Bitcoin Price: US$ 42,364.13 (+3.32%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 2,969.64 (+2.75%)
Lido’s Lead, ApeCoin Governance, & The BreederDAO Factory
- Lido is a liquid staking protocol for Proof-Of-Stake blockchains to unlock liquidity for staked assets. They currently support liquid staking over five blockchains, Ethereum, Terra, Solana, Kusama, and Polygon.
- Lido has long been a clear leader as other liquid staking protocols failed to gain traction. Since Jan 2021, Lido’s growth has been immense, with over 25% of total ETH2 deposits staked with Lido currently.
- Last week, Lido had its largest daily deposit of 197k ETH, with a continuous higher trend of daily deposits. Total deposits into Lido the past week totaled 433k ETH, making it its largest depositing week.
- As mentioned in our previous daily, ETH2 yields will rise post-merge as transaction fees move from miners to validators. This makes the future liquid staking yields incredibly attractive.
- Not the only one in the market, RocketPool, a competitor liquid staking protocol, has also gained traction since its launch. It is now the 2nd ranked liquid staking protocol for ETH.
- Yuga Labs shocked the NFT world on March 11th with its acquisition of IP rights for CryptoPunks and Meebits.
- Less than a week later, the team was back in the spotlight amid the launch of Apecoin ($APE), which officially went live on Thursday. Many were eagerly awaiting a BAYC token after the team revealed its plans to launch a fungible community token a few months ago, but the degree of thoughtfulness that went into this launch certainly caught many by surprise.
- For starters, the team created the APE Foundation to serve as the “base layer on which ApeCoin holders in the ApeCoin DAO can build”. They also have a live governance forum, which was pre-populated with a handful of forum posts outlining the first five AIPs (Ape Improvement Proposals) to formally establish the ApeCoin DAO, voting processes, year one budgets, and staking pool allocations.
- Holding ApeCoin ($APE) is the only requirement for membership in the DAO, and we’ve already seen thousands of people view the forum posts; not bad for a DAO that just launched a few days ago. Let’s go over these initial forum topics in more detail.
- The Avalanche Bridge will expand support for the Bitcoin network, enabling Bitcoin holders to securely transfer their BTC onto the Avalanche public blockchain and use it within Avalanche’s DeFi ecosystem, which currently has nearly $16B in total value locked (“TVL”). Upon launch, which is expected in Q2, Bitcoin will join Ethereum as supported networks on the Avalanche Bridge.
- By expanding support to Bitcoin, the Avalanche Bridge will unlock a trillion dollar asset that has yet to fully join DeFi and Web3 culture applications at the scale of user demand.
ETH price hits $3K as major crypto fund adds over $110M Ethereum to Lido’s staking pool
- Ethereum’s native token Ether (ETH) rose above $3,000 on March 22 as fresh data suggests Three Arrows Capital staked at least $110 million worth of ETH into Lido’s liquidity pools.
- The Singapore-based hedge fund manager provided liquidity worth 36,401 ETH to Lido’s “Curve stETH pool” using a third-party Ether wallet, data from Etherscan shows. As a result, it became eligible to receive at least 36,401 stacked Ether (stETH) tokens from Lido: to ensure low slippage when un-staking those tokens for real ETH plus staking reward.
- Almost an hour later, another Ether address, marked with the word “fund,” sent 6,993 ETH (worth $21.12 million) to the Curve stETH pool, hinting that Three Arrows Capital was adding more liquidity to the Lido’s coffers. If correct, the fund may have already staked more than $130 million worth of Ether on March 22.
Bitcoin hash rate may see ‘small capitulation’ with difficulty set for new all-time high
- Bitcoin network fundamentals appear more resilient than ever to attacks on miners‘ operations.
- Bitcoin has overcome considerable odds over the past year to see the processing power dedicated to mining — hash rate — reach a giant 222 exahashes per second (EH/s) this month, according to estimates from monitoring resource MiningPoolStats.
- Miners have a breakeven cost for producing each Bitcoin, and when the spot price is lower than that cost, the danger arises that they will begin to “capitulate,” or cease operations due to a lack of profitability. This has the knock-on effect of reducing price performance, and an adjustment in Bitcoin network difficulty is needed to lower miners‘ production costs en masse.
Enzyme’s Polygon deployment is now live!
- Enzyme’s Sulu is now live on Polygon as well as Ethereum!
- Users can now set up vaults, trade and interact with DeFi at extremely low gas costs!
- You’ll find that the interface has had a complete revamp
- App performance should be much quicker & smoother on Sulu
BIS joint pilot: Institutions can use CBDCs for international settlements
- Bank of International Settlement (BIS) Innovation Hub has completed an experimental central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform pilot for international settlement with the central banks of Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa.
- The multi-national experimental CBDC project, dubbed Project Dunbar, has been developed to facilitate direct cross-border transactions between financial institutions using multiple currencies connected across multiple central banks.
- The joint CBDC pilot was announced in September 2021, and a final report regarding the same was released on Tuesday. The experimental joint CBDC program turned out to be a success and proved financial institutions can use CBDCs issued by central banks to transact directly with each other on a shared platform
THORChain says its hard fork is now complete
- THORChain has halted at block 4,786,559 to perform the scheduled hard fork.
- The THORChain team announced in a tweet that it has successfully completed a hard fork of its network. As a result, blocks are being produced on the blockchain.
