🟣 Staking has now come to Bitcoin

Pump.fun copies are making noise on Tron and BNB Chain

Author

Nikhil Chaturvedi
August 22, 2024

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

  • Babylon rolls out Bitcoin staking live on mainnet

  • Avalanche has two large announcements: A Grayscale trust for AVAX and a partnership with Franklin Templeton

  • Pantera announces a $1 billion fundraise for their Fund V focused on decentralized AI

  • Pump.fun copies are making some noise on Tron and BNB Chain

Babylon, the Paradigm backed team enabling self-custodial Bitcoin Staking just officially unlocked their staking product. There is a cap of 1000 BTC for the first round of staking and it supports increments of 0.05 BTC that is available on a first-come-first-served basis. Bitcoin mining pools such as Antpool are reporting significantly higher fees due to the rush in demand to participate in Babylon Bitcoin Staking. 

The L1 Blockchain Avalanche announced that Grayscale will be offering an AVAX trust to provide exposure to the token. The Grayscale team expressed interest in Avalanche’s efforts to push RWAs and institutional onchain finance forward. The second announcement was Avalanche’s partnership with $1.6T investment firm Franklin Templeton for their $402M Onchain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX).

Pantera announced its $1B fundraise for its Fund V that is focused on decentralized AI following their investments into projects such as Sahara AI. They have also featured various Decentralized Physical Infrastructure network (DePin) projects on their podcast including but not limited to Akash network, Hivemapper, and Geodnet. 

In more news, Pump.fun copies are making their way to other blockchains such as BNB Chain and Tron. The Tron variant known as SunPump has done over $420M in trading volume over the past 24 hours, showcasing the continued demand for memecoin trading activities on networks outside of Solana. 

Drift Protocol which is an onchain derivatives protocol has expanded its product offerings to prediction markets in order to compete with the momentous activity on Polymarket. They have recently spun up an onchain prediction market to speculate whether or not the Fed cuts rates by 50bps this September. 

– Nikhil Chat (@0xnikhilchat)

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Source: Blockworks Research

With Avalanche’s major announcements such as its Grayscale AVAX trust, a partnership with large asset manager Franklin Templeton, along with its ongoing “Boost” incentive program, Avalanche has seen a strong uptick in stablecoin activity onchain.

Separate from this chart is the launch of the fast-growing stablecoin known as AUSD — built by the Agora team — which has minted more than $17M in stablecoins on Avalanche. A potential future catalyst for Avalanche stablecoin activity is a future proposal known as ACP 125, which proposes to lower the base fee to make transacting on Avalanche cheaper.

It will be interesting to see how stablecoin activity is influenced as Avalanche continues to onboard institutional participants such as JP Morgan, Citi Bank, Franklin Templeton, Wellington, Wisdom Tree, and T.Rowe along with key performance upgrades.

– Nikhil Chat (@0xnikhilchat)

The latest memecoin to dominate news headlines is “IQ,” launched in an experiment by Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik. “testing some tech a friend built! don't ape this thing goddamnit,” tweeted Svanevik, as the token ironically soared to a high of $11.5 million market cap before cratering to $646K at the time of writing.

The token was launched on Solana with “makenow.meme”, a Pump.fun competitor that lets anyone create a token entirely on X by listing your ticker, tagging @makenowmeme and attaching an image.

Whether you like memecoins or not, its organic interest and usage is undeniable. In the past two days, Pump.fun has generated a whopping $3.5 million in revenue, according to DefiLlama. The memecoin launcher takes a cut by charging a 1% fee on all trades and a 2 SOL fee when tokens reach sufficient liquidity ($69K market cap) to be listed on the Raydium DEX.

— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)

Polygon's AggLayer may be the catalyst the Polygon ecosystem needs to prove itself as a standout underdog.

The crypto-AI market appears overhyped in the short term, but will produce critically important products for society in the long run.

Blockworks Research is conducting a survey to gain insight into the institutional staking landscape. This data will help industry leaders adopt their strategies as the industry matures.

If you're an institutional staker, we want to hear from you (and if you’re new to Blockworks Research, get 20% off of our service while you’re at it!)

Pump.fun’s revenue, which peaked in July, has fallen a little short so far this month, according to a report from K33.

ETH ETF flows could pick up if they follow the same pattern as bitcoin ETFs.

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.