flows are a large contributor to BTC’s march back to the $71.6k level where it has faced resistance in March, April and May.
New On the Margin host Felix Jauvin chalks it up to weaker economic data and a drop in the price of oil. That helps central bank policymakers gain confidence that inflation pressures will continue to abate, increasing the likelihood of monetary easing on the horizon.
More in Chart of the Day below.
Coinbase smart wallet
Coinbase debuted its smart wallet at EthDenver a few months ago, with an eye to improve onchain onboarding.
Today they’re taking it to the next level, alongside a new web portal and initial support for Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Base, Zora, Avalanche and BNB chain.
Biometrics and other passkey options have replaced seed phrases in a lot of modern wallet offerings, and Coinbase is joining the club.
Unique are integrations with Coinbase exchange accounts to facilitate payments, both on exchange and onchain.
Paymaster features enable gasless transactions — another hot topic — that let developers sponsor activities of their users.
The latest release is timed with the return of the company’s Onchain Summer marketing campaign, focused on Base.
CoW Swap’s first L2
The intents-based DEX aggregator is branching out with its first expansion to Ethereum layer-2 networks.
CoW’s developers cite "Arbitrum’s significant adoption and use by real people" plus "strong alignment and compatibility with Ethereum mainnet" as contributing factors for the move.
CoW Swap users on Arbitrum can now enjoy the same access to the aggregator’s robust solver competition to get better trade execution.
Mina brings ZK programmability live
Mina executed a major upgrade Tuesday, turning the page to a new chapter for the zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain.
Mina’s focus on being super lightweight allows dapp users to interact directly with the chain via OpenMina, thus skipping the middleware of centralized RPC providers.
While sharing similarities with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in terms of privacy potential, Mina is functionally different in that computation is hidden offchain rather than executed on encrypted data.
Mina’s developers are hoping that new classes of dapps will become possible, breaking the mold from today’s EVM-centric fare. But "private EVM-like" applications will still be possible using frameworks built on top of the base-layer, such as Protokit.
BTC spot ETF flows since inception:
It’s hard to ignore the change of behavior seen on the right side of the chart. Even if only for a day, Tuesday’s inflows have not been matched since March, when bitcoin made its last run to an all-time high of about $73,750.
Wednesday’s price action has the king less than 3% away from that, as of 12:15 pm ET.
May 2024 was a month of contrasting trends, with easing inflation boosting markets but failing to significantly impact Ethereum until the surprise approval of US spot ETH ETFs. Political developments signaled a shifting regulatory landscape and the ETH/BTC ratio reached its lowest level since April 2021 before sharply rebounding as ETH ended May up 25%.
May 2024 was a pivotal month marked by easing inflation, strong market performance, institutional adoption of bitcoin ETFs, and evolving cryptocurrency regulations. Economic projections from the market suggest slightly higher chances of interest rate cuts later this year, the growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies by major financial institutions, and legislative progress that signals a shifting financial paradigm.
The cause of the $300 million-plus "unauthorized leak" is still unknown as the company gets set for a big fundraise.
Solana’s validators made almost $7 million in tips last week.
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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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