🟣 One day to ZRO

Like the LayerZero Labs team, tokenization progress never sleeps

Author

Macauley Peterson
June 19, 2024

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Welcome back to 0xResearch. Here's what we’ve got for you today:

  • ZRO day drop

  • dYdX V5

  • Tokenizing the real world

  • CT: Where are we in the cycle now?

US markets are closed for the Juneteenth holiday, resulting in an uncharacteristically placid crypto market for a Wednesday. 

LayerZero ends the suspense

An IV-drip hydration-infused all-nighter culminated in the release of the long-awaited LayerZero ZRO token eligibility checker.

Some 1.28 million eligible wallets made the cut after a months-long and very public anti-Sybil hunt, during which the LayerZero team encouraged participants farming with multiple wallets to come forward and “self-report.”

The LayerZero Foundation site expressly does not require connecting a wallet — a smart decision that should make it easier for would-be claimants to avoid getting phished. The ZRO airdrop was a favorite target of fake X bots and scammers trying to lure unsuspecting users into executing malicious transactions.

Version 5 of dYdX V4

We mentioned last week that, following a dYdX community vote, the dYdX Chain software was upgraded to version 5.

Confusingly, that’s still V4 of dYdX Chain, just version 5 of the software running it.

The update introduces several new features, including isolated markets and margin, the Slinky price oracle by Skip, batch order cancellation, the initial version of liquidity vaults, risk and safety improvements, and performance enhancements.

The Slinky Price Oracle is being touted as providing guaranteed per-block price updates with millisecond refresh rates, as dYdX tries to beat back competition from newer entrants like Hyperliquid.

RWA in the IC

A DeFi OG, the “call me IC” Index Coop has added a Real World Asset Index Token (RWA) to its onchain indices list.

The new token provides a weighted basket of RWA-centric names, starting with Maker (MKR), Ondo Finance (ONDO), Ethena (ENA), Centrifuge (CFG), Canto (CANTO), and Maple Finance (MPL).

A new bootstrapping method, first trialed with a similar High-Yield ETH index last month, doles out Product Revenue Tokens (PRTs) to early investors over a month-long presale period. Sadly, US investors need not apply.

In the non-retail facing side of tokenization, a new effort from Infineo is putting life insurance on the blockchain, specifically the compliance-focused Provenance chain.

The firm is looking to elevate life insurance to a global asset class, according to Infineo’s CEO Cole Snell.

“Life insurance is a $3 [trillion] industry with no marketplace for secondary trading,” Snell told Blockworks. “Many of these policies have a higher Sharpe Ratio than other assets.”

That secondary trading market is still under construction, anticipated for early 2025.

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

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Make that “Art of the Day”:

Source: @marcov_91

This image represents the largest 50 clusters of wallet addresses that claimed the zkSync $ZK airdrop and then sent it to a related address (excluding smart contract addresses like liquidity pools. “The top cluster includes 1516 addresses (!), all clusters include more [than] 150 wallets,” according to Marcov’s analysis.

So much for anti-Sybil filtering!

With the spot ETH ETF approval, the institutions are coming. stETH - given its dominance in marketshare, existing liquid market structures, and highly desirable properties - is poised for institutions.

Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers (NTT) is an open source development framework that allows projects to define a canonical multichain deployment for their tokens. NTT builds upon Wormhole Messaging to embed multichain interoperability at the token layer, and it is open and flexible to accommodate additional verification frameworks.

Tokenized RWAs might not sound sexy, but there’s no doubting the demand.

Non-US investors have a new way to access RWA-focused tokens

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.

Correction June 21, 2024: A quote from Infineo was initially misattributed.