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- 🟣 Avalanche freezes and Uniswap leaps
🟣 Avalanche freezes and Uniswap leaps
The DeFi summer OG is sparking a renewed look at some "DeFi dinosaurs"
Bitcoin has been fairly listless in recent days, though still holding above its short term range. Wednesday marked the first day of negative spot ETF flows since late January, with $35.6 million leaving the funds, but inflows rebounded Thursday with $251 million entering — still a healthy clip, so no immediate worries there.
And Reddit disclosed they bought a little BTC, ETH and MATIC ahead of their IPO.
But the market drama lies elsewhere this Friday.
Avalanche suffered an outage similar to the one we saw from Solana earlier this month. Both chains stopped finalizing due to a client bug, development teams scrambled to push out a patch, validators upgraded, the network restarted — and the market didn’t seem to care much one way or the other about any of it.
AVAX dipped a few percent, but more or less in line with other majors, indicating traders are surprisingly unbothered by a major outage so long as it’s remedied relatively quickly.
Uniswap stole the show today, however, as news of a new governance proposal to activate the protocol’s fee switch broke, fueling a 55% rally in the token. Speculation is rife that this change to the fundamental value of the governance token will finally pass muster in an on-chain vote.
Given that it came from the Uniswap Foundation and presumably has the blessing of investors and the Uniswap Labs team — who effectively have veto power thanks to their large UNI stakes — Blockworks Research analyst Matt Fiebach considers passage very likely.
Less clear is whether the fee revenue that may eventually flow to delegating token holders truly justifies such a revaluation. UNI now stands at an $11.2 billion FDV.
But with Uniswap v4 coming later this year, and the general bullish market sentiment, it's another illustration of the idea that FDV is a meme — which is becoming a meme in itself!
800,000 ether removed from exchanges in 2024:
Source: Cryptoquant
A trending decline in exchange balances is considered bullish in crypto as the assumption is that most of an asset leaving an exchange is headed for cold storage or other productive use where it will be locked up for a period of time (e.g. staking, collateral in DeFi)
In the case of ETH, exchange balances have been in decline for the past year, but have accelerated a bit in recent months commensurate with the uptick in ether’s price. About $2.4 billion worth is off the market year-to-date.
Ethena is an Ethereum protocol that democratizes access to an ETH funding/basis trade via its synthetic dollar, USDe.
OSMO is up ~5.3x from the beginning of October 2023, and the price has become correlated with protocol revenue. However, more growth potential is left, and the market likely overlooks Osmosis’ high operating leverage.
Avalanche nodes recently began the Durango upgrade, which is scheduled to activate on its mainnet next month.
Pudgy also announced its toys would expand to an additional 1,100 Walmart stores this 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.
