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- 🟣 Macro vs airdrops
🟣 Macro vs airdrops
Do you care about turmoil in currencies or imminent crypto stimmies?
Macauley Peterson
April 29, 2024
Welcome back to 0xResearch – quick hitting alpha for the crypto degens. Here's what we got for you today:
JPY currency intervention
What to watch this week
Impending airdrops
Scroll joins the blob parade
There’s a ton going on this week, but zooming out to the big question on market-watchers’ minds: “Is the correction done?” Equities turned in an impressive rally last week, all things considered, while crypto was left limping along by comparison.
The latest macro turn for markets to digest is the plunging Japanese yen, which recently sunk to its lowest value versus the USD in three decades. Whipsawing price action over the past day signals government intervention — the BOJ has let the value slide, but has been known to throw short sellers a brushback pitch from time to time.
Today’s daily USDJPY candle has a range of 3.5%, which is quite unusual in the generally staid world of forex trading. And then there’s the China shoe yet to drop.
Heading into midday in New York, however, bitcoin is rallying as the dollar retreats.
There’s a ton of economic data releases on the calendar this week, a week which also includes an FOMC rate decision coming up on Wednesday.
Expect fireworks.
Airdrop expectations are also heating up, with Kamino, Nim Networks and FriendTech confirmed for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and rumors of airdrop news from EigenLayer abound.
All these new assets hitting the market and vying for the available liquidity will inevitably put pressure on valuations.
Stacks is the leading Bitcoin L2 that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as a secure base layer.
The Nakamoto release, happening in May 2024, will bring faster block times, as well as transactions that are as irreversible as Bitcoin’s once confirmed, setting the stage for a programmable Bitcoin asset called sBTC later in the year. Stacks is poised to help unlock Bitcoin and its $1T in passive capital as a fully programmable, productive asset. The Stacks (STX) token, used as gas on the L2, was the first to undergo an SEC-qualified sale in the United States.
Scroll joins the blob party:
Source: dune.com/hildobby/blobs
Ethereum zk rollup Scroll executed its “Bernoulli” upgrade early Monday, which enabled the use of EIP-4844 blobspace.
In a matter of hours Scroll became the fourth-largest blob consumer, after Base, Arbitrum and OP Mainnet.
Early indications are that fees on the layer-2 networks have fallen by about 75% as a result.
Bernoulli is the surname of a prominent family of Swiss mathematicians and physicists in the 17th and 18th centuries, who made contributions to the fields of probability, number theory and statistics.
Perpetual futures stand out as one of the most dynamic segments within DeFi, characterized by constant innovation, whether that be through pre-market futures or access to community trading vaults. Despite this, perp DEXs currently constitute less than 2% of the total crypto perp volume.
Data publishing costs have historically been a bottleneck for rollups, and as more rollups launch, interoperability will continue to be a major challenge. Avail presents a potential solution to rollup fragmentation through its three products: Avail DA, Nexus, and Fusion, which together aim to unify the web3 experience.
Not everyone with “cryptographer” in their title has the training or expertise to write cryptographic code that’s used by real people to protect real things.
Last week marked the third straight week of outflows for US bitcoin funds as demand for the BlackRock and Fidelity products hit a low point.
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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.
