🟣 You can call me Blob Marley

My entire timeline is filled with celebrations regarding the blobs. All while SOL/ETH makes new highs.

You can call me Blob Marley, Harry Blobber, Blobby Knight, Blobin Hood, Ablobham Lincoln, Blobert Downey Jr., Blob Jovi, Justin Blobber, the way I be tracking these blobs.

We’ll talk more about these in the next section; I have a lot of cool insights you’ll like.

What’s been interesting is that as soon as blobs went live on Ethereum mainnet, SOL and WIF were the clear market outperformers. Not to say there’s a lesson in there, but despite the clear positive catalyst markets always tend to sell the news.

ETF flows continue on their rampage, with $680B in total inflows yesterday, a great follow-up to Tuesday’s $1B. The inflows are so incredible that even JMP Securities revised their estimates and now believe upwards of $220B are likely to be deposited into these ETFs over the next three years.

Additionally, Wall Street firm Bernstein initiated an “Outperform” rating on Robinhood due to an upcoming “monster of a crypto cycle” where they project the total crypto market cap to reach $7.5T in 2025, nearly 3x from today. And I thought I was bullish!

In other news, Avalanche Foundation announced their first “community coin” purchases from their culture fund, as they try to incentivize users to come to the ecosystem and create a strong culture.

As much as it is cringe to have a legitimate foundation buy meme coins, I honestly think this is not a bad strategy. Oftentimes, buying a meme coin is your average user’s first experience of a chain, and the token price going up is enough of a reason to become an advocate.

We’ll see if it’s successful and other ecosystems follow suit.

— Westie (X: @WestieCapital | Farcaster: @westie)

Coming very soon to a Blockworks Research analytics dashboard, here we have a table looking at the ranking of the top Blob posters. These are the L2s we have so far labeled, with most being currently unidentified.

Of the ones we have identified, Starknet and zkSync have posted the most blobs, with Base and Optimism among other OP Stack chains beginning their deployment at a much later date. 

What’s been particularly interesting to see is the sheer amount of blobs used by these zk rollups vs the optimistic rollups, and how expensive their blobs are. 

The reason for this is because all blob transactions have two pieces of gas fees: the gas fee associated with the blob and the normal gas fee associated with the transaction. With blob fees themselves being so low at the current moment, a majority of these fees actually come from the residual transaction gas fees.

Where does this discrepancy come from? zkSync and Starknet emit logs in their transactions, and OP Stack chains do not. Even so, the cost reduction from using blobs is around 93% from using calldata only for zkSync, with Base and Optimism currently saving 99%.

However, this will likely be short-lived as there hasn’t been a lot of competition for blobs. You are probably noticing a lot of L2s not named by this list. For the most part, the gas price for blobs has been 1 gwei, the lowest cost it could possibly be. Therefore, expect fees to only increase from here. The number of blobs per block is slowly increasing.

MakerDAO has struggled to find organic demand for its stablecoin. This has been driven by mispriced interest rates and heightened market volatility, placing vast pressure on the USDC PSM.

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.

SWIFT’s forays into blockchain hint that one day the tech can replace intermediaries

MicroStrategy announced a senior notes offering last week, raising $800 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.