🟣 Thursday, August 8

Author

Darren Mims
August 08, 2024

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

  • U.S. Jobless claims hit record weekly low for the first time in 11 months.

  • NEAR pushes ‘Signatures’ to mainnet, continuing the trend in chain abstraction.

  • FTX and Alameda ordered to pay $12.7B to creditors and is prohibited from future trading activities.

  • Robinhood sees increase in quarterly trading activity.

For today’s news, the market calms slightly as the US weekly jobless claims have dropped amid uncertainty. Jobless claims for state unemployment benefits fell 17,000, which the U.S. Department of Labor referred to as the largest drop in 11 months. The overall market gained following the release of this news.

In more crypto-specific news, NEAR recently launched its ‘Signatures’ feature this morning. This feature is meant to serve as a chain abstraction method, and was introduced back in March to allow users to sign transactions on supported blockchains. These cross chain transactions can occur without the need to bridge assets prior. This feature marks a trend in recent strategies to onboard more users. For example, Polygon recently released its AggLayer V1 which can process cross chain transactions as well.

FTX and Alameda have been officially ordered by a U.S. judge to pay $12.7B back to creditors (not including civil penalties). The organizations will additionally be banned from trading any digital assets or acting as intermediaries for the foreseeable future.

Finally, Robinhood, the popular brokerage firm, reported its quarterly earning yesterday showing a year-on-year growth in cryptocurrency revenue and related trading volume. Robinhood’s digital asset notional trading volume rose to $21B. up 137%. It is possible Robinhood is positioning itself as a possible competitor for Coinbase given its recent swap integration with Arbitrum and its acquisition of the European trading platform, Bitstamp.

— Darren Mims (X: @0xMims)

All 1000X listeners know that when Jonah and Avi give guidance on the markets, it’s best to pay heed. 

Catch them live and in person at Permissionless III in October as they answer the perennial question: “Where are we in the cycle?”

Polymarket’s prediction market activity for the 2024 election is today’s Chart of the Day. The prediction market odds reflect that Kamala has gained in sentiment and could win the election, but why is this?

Recent polling data has shown that the Harris campaign are contesting important electoral battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and elsewhere, with Pennsylvania looking to be the most important battleground for the 2024 election. Additionally, Kamala has recently received a surge in donations destroying fundraising records for democratic campaigns.

Nevertheless, the prediction odds for the election are almost tied with 49% for Trump and 48.8% for Kamala.

No matter what though, Polymarket stands to gain from the recent activity, but will Polymarket be able to keep the ball rolling post-election in other realms?

— Darren Mims (X: @0xMims)

The Ahmedabad hard fork specifications are being finalized, with a focus on PIP-30 for increasing max code size and on PIP-36 for improving state-syncing transactions. The inclusion of PIP-45, which proposes a token ticker change, is still under consideration and may affect the timeline. The ticker change has been discussed extensively over the past PPGCs. MATIC to POL transition is scheduled for Sept. 4, 2024. This transition involves multiple PIPs to upgrade backwards-compatible with automatic conversions between MATIC and POL where necessary. The proposed PIP-45 suggests changing the token name and symbol from MATIC to POL, which could have potential implications for smart contracts, front-ends and systems relying on these identifiers.

The Paradigm team has developed Reth, a framework for developing Ethereum-compatible nodes to enhance Ethereum’s infrastructure by improving its performance and fostering a more efficient and developer-friendly environment. The aforementioned framework serves as a growth catalyst for Base, Optimism and Symbiotic.

Europe is handing Tether unforeseen advantages with MiCAR.

There is a strange correlation between Trump’s odds and the price of bitcoin.

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.