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

• Calls to ban pump.fun

• Listen & Read: Avalanche’s next steps

• Chart: Aptos paying too much in token incentives

Pump.fun looks to self-regulate gory content

Charlie Munger once said: “Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.”

So if you’re launching a memecoin on pump.fun, your incentives are: reach a token market cap of $100k, upon which $17k of liquidity is deposited into the Raydium DEX to kickstart a trading pair. 

Then, here are the outcomes: nudity, stray gun shootings, threats of suicide, threats to harm pets, school children, family members and alleged stunts involving the consumption of faeces in a dog cage.

This list just about sums up the banal grasps for attention in the world of memecoins. Thanks to pump.fun’s in-built livestream feature, that race for attention to the bottom is being laid bare on full display.

Attention is the currency of memecoins, so it’s a somewhat unsurprising outcome. 

This state of affairs has sent a call for regulation or a ban on the memecoin launcher trending across Twitter. Already, there are fake images of a Polymarket predicting the odds of a pump.fun ban, and the SEC seizing the pump.fun website.

Over the weekend, pump.fun founder Alon acknowledged the problem and claimed that the platform’s team of moderators are “working around the clock” to quash the “illicit content.” But given the rate of thousands of memecoins being deployed daily, that’s going to be easier said than done.

Realistically speaking though, what could a regulator do?

US regulators, for example, could pressure internet service providers to block the pump.fun DNS domain, but a VPN could easily skirt the ban. 

As for the tokens themselves, they live on the Solana blockchain. Regulators could technically pressure validators to block the transactions the same way the US Treasury applied sanctions on Tornado Cash in 2022, which takes us down the MEV supply chain rabbit hole once again.

There’s an ironic parallel here to the longstanding problem facing Big Tech’s social media platforms. If illegal content is posted on Facebook, who should be held legally liable — the user or Facebook?

Within the US, free speech proponents have argued that Section 230 of the 1934 Communications Act legally protects platforms’ illicit user-generated content.

That logic, consistently applied, may shield pump.fun from regulatory pressure, though it will certainly not shield it from the forces of market competition.

Pump.fun’s success has already been mimicked dozens of times. There is makenow.meme on Solana, sun.pump on Tron, and “Clanker,” a kind of AI-powered equivalent of pump.fun on Base, through which memecoins can be deployed into a Uniswap v3 pool for free with a Farcaster tweet.

Clanker was launched slightly more than two weeks ago, and already has collected about $4 million in fee revenues, according to Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero.

But whether it’s the regulatory hammer or market competition, pump.fun has plenty of incentives to quickly nip such a problem in the bud.

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

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Avalanche’s next step

How will Avalanche subnets be reinvented with ACP-77?

Luigi Demeo: Historically, the cost of 2000 AVAX to run a node was prohibitively expensive. Some institutions who wanted to launch their own subnet didn’t want to also validate the C-Chain and incur higher overhead costs. What changes with ACP-77 for Avalanche is that builders can launch a chain permissionlessly and no longer have to validate the network. If they do, they can do so on a pay-as-you-go model, where fees are burned; users with a lot of AVAX can still opt for the original staking model and run a node. Base fees on the Avalanche C-Chain will also be going down to one gwei, making it as cheap as Polygon or Arbitrum. It’s a much more sustainable model where the Avalanche community can also benefit from the Avalanche L1 chains that launch on it.

A common trope about Cosmos was that there were too many tokens in an interoperable ecosystem that lacked a unified narrative for the ATOM token. Is that a concern for Avalanche?

Luigi Demeo: As a first principle, we never want to build infrastructure that provides less choice to users simply to gate parts of your infrastructure that have weaknesses. Users are always going to wait to move across chains and we want to enable them to do that as fast and cheaply as possible. People equated ATOM’s token price with the success of Cosmos, but that’s a bad proxy.

Aptos spending in token incentives:

Based on a report from TokenTerminal, the MoveVM-based L1 Aptos has one of the highest spends for token incentives as a ratio to user fees paid for using the chain.

So far this month, Aptos paid out $495 million in token incentives but generated a mere $1.38 million in fee revenues, suggesting a high inflationary cost on the APT token for very little returns. When looking at other chains across the same metric, the Tron L1 turns out to be the best performer, with $1.48 billion in token incentives paid out for about $1.75 billion in user fees.

Geodnet is the world’s largest RTK network by both the number of base stations and coverage area, providing hyper-precise positioning data to Web2 customers. RTK networks are critical to enabling a world of ubiquitous autonomous drones, vehicles, and industrial robots.

In this unlocked research report, Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor explores why the GEOD token enables both a cost and product advantage for the GEODNET RTK network, which will allow it to out-compete multibillion-dollar incumbents Trimble and Hexagon.

• 1inch announces Fusion+ upgrade that enables cross-chains swaps with integrated liquidity.

• Babylon Labs and Lombard Protocol is bringing Bitcoin staking to the MoveVM-based L1 Sui.

• FIFA is partnering with Mythical Games to launch an officially-licensed FIFA blockchain-based mobile game.

• The Mantle L2 announced today the expansion of its GameFi ecosystem, bringing onboard AAA games like Blade of God X, Uldor, Spot Zero and more.