🟣 Airdrop Szn?

BTC and ETH looking strong, and airdrop hunters rejoice.

Good Morning, Ladies and Gents.

BTC and ETH are both up about 6% over the past week while funding rates remain relatively muted, with longs paying shorts less than 10% annualized on both assets. As a friendly reminder, spot BTC ETFs continue to see millions of dollars of net inflows every day, and spot ETH ETF applications remain pending.

Yesterday, Ark 21Shares amended their S-1 for their spot ETH ETF, adding a section indicating interest in staking some of the ETH under custody. This would mark a major milestone for the staking industry, as there is now potential for a whole new source of inflows. Lido spiked 10% on the news, but it is likely that Ark 21Shares will use more centralized staking services, such as cbETH.

We already got the DYM airdrop earlier this week, which is now pushing past its launch day high of $7. Wormhole released its token design ($W) in a blog post yesterday, and MadLads stakers who followed directions in Discord correctly (not me) received an airdrop last night related to Wormhole.

It is not clear what the MadLads airdrop entails, but it does seem clear that Wormhole’s native token is extremely close. Airdrop season is really heating up, and sybilers are taking full advantage.

Even Frax, a well known crypto project at this point, is releasing a points program for its newly announced “modular L2” built on the OP Stack as a part of the Optimism Superchain. FXTL points will be awarded to veFXS stakers and early users of the L2.

The announcement says, “Fraxtal is the first chain to have blockspace incentives (called Flox), block-by-block rewards based on usage of the chain”. It seems protocols and users will be rewarded based on the amount of gas spent interacting with Fraxtal. FXS is down 1% over the past 24 hours despite the announcement. FXS investors appear to be getting exhausted by the constant pivots in the Frax roadmap.

Since airdrops/points are the theme of the commentary today, I’d be remiss to not mention Whales Market, a unique exchange that enables users to trade points, pre-TGE tokens, or make OTC offers. Traders are currently pricing EigenLayer points at $0.15 per point.

That’s it for today, my friends. I hope to see you all on Warpcast.

— Sam Martin

Stargaze, the leading NFT marketplace in the Cosmos ecosystem, has experienced a drastic uptick in volume over the past few months. A vast majority of this volume derives from the “Bad Kids” collection, which are up substantially over the past year. Someone purchased 22 Bad Kids last night with a fresh wallet with $161K, or 3.22M STARS tokens. Protocol revenue is either burned, sent to the community pool, or shared with STARS stakers. Bad Kids are slowly becoming the defacto NFT collection in the Cosmos ecosystem for airdrop allocations, which is likely the reason for the collection’s price run up. It will be interesting to see if users get accustomed to the unique Stargaze UX and if volume continues to experience growth. I am personally not a fan of having NFTs denominated in a low-cap token, but to each their own.

The market has taken an interest in high-throughput blockchains, and Sui headline metrics show positive signs of growth for the nascent layer-1.

Marinade has launched new products in the form of Marinade Native, introduced new and more refined incentive programs, and will soon update its delegation strategy. Given the superior delegation strategy and impressive returns, Marinade Native could be a dark horse, and MNDE could represent an interesting opportunity, especially in the face of potential future monetization of new products.

BTC’s price began to surge during late-afternoon trading hours in the US

Farcaster has taken crypto by storm, but more must be done before it achieves mainstream popularity

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.