šŸŸ£ Airdrops and Exploits

Only two things in bull markets are guaranteed: Airdrops and Exploits.

March 28, 2024

GM - itā€™s Thursday. Just 12 more hours until Friday, my fellow nine-to-fivers. Letā€™s be honest with ourselves though, if youā€™re reading this newsletter.. you will likely be consuming crypto content for at least 50% of the weekend. NO DAYS OFF. 

BTC and ETH are behaving nicely to start the day, both up ~1% over the past 24 hours. Funding rates are creeping higher, with BTC and ETH annualized funding at 62% and 55% respectively. 

Ethena announced its airdrop of ENA yesterday evening, which will include 5% of the total ENA supply to ā€œShard Programā€ participants. The token is currently trading at a ~$10B implied FDV on Aevo, which would result in ~$500M being airdropped to users who participated in the surprisingly short 6 week campaign.

In less positive news, Prisma, which is an LST and LRT protocol, suffered an exploit earlier this morning. The post-mortem has yet to be posted by the protocolā€™s core contributors, but the exploiter appears to have stolen ~$10M. It might not be a bad idea to revoke approvals related to Prisma if you have interacted with protocol in the past. 

This attack comes just a day after the munchables exploit on Blast. Stay vigilant out there ā€“ exploits have historically tended to pick up during bull markets, and we do not expect this bull market to be any different on that front.

Lastly, Ethereum missed a hefty amount of slots yesterday. Ethereum researchers seem confused as to what the root cause of the missed slots actually is, so this is worth monitoring closely given the recent 4844 upgrade. 

Thatā€™s it for today, folks. Catch you back here tomorrow. 

ā€” Sam (X: swmartin19 | Farcaster: swmartin19)

Base has officially increased the gas target by 50% to 3.75 mgas/s, and will further increase it over the coming weeks to 5 mgas/s. The initial gas target hike was enough to bring Base median gas fees down from a high of over $11 to around $0.02. However, as you can see in the above image, fees are already spiking up again to about $0.06.

Additionally, the amount of L2 gas consumed per second has increased in tandem with the gas target increase. It will be interesting to watch this play out as the Base team continues to raise the gas target; will the increase in bandwidth be met with demand, thus rendering the gas target increases relatively ineffective? This is one of the more interesting things going on in crypto right now, as it is putting the scalability constraints of EVM-based rollups at the front and center stage.

The Hivemapper Network represents a new model for building, updating, and monetizing global map imagery and data by leveraging the power of community coordination through token incentives.

Although Ondo Finance has experienced growth stagnation over the past few months, they remain a significant player in the tokenized security space, with their recent multichain expansion and their dive into broader tokenized assets through Ondo GM potentially revitalizing growth.

The Fidelity Ethereum Fund, like other proposed ETH ETFs, seeks to stake a portion of its assets, according to the firmā€™s Wednesday registration statement.

Blob space stopped being free on Wednesday.

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 Firmā€™s Financial Disclosures.