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Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We review the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 250k weekly subscribers. This week Bitcoin’s every four year halving was completed, BTC network fees came down after Runes rollout, SEC lawyers resigned for abuse of power, and big new venture rounds were announced for Centrifuge ($15M) and Shiba Inu ($12M).
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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals
Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…
🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories
Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week…
🚀 Bitcoin’s average transaction fee comes down after reaching record high amid Runes rollout: The average transaction fee on Bitcoin fell on Sunday after it surged to a record high the day prior, following the network’s fourth halving.
🚀 Bitcoin bulls may have to wait at least two months for halving's impact, analysts say: The spot price of bitcoin has posted an 8% increase since the fourth halving was completed on Saturday, April 19. According to analysts at QCP Capital, investors may have to wait around two or three months for the bitcoin halving's supply constraint to impact the market.
⚖️ SEC lawyers resign after judge blasts agency for 'abuse' of power in crypto fraud trial:The SEC was planning to fire the two lawyers if they didn't step down, the report also said. A federal district court judge in Utah had criticized the SEC attorneys, saying their case was "marred by false statements and misrepresentations."
⚖️ Pro-crypto lawyer John Deaton files to appear as counsel in the SEC's case against Coinbase: John Deaton, an attorney whose cryptocurrency advocacy is part of his bid to unseat Elizabeth Warren in the U.S. Senate, is now asking to lend a hand to Coinbase customers in the exchange's ongoing lawsuit with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
⚖️ Crypto.com denies reports that South Korean regulator is delaying local unit leadership change: Crypto.com has denied a local media report that said the firm might have encountered a roadblock in entering the South Korean crypto market, as the local financial regulator could be deferring the approval of a local entity's transition of executive leadership.
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💬 Tweet of the Week
📊 Key Stats of the Week
Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...
1. Stablecoins Approach 100M Holding Addresses, On-Track to Settle $20T in 2024
2. GHO Nears $50M Milestone
3. DAI staked in the Savings Rate increases 17x in a Year!
4. 10m active wallets per week in the Ethereum economy.
5. Bitcoin generated $80.7M in daily fees yesterday, the most by any network or application throughout the space in the past year. To put this into perspective, the most daily fees earned by the next four highest earning projects (Ethereum, Lido, Uniswap, and Tron) combined was just $58.5M this year.
6. Top Moving Coins From the Top 100
📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports
Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…
What Do You Meme? - VeradiVerdict - Issue #291
About the Author: Paul Veradittakit, is a Managing Partner at Pantera Capital, one of the oldest and largest institutional investors focused on investing into blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.
Introduction
Memes, defined as units that carry cultural ideas from person to person, have been deeply intertwined with crypto culture for the past 10 years.
The first memecoin, launched in 2014 as a lighthearted spin-off of Bitcoin, marked the dawn of memecoins, peaking with a $75 billion market cap in the 2021 bull market.
Recently, the memecoin market has seen explosive growth. An ERC-20 token around Pepe The Frog has surged 400% to a $2 billion market cap in less than a year. Another memecoin that depicts a purple top hat, which launched on decentralized social network Farcaster, has impressively reached over $1 billion market cap, outpacing Farcaster’s own valuation. Finally, there’s been a meme of a dog with a knitted hat, which has gained fame on Crypto Twitter with its viral appeal-it has soared over 20x since the year’s start, now boasting a market cap of around $4 billion.
Memecoins are here to stay, and this article will explore why. We’ll offer a framework to better understand memecoins, examine the evolving infrastructure supporting them, and discuss how they can significantly enhance network engagement.
Memecoins Rely On Attention
One key realization is that memecoins thrive off of attention. In the world of memecoins, attention is everything; attention drives community behavior, the surrounding buzz, and the memecoin’s price action.
You’ll often find comment sections on Twitter swamped with people promoting memecoins. The behavior stems from a simple fact: the memecoin’s price ultimately depends on how much attention it receives. The more attention a memecoin receives, the more potential buyers. If the associated meme is fun or interesting, those potential buyers are more likely to make a purchase.
Besides sharing memes on social media, memecoin enthusiasts find creative ways to bring attention to their tokens. For instance, the community around the memecoin of the dog with a knitted hat has raised $700,000 for a campaign, aiming to display their meme on the iconic Las Vegas Sphere. As a result, anticipating the buzz from this publicity stunt, the value of the token surged by 25%.
Sometimes, memecoins leverage existing attention rather than generating it themselves. For example, while prediction markets like PredictIt and Polymarket let users bet on Presidential Election outcomes, attention-based “Politifi” memecoins around Presidential Candidates were developed for speculating on the public interest surrounding the candidates. As the 2024 elections have drawn closer, speculation and hence the price on these “Politifi” memecoins has significantly increased.
So which memecoins do well? The ones that people think will consume the most attention.
The Importance of Distribution
When evaluating a memecoin, token distribution remains a key factor for many potential buyers.
Some memecoin projects decide to reserve tokens for the team and other initiatives. In addition to airdropping community members and developers, many choose to set aside a portion of the supply for marketing initiatives, the team, and to their DAO.
Setting aside part of the supply creates stronger incentive alignment and better chance of long-term success. By allocating themselves vested tokens, the team is incentivized to participate more heavily in the project and ensure that the token is successful over the longer term. Second, DAOs can be used to fund big initiatives.
🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week
Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...
The Defiant - Memecoins, Web3 Social Media, and the Evolution of Token Models with Li Jin
Coin Bureau - Bitcoin Halving 2024!! What It Means For YOUR Crypto Portfolio!
Bell Curve: Bitcoin's Renaissance: Inside Runes, Ordinals, and Transaction Revenue | Roundup
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📚 How To Get Started With Crypto Learning
Crypto: Explain It Like I’m 5 (Article)
Bankless - The DeFi community (Substack + Podcast + Discord)
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2008 Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF)
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📰 The Coinstack Newsletter:
Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. Published and written weekly by Ryan Allis and Mike Gavela.
Coinstack is a news and analysis newsletter for the digital asset industry. None of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities or other types of investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections may not reflect actual future performance. All investments involve risk and may result in loss.
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