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- 🟣 Markets rally on soft inflation numbers
🟣 Markets rally on soft inflation numbers
And a potpourri of industry happenings
Macauley Peterson
June 12, 2024
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Welcome back to 0xResearch. Here's what we’ve got for you today:
FOMC day
EigenLayer acqui-hiring
DePIN: Aethir launch
DePIN: Minima monitors McLaren
Crypto markets reacted very favorably to the soft US inflation numbers released this morning, which are expected to give cover to the FOMC policymakers. The bulls hope they will greenlight interest rate cuts later this year.
Bitcoin has now fully retraced its Tuesday decline and is attempting to reclaim $70k, up about 3.5%. On Wall Street, stocks are surging into fresh all-time highs.
Wednesday is typically a volatile day, especially around the Powell presser, so we’ll see what kind of a mood he’s in, in a few hours.
Eigen Labs bulks up team
The company behind EigenLayer is augmenting its staff with 17 people from Rio Network, which has been developing a liquid restaking token (LRT).
Amid a backdrop of heavy competition in the LRT space, that project will be mothballed — its code fully open-sourced by the Eigen Foundation in a side deal for Rio’s intellectual property.
Eigen Labs seems to be primarily after the people, making this an acqui-hire, with Rio’s CEO Alan Curtis — who was also an investor in Eigen Labs’ Series A — moving over to become the chief commercial officer at the company.
Node sale as an iteration on the ICO
In recent months, the "node sale" model has become increasingly popular for blockchain fundraising. This approach involves selling the right to operate blockchain nodes, often through NFTs, which can be delegated to technically proficient operators.
Notable examples are XAI Games in December 2023, and subsequently CARV, Gunzilla, Hytopia, Sophon and, today, Aethir is in the spotlight as its ATH token began trading.
The startup bills itself as a provider of “enterprise-grade GPU-as-a-Service solutions,” and CCO Mark Rydon claims it has the “largest supply of Nvidia H100s in the space — with 2000+ online and thousands more being onboarded.”
Node sales are promoted as enhancing decentralization and security, while also demonstrating demand in a crowded market. However, many investors overlook hidden costs and longer-than-expected break-even periods, often trusting optimistic projections without thorough analysis.
The true beneficiaries tend to be the projects and referrers, not the investors. Despite the benefits touted by projects, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.
In Aethir’s case, it has made lofty claims regarding tie-ups with Nvidia and Qualcomm, while heavily promoting its token over a months-long marketing push leading up to the start of trading.
Onchain data in professional racing
I know next to nothing about motorsports. I used to watch the Indy 500 once in a while as a kid, but that’s about it.
So, when I heard that McLaren was using a “DePIN data logger” to publish live car data onchain, I thought, “why would you want to do that?”
Turns out, Hugo Feiler, co-founder and CEO of Minima — which is providing the blockchain — had a good explanation:
“The resale price of a racing car is dependent on its history, including Service history, engine tuning, and maintenance. Everyone cheats if they can (resetting the [odometer], etc.), so making this immutable on the blockchain is considered hugely valuable.
After a race, the organizers need to validate that the cars have been racing according to the allowed specs, but many tend to cheat. This means an official race engineer has to manually download the engine data and validate that the cars have not been re-tuned; this can take up to three hours in a Parc Fermé before the winner is confirmed, so having the immutable data transferred as the cars cross the finish line is hugely attractive.
Motorsport fans are fanatical about data. They love to know every little piece of information, so having an immutable record signed by the car is considered to be hugely attractive for the supporters of the teams.”
Start your engines; the fans are watching!
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Ethena USDe trend:
Source: @leptokurtic | Dune analytics
As most crypto assets not named BTC and ETH have been in a serious skid in recent weeks, it’s not surprising that traders would seek shelter in stables.
Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDe has been a main beneficiary, with TVL recently rising to $1.5 billion.
Rates on its staked flavor sUSDe are still well above most reasonably sound yield options — currently 27.5% — although it varies.
The new rage is leveraging that yield with more exotic — and riskier — strategies, such as collateral looping in Curve’s lending market. As always, stay safe, there’s no free lunch.
Avalanche has introduced proposal ACP-77, which would drastically lower the barriers to entry to launch a dedicated blockchain, while imposing a continuous fee mechanism that subnets would pay to the P-Chain. By performing a scenario analysis of different dedicated blockchain solutions, we conclude that ACP77 would hypothetically make Avalanche subnets as cost-effective as Celestia-based rollups while providing additional liveness guarantees and native interoperability.
This month's PPGC mainly focused on discussing PIP-37: Ahmedabad Hard Fork, and the PIPs included with it. PIP-36, PIP-30 and PIP-35, included alongside PIP-37, were also discussed in the last PPGC notes. The only notable change since then has been the adoption of EIP-7702 over EIP-3074, with regard to PIP-22. Both are related to account abstraction, while EIP-7702 was proposed by Vitalik to eliminate vulnerabilities and ensure forward compatibility by improving upon EIP-3074.
The number of companies buying BTC is likely to go up “as inflation continues to erode the purchasing power of cash,” an analyst tells Blockworks.
The Solana developer also oversees a mobile phone line and a game development product.
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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.
