🟣 T-1 To Dencun

March 12, 2024

gm my frens.

BTC ETFs saw significant volume yesterday with a net inflow above $500M. While GBTC saw a ~$500M exodus, Vaneck’s HODL had its best day yet with a ~$120M inflow and IBIT and FBTC saw a combined ~$775M in the door. The ETFs have now achieved a net inflow of over $10B since launch; quite an impressive milestone to achieve in the first two months of trading.

Tomorrow morning, Ethereum will undergo the Dencun upgrade at ~10:15 AM EST. By the time you send your first rollup transaction on Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, etc you should see a massive discount assuming everything goes well. This is a huge landmark for the Ethereum ecosystem and should be celebrated accordingly (with mimosas and L2 meme coins).

In the private markets, valuations have rebounded quite strongly. Eclipse, a prelaunch SVM rollup, announced raising a $50M Series A. Elixir, a decentralized market-making protocol, announced a $8M Series B at an $800M valuation. Finally, there are rumors circulating that Monad, a parallelized EVM L1, is raising at $3B. In my opinion, the real opportunities lie in the liquid markets at this point in the cycle and private markets are getting frothy.

With all the noise, don’t forget we are only ~38 days away from the next BTC halving. 

Bitcoin has now surpassed silver to become the 8th largest asset by market cap in the world. We are still quite a ways away from the #1 spot of surpassing gold, with another 1,000% gain required (all else equal). I doubt we get there this cycle, but Google and Amazon are on the chopping block. 

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.

With a potential spot ETF on the horizon, Ethereum is poised for success for the rest of 2024. EigenLayer, currently the second-largest protocol by TVL on Ethereum, should continue to bring additional demand for ETH.

Protocols built on Blast have accrued nearly $1 billion in TVL in the two weeks since the layer-2 went to mainnet

For the first time, a major Ethereum hard fork launches on another chain first

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.