🟣 Ethereum upgrade “was almost boring”

The blobs are bubbling. Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade activated without incident, ushering in a new phase of the Surge on the Ethereum roadmap, and with it, dramatically lower transaction fees on layer-2 rollups that use Ethereum mainnet for data availability.

The jury is still out on exactly how cheap transactions will get, but the Starknet ecosystem is already out in force touting sub-5 cent AMM swaps.

ZkSync is also in the blob mix on day 1. Base will start using blobs around 8 pm ET today and Arbitrum is expected to follow tomorrow following its Atlas upgrade.

Blast botched something in its upgrade planning and stopped producing blocks for an hour. A post-mortem is in the works.

Bitcoin notched a new all-time high on the heels of a record $1 billion in net bitcoin ETF inflows Tuesday.

The Solana “manlets” are on breakout watch, looking for continuation following a 4-hour close back above the $150 mark.

On the airdrop front, Aevo released its token today, which was immediately listed on Binance, and of course there’s a perpetual market on Aevo itself.

It’s currently trading in a range between about $2.70 and $3. Multiply by a billion for the fully diluted valuation. That’s pretty rich, given that the FDV of dYdX is currently just over $2 billion, with Synthetix (SNX) behind at $1.6 billion in the derivatives category.

Aevo has notched the odd day with higher volumes than dYdX, but overall it’s volumes have tailed off in recent weeks faced with stiff competition from many still-tokenless protocols.

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

Curve revenue on the rise:

Curve Finance is known primarily for stableswaps, but new complementary products, like its own growing CurveUSD stablecoin and Llama Lend, are bringing in new revenue streams.

MakerDAO: Organic Demand Doesn’t Grow on Trees

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.

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An Analysis of the Avalanche Architecture

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.

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Swell launches its own layer-2 for restaking with Polygon CDK

rswETH, Swell’s liquid restaked token, will be the gas token used on this new rollup.

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Judge orders former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao to ‘surrender’ Canadian passport

A judge in Washington modified the former Binance CEO’s bond on Monday.

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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.