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  • Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and more Week 4 2024

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and more Week 4 2024

Keeping you updated on crypto, web3 and blockchain

TLDR: BlackRock BTC ETF Hit $2B, The SEC Holds Off on ETH ETFs, Celsius Move $1B in ETH to CEXs, Juno Launches v19 Upgrade, Skip Protocol Introduces Slinky, Solana Introduces Token Extensions & Terra Goes Bankrupt.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Elys Network:

Elys Network is a NextGen oracle-based perpetual trading and all-in-one DeFi platform and a decentralized suite of financial applications in the Cosmos ecosystem to feature:

  • Native leveraged perpetual trading capabilities powered by liquidity pools and liquidity providers

  • Leverage LP and USDC lending

  • All USDC-paired liquidity pools for optimal user experience and sustainability

  • Arbitrage-free dynamic weighted pools for best pricing

  • Multi-asset index pools for risk diversification

  • Seamless user onboarding and integrated fiat onramps using email or social accounts 

System income drives a revenue sharing model to encourage long-term participation and growth. Elys is DAO-enabled and decentralized right from the start and driven by its core values.

Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

Swan Bitcoin, a new player to the BTC mining scene, is seriously ramping up their mining capacity. Recently announced, Swan Bitcoin have invested $100M in mining capacity, and now has already mined more than 750 bitcoin across its seven mining sites and has three more in the works.

Two weeks after its approval, BlackRock’s BTC ETF becomes the first ETF to surpass the $2B asset under management mark, as it holds $2.11B.

Growing speculation states Google will start BTC ETF ads this coming week, which would be a game changer for funds flowing into BTC ETFs as Google handles 100,000 searches per second.

After a number of BTC sell-outs, Tesla has missed out on $300M in profits. Nonetheless, the company’s remaining BTC holdings is estimated to be around 9,720 BTC.

Asset management firm Bitwise made the BTC address of its BTC ETF public on Jan. 24, becoming the first of the 10 spot BTC ETF issuers to do so. The Bitcoin wallet address has received multiple tips and donations within hours of being public, including some Bitcoin ordinals and rare sats.

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

The SEC has announced it will hold off decisions on ETH ETFs from Grayscale and BlackRock until March, with further delays expected, possibly until May. Naturally, ETH token price took a dig this week.

Derivatives DEX Synthetix has launched the third version of its perpetual contracts protocol (Perps V3) on the Layer-2, Base. This upgrade is designed to simplify the process for developers to create and trade new derivatives products on Synthetix and its associated exchanges like Kwenta, Polynomial, and dHEDGE.

EtherFi has launched 'deVamp', a campaign to encourage users to switch their restaked Ethereum tokens from platforms like Lido's stETH, Coinbase's cbETH, and Binance's wBETH to EtherFi's eETH. This move allows users to instantly convert their tokens into eETH, avoiding the usual 7-day withdrawal delay, and offers “points” as an incentive.

Polygon Labs is developing a new "aggregation layer" named AggLayer, set to launch next month. The platform will combine the advantages of both modular and monolithic blockchain architectures using zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.

Celsius, the defunct crypto lending platform, has moved large amounts of ETH to centralized exchanges amid expectations that the firm will start repaying creditors in liquid crypto in mid-February. The largest transaction was for 443,961 ETH worth $984 million at the time of the transfer from Celsius to another network-controlled wallet in preparation for moving.

Cosmos Highlights of the Week

Juno kickstarts the year with connecting to Polkadot with the v19 upgrade. With this upgrade, users get new essential features such as; Permissionless x/Clock, IBC Wasm Light Client, and Validator Max Commission Change Rate is set to 5% just to name a few.

Stride announces their first new LST of 2024, namely stDYDX. With stDYDX users can become fully liquid and start earning staking rewards immediately without the 30 day unbonding period of dYdX. Notably, stDYDX auto-converts USDC staking rewards to staked DYDX.

Skip Protocol, the dApps and rollups provider, has introduced Slinky. Slinky is the first restaked oracle aggregator, built for perps markets & DeFi that need maximal performance and minimal trust.

The Stargaze community have a decision to make with the latest governance proposal where lowering of the current fee to put a proposal vote on-chain to 25k STARS, with a minimum deposit of 6,250 STARS (25%) has been put forth.

Asteroid Protocol goes live with their CFT-20 marketplace where users can swap $ROIDS or any of the 3k+ CFT-20s deployed on Cosmos. With the CFT-20 marketplace, users get permissionless and non-custodial trading.

Other Highlights of the Week

Solana introduces the future of tokenization with token extensions which are ready-to-use advanced token functionality on Solana. Token extensions empower developers to rapidly build customized token experiences & designed to meet business compliance needs.

Terraform Labs, creator of TerraUSD/LUNA, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. By filling for bankruptcy, Terra expects to remain afloat as it settles legal challenges in Singapore and the US after LUNA were ruled a security.

After former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty, regulators in Florida and Alaska said Binance.US could no longer serve its residents.

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