🟣 The blobs are coming!

And everyone who ever bought bitcoin (in Switzerland) is in profit

March 11, 2024

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade is slated to go live on Wednesday at 9:55 am ET. But we’re about to get a preview of beacon chain blobs, courtesy Gnosis Chain, which upgrades to Dencun at about 1:20 pm ET.

Gnosis can adopt Ethereum hard forks because it runs the same dual-layer stack with a “Beacon chain” consensus layer that supports all the major Ethereum clients. Thus, it will serve as an excellent confirmation that everything will go smoothly for Ethereum mainnet on Wednesday.

Ether has continued to range against BTC between 0.05 and 0.06 since October, and is trading at $0.55 and change today.

The prospects of an ether ETF in May are dwindling, according to Bloomberg analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas, who see no signs of proactive attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, unlike during the run-up to the bitcoin ETF approval.

For on-chain prediction market guidance, the collective wisdom of Polymarket punters puts the odds at 31% and trending down.

In happier news (and lest I be accused of burying the lede), bitcoin hit a fresh all-time high Monday morning and seems to be holding in the rarefied air about $72,000.

With 38 days until the bitcoin halving, miners have been gradually offloading BTC from their treasuries, but that liquidity just gets sopped up by the ETFs which notched another full week of nine-digit net inflows on Friday.

Miners still hold a record $131 billion worth of bitcoin.

Another fun fact for your next dinner party: The US government owns about $15 and a half billion in BTC through criminal seizures. About $8 billion of that comes from “Dutch” and  “Razzklekhan,” the couple arrested in 2022, whose hijinks are now rumored to be the subject of two films in development.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

And then there were 2: bitcoin vs the Swiss franc.

Trading View: BTCCHF on Kraken

Today, bitcoin put in its first new all-time high against the Swiss franc (CHF), leaving only the Mexican peso and Brazilian real among G20 currencies.

The Avalanche Network is well on its way to becoming the best platform to build high-performance blockchains that can seamlessly interact with each other, and the strong focus on performant and scalable blockchains will likely be Avalanche’s competitive advantage.

With a potential spot ETF on the horizon, Ethereum is poised for success for the rest of 2024. EigenLayer, currently the second-largest protocol by TVL on Ethereum, should continue to bring additional demand for ETH.

The FCA said Monday it would not object to such products being offered to professional investors.

Modular blockchain Eclipse has secured $50 million in a Series A funding round led by Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing its total funding to $65 million.

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.