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Are you not bullish enough?

Author

Luke Leasure
June 06, 2024

Welcome back to 0xResearch – quick hitting alpha for the crypto degens. Here's what we got for you today:

  • VanEck raises price target on Ethereum

  • Robinhood to acquire Bitstamp crypto exchange

  • Cosmos downtime

Bullish sentiment strengthens as Bitcoin trades back above $70k on a banner day of ETF inflows, while the S&P500 and the Nasdaq each closed at a new all time high. In this mood, VanEck has raised their base case 2030 price target on Ethereum to $22,000, over 400% higher from the current price of $3,836. The team cites a number of key developments and tailwinds to bolster this appreciation, including the ETH ETF approval, progress on scaling with EIP-4844, growth of on-chain financial applications, and potential backend use cases for artificial intelligence models and agents.

While $22,000 is an attractive base case for 2030, the report articulates the bull case as $154,000, and $360 as the bear case. Moon math is no stranger to the VanEck team, recalling that the firm shared their price targets on Solana in October, 2023, outlining a base case target of $334.70. Solana was trading around $30 at the time, and has since risen over 500%.

Others are betting big on crypto, as Robinhood announced their intent to acquire global crypto exchange, Bitstamp, in a $200M cash deal. The acquisition is expected to close in H1 2025, pending regulatory approval. Bitstamp would bring spot markets for 85 crypto assets and over 4M users. Robinhood has over 13M monthly active users and over $100B assets under custody. This acquisition comes after Robinhood’s February 29th announcement of a partnership with Arbitrum to offer Robinhood Wallet users DEX swaps directly on the layer-2.

The Cosmos Hub halted block production on Wednesday for around 4 hours following the discovery of a bug in the deployment of the v17 network upgrade. A vulnerability was discovered in the Liquid Staking Module, which could allow a user to bypass slashing penalties. Cosmos developers shipped a patch that has since been implemented by a majority of the validators, allowing the chain to restart. Cosmos contributor Informal Systems will be sharing a post-mortem on the incident shortly. The price of ATOM was relatively unchanged on this news, and has since traded higher.

— Luke Leasure (X: @0xMether)

In a follow-up to a previous comparison of Ethereum vs. Solana’s Total Economic Value(TEV), which is comprised of transaction fees and MEV, we can compare TEV for the two chains in the time since inception. As demonstrated on the chart, TEV for Solana has eclipsed the highs for Ethereum dramatically earlier in the chain’s lifecycle. This metric is demonstrative of the chain’s lightspeed growth in demand.

The proliferation of new perp DEXs has led to fragmented liquidity across various DEXs and chains. Our latest report, made free thanks to Vertex, shows how Edge is tackling cross-chain liquidity fragmentation with its synchronous orderbook liquidity. Check it out here!

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.

Whether you decide to invest in bitcoin should be up to you, not the SEC or Gary Gensler.

The industry-first general purpose zk programmable blockchain charts a fresh course.

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.