- Blockworks Research
- Posts
- 🟣 How Bitcoin mirrors Labor Day's fight for equity
🟣 How Bitcoin mirrors Labor Day's fight for equity
Polygon’s POL evolution: What you need to know
Macauley Peterson & Donovan Choy
September 02, 2024
Brought to you by:
Welcome back to 0xResearch. Here's what we’ve got for you today:
Quiet Labor Day market
Polygon’s big week
Chart: Base DEX trading
Listen & Read: What Bitcoin Did
Bitcoin has started off the month of September flat. After retreating below $58k on Sunday, the top crypto has rallied back to $58.6k thus far on this US holiday Monday.
Labor Day may at first seem unrelated to Bitcoin and crypto, but they share broader themes of labor, economics, and technological change.
Bitcoiners maintain that the technology represents a new kind of revolution in the digital age, on par with the Industrial Revolution.
At its core, Labor Day symbolizes the post-Industrial struggle for worker rights, fair wages, and the efforts to decentralize power within capitalism. Crypto embodies the decentralization of financial power, redistributing it from centralized institutions like banks and governments to individuals. Both movements share a common goal: empowering people and challenging established hierarchies to create a more equitable system.
Crypto’s promise of financial independence resonates with the goals of the labor movement. By providing access to financial services to the underserved, it offers a form of financial independence that mirrors the labor movement’s fight for economic equity and fairness, particularly in regions where traditional banking is inaccessible or subject to censorship.
Labor Day is an opportunity to reflect on the significant shifts in how we think about work, value, and power. Crypto’s gradual adoption is part of an ongoing evolution of the global economy and the continuous quest to better society.
The holiday traditionally represents the end of summer, when many professional traders lock in once again. Expect volatility to pick up later in the week.
Polygon’s big week
Polygon is gearing up for some big changes this week, with the launch of its new token POL.
MATIC will finally be upgraded to POL on September 4 (at 8 am ET), pending an approval from Polygon governance. Three key PIPs will be executed:
Following the upgrade, POL will succeed MATIC as the native gas and staking token on Polygon PoS chain. POL will see an annual emission rate of 2%, half of which will be allocated as staking rewards for validators, while the other half will go to the community’s treasury to support the growth of the ecosystem.
Users will have the option to upgrade their MATIC to POL with no deadline. All staked MATIC however, will be automatically upgraded to POL by September 4.
As per the Polygon Protocol Governance Call #24, the MATIC to POL transition is not a hard fork and will therefore not require timed coordination amongst the validators to fork at a specific block. The change will be implemented on three different multisigs: the governance multisig, the PoS bridge multisig, and the Protocol Counsel executor multisig.
The second big upgrade is the Ahmedabad Hard Fork (PIP-37), slated to begin early September and finish mainnet implementation by the end of the month. The hard fork is independent of the upgrades in the L1 contracts for MATIC to POL, and includes the following key changes:
The next Polygon Protocol Governance Call #25 on September 19 will set a date for the hard fork.
— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)
Brought to you by:
Own Your Web3 Identity: FIO Handle!
Claim your free FIO Handle today and replace complex crypto addresses with a single, simple web3 name. With FIO Handles, send, receive and request any digital assets seamlessly across ALL platforms. Secure your unique digital identity today and make transactions easier than ever. Join millions of satisfied users who have already simplified their crypto experience. Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer to claim your first FIO Handle for FREE!
Get Started Now!
Uniswap vs Aerodrome DEX on Base:
Source: Uniswap Labs
98.9% of all new DEX trading pairs on Base are launched with Uniswap. Yet, of the majority of these new DEX pairs, only four pools have more than $1 million in liquidity and $400k in daily trading volumes.
The majority of trading volumes (85%) on Base is still taking place on Aerodrome DEX, which suggests that Uniswap on Base is merely the preferred DEX protocol for spam-like creations of new trading pairs. Aerodrome has three times the TVL of Uniswap, according to DeFiLlama.
— Donovan Choy
What Bitcoin Did and will do
The podcast What Bitcoin Did released its final episode on Aug. 30 with guests Jack Mallers, Matt Odell, Harry Sudock, and others.
After 7 years, and 860+ episodes, Peter McCormack, along with co-host Danny Knowles, who worked on at least 700 of those, are moving on from the travel-heavy bitcoin-focused show.
“We’re having the same conversations over and over again now…if we go into a new bull run, it’s like we’re going to be making the same shows over again for new listeners,” McCormack said during the episode.
His podcasting days aren’t over, however.
The podcast feed will resume from a permanent studio in London, in a new form and a focus on his English soccer club, Real Bedford FC, which McCormack acquired in 2021.
According to McCormack, the club maintains a bitcoin treasury of around GBP 4.28 million ($5.4 million).
“Bitcoin rewards personal principles, ethics, humility,” Mallers, who founded payments company Strike, said. Mallers revealed that he had planned to sell Strike in the first quarter of 2021 for “a big number” but backed out of the deal at the urging of acquaintances, and then went to visit El Salvador to discuss how Strike could help the country’s bitcoin strategy.
Bitcoin is a “Promethean” idea, said Sudock. “We have discovered fire, and the world will never be the same again.”
— Macauley Peterson
This month's PPGC mainly focused on two subjects: discussing the Ahmedabad Hard For and the PIPs included with it (PIP-30, PIP-36, and PIP-45). Secondly discussing the MATIC-POL transition and the stakeholders it primarily impacts.
Recent discussions within the Ethereum community highlight this broader trend in crypto: L1s are converging on leaderless consensus designs to deliver higher performance and hardened censorship-resistance. magicdhz illustrates the L1 convergence, discusses the two prevailing leaderless consensus designs (multiple concurrent proposers and directed acyclic graph based protocols), and argues refreshing one's perspective on the L1 landscape is an advantageous position for evaluating adoption and the potential investment value of L1s and their applications.
Brought to you by:
Level up your DeFi research with CoinGecko API — the world’s most comprehensive, reliable and accurate cryptocurrency data API supplying aggregated price, market data, metadata, exchange data, historical data, community statistics, and on-chain DEX data.
With CoinGecko API, you’ll be able to access extensive crypto data as seen on CoinGecko and GeckoTerminal — for 3.1M+ cryptocurrencies, 3.7M liquidity pools across 1,200+ DEXes and 160+ networks from one consolidated API:
Aggregated crypto price & market data
Exchange data and trading volume
Onchain DEX and liquidity pool data
Metadata (logos, website & social links)
Crypto categories and global market data
Historical coin and exchange data
OHLC, OHLC chart data and OHCLV
NFT collection data
Discover the market momentum easily and get a panoramic view of the cryptocurrency market today.
El Salvador started buying bitcoin every day less than a week after FTX collapsed in November 2022. That was the cycle bottom.
Space and Time Labs and Edge Matrix topped this week’s funding announcements with raises of $20 million each.
|
|
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.