An NFT trading experience like no other...
Origin Story's new Community Rewards Platform. Plus news about Binance fighting back again the SEC, Solana Foundation fighting security classification, and Robinhood ending SOL, ADA, & MATIC support
Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We hear from our new sponsor Origin as well as review the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 105k weekly subscribers. We cover Binance fighting back against the SEC, Solana Foundation stating that SOL is not a security, Robinhood ending support for SOL, ADA, and MATIC, and big new venture rounds for Gensyn ($43M) and Taiko Labs ($22M).
Thanks to Our 2023 Coinstack Sponsors…
Origin Story builds branded marketplaces that empower creators. To celebrate the launch of the protocol’s brand-new Community Rewards platform, Story has teamed up with 0N1 Force to create a uniquely rewarding trading campaign packed with IRL experiences, exclusive NFTs, and more. 0N1 0R1G1NS runs until June 30th on the official 0N1 Force NFT marketplace. Learn more at www.story.xyz. More in the article below.
TokenX streamlines Web3 tokenization for Web2 companies, simplifying integration of blockchain technology into existing applications. Powerful APIs tokenize assets with on/off blockchain metadata, policies, and authentication. Leveraging TokenX, Web2 companies can access the benefits of decentralization, ownership, authentication, and transparency provided by Web3, unlocking new opportunities for growth, customer engagement, and innovation. Learn more at www.tokenx.is
Coinstack Partners helps crypto/web3 companies raise funding from crypto venture capital firms and family offices for Series Seed/A/B/C rounds of $1M to $50M. The firm has relationships and access to all of the top 300 crypto venture capital firms across North America, Asia, and Europe. To discuss venture capital fundraising services for your company, please review our deck and schedule a free consultation.
To reach our weekly audience of 105,000 crypto insiders, view our sponsor deck and schedule a call to discuss sponsoring Coinstack.
Here’s a message from our sponsor Origin about their new Community Rewards Platform.
Growth for growth’s sake is a pointless exercise. While generic NFT marketplaces stifle creators by slashing royalties, Origin Story is unapologetically committed to empowering them.
Story’s branded marketplaces offer artists solace without compromise. Users enjoy a rich feature set that gives creators full control of their projects with endless customizability.
The protocol is once again shaking up the narrative with a brand new Community Rewards Platform. The unique tool allows creators to reward their communities and attract users with meaningful incentives.
Together with 0N1 Force, Story is showcasing the platform’s power with an unparalleled trading campaign – 0N1 0R1G1NS.
For the duration of June, collectors can accrue points on the Community Rewards Platform by using the official 0N1 marketplace powered by Story. Participants stand to win unforgettable IRL experiences, exclusive NFTs, and more.
Rewards, Rewards, Rewards
Boring prizes are for lazy builders. Origin and 0N1 have crafted an impressive range of rewards specifically tailored for NFT lovers.
The campaign’s overall winner will jet off on an all-expenses paid trip to Comic-Con with the 0N1 team and meet their CEO, Starlordy.
Meanwhile, the top 100 participants will enjoy a list of tiered rewards:
Top 10: The campaign’s ten highest scorers will each receive their very own 0N1 PFP, as well as an invite to the team’s next exclusive dinner.
Top 25: Winners will receive a limited edition NFT from renowned 0N1 artist, IMCMPLX
Top 50: The top 50 scorers will receive a free limited edition NFT from Cromagnus, another iconic 0N1 creator
Top 100: All participants who place in the Top 100 can look forward to a Cromagnus special cover NFT, which can be redeemed for a physical print
The collaboration culminates in an official 0N1 0R1G1NS NFT collection, slated to mint this summer. The collection celebrates industry-defining creators through an expertly crafted Web3 comic book.
All campaign participants will receive an allowlist spot for the mint, as well as a commemorative POAP.
To celebrate the platform’s launch, Origin is also offering a prize pool of 500K OGN. Accruing more points increases your share of the prize pool.
Accruing Points
The campaign takes place on the official 0N1 Force NFT marketplace. Participants can earn points by conducting marketplace actions, specifically:
Listing an NFT for sale
Purchasing an NFT
Placing a collection offer
Accepting a collection offer
Honoring full royalties when purchasing an NFT
Staking OGN during the campaign adds tiered multipliers to your points. OGN stakers enjoy rewards derived from 100% of Story’s platform revenue, as well as other avenues.
Trade Now
There’s still weeks left to explore Story’s rich tools and claim your share of the prizes on offer. Simply visit the official 0n1 marketplace to get started.
💵 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…
⚖️ Binance Fights Back Against SEC Lawsuit Over Alleged Securities Violations - A week after the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume filed several motions in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday in opposition to the lawsuit.
🙅♂️ Solana Foundation 'disagrees' with SEC's claim SOL is a security- The Solana Foundation explicitly "disagrees" with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's characterization of Solana's native coin, SOL, as a security.
🚩 Robinhood ends support for Solana, Polygon, Cardano amid SEC exchange crackdown- Fintech trading app Robinhood has decided to delist three cryptocurrencies amid the Securities and Exchange Commission's crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges.
🚩 BinanceUS suspends USD deposits, says bank partners will pause dollar payments next week- BinanceUS said late Thursday that its banking partners will stop processing its dollar payments as early as the day a federal judge will hear arguments over a temporary restraining order on the U.S. trading affiliate.
⚖️ Uniswap releases version 4 code, allowing for new types of liquidity pools- Uniswap Labs has released a draft of the code for Uniswap V4, according to a June 13 blog post from Uniswap’s founder, Hayden Adams. The new code features “hooks” or plugins that allow developers to create custom liquidity pools.
💬 Tweet of the Week
📊 Key Stats of the Week
Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...
1. May was the all-time high month for rollup revenue, with Arbitrum leading the way
2. The full list of tokens deemed securities by the SEC. Over 50 in total
3. Bitcoin Exchange Outflow Volume hitting a one month high after suspending USD deposits on June 9th
4. Polygon zkEVM network saw a new ATH in TVL hitting $27M
5. ETH locked into staking on a formidable upward climb, while ETH on exchanges is declining at an approximately inverse rate (bullish long-term sign)
📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports
Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…
Solana: Firedancer Overview And Unlocks
About the Author: Messari brings transparency to the crypto economy. Messari wants to help investors, regulators, and the public makes sense of this revolutionary new asset class and build data tools to drive informed decision-making and investment. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.
Rollup Specialization
General purpose chains are designed to accommodate the widest set of smart contract applications, including financial applications. Financial use cases require significant security to back the assets, and this requirement results, in Ethereum’s case, with relatively high transaction costs. These high transaction costs, while to the benefit of financial protocols, is a detriment to consumer protocols, for example, which consist of high volume, low-value transactions. Even Ethereum rollup transaction cost of a few cents is prohibitive to many high-volume, low-monetary-value use cases such as social and gaming.
In order to overcome the restrictions of general-purpose chains and rollups, it has been a long-held theory that application protocols would eventually split off from their smart contract roots and operate their own app chain in order to optimize the blockchain architecture for their particular use case. This thesis manifested with dYdX’s migration from an Ethereum rollup to its own Cosmos-based app chain so that it could internalize its order book matching engine within the validator design.
However, there are tradeoffs when migrating to an isolated chain of your own, namely the loss of liquidity network effects, cross-protocol composability, and potentially developer tooling. Therefore, it is only a viable strategy for large, mature applications that have existing brands, user relationships, and product-market fit.
In contrast to the either-or option of general purpose protocol or app chain, a third design has emerged as a trend over the last few months – sector-specific chains.
Sector-specific chains are optimized for the core requirements of a particular family of applications instead of a single application. Games, for example, are likely all share similar requirements, such as high-volume, low-value transactions. By building optimizations targeted at a particular application vertical, the success of the chain is not dependent on the success of a singular application and is also able to share the infrastructure cost across multiple applications, benefiting all. This meets the polar options of a fully generalizable chain or a dedicated app chain in the middle as applications get both the base optimizations needed for their functional area as well as the benefits of shared infrastructure.
Some recent examples that highlight this trend include:
Argus – With a gaming-specific chain architecture, Argus, enables games to spin up individual game shards on top of a core Layer-2 chain. This allows games to retain both composability while splitting up the execution demand.
Kinto – Built on the OP Stack, Kinto is a general-purpose KYC Layer-2 in which all wallets must pass a KYC check before initiating. The Kinto nodes are responsible for keeping the user address identity and KYC providers separated while also securely passing along information between the user and provider. And, since it is built with the OP Stack, Kinto retains the developer tooling effects inherent in the EVM and can adopt existing protocol smart contracts.
Lens Momoka – In a similar vein, Len’s Momoka is a sector-specific optimization with its parallel execution for low-value transactions such as social posts. Instead of writing post transactions to Polygon, Momoka bundles the transactions and stores them on Arweave after doing some validity checks. This design allows Lens to scale its social transactions while maintaining an ultra-low unit cost in order to keep consumer use cases economically viable.
As developers continue to look for compelling applications, they will increasingly look for optimizations that enable new application features. However, instead of dedicated app chains that have had limited success, sector-specific chains could continue to emerge to solve the need for optimizations while retaining the benefits of users, developers, and shared infrastructure associated with fully general-purpose chains.
Optimism Bedrock Upgrade
The Bedrock upgrade implements the modular OP Stack into Optimism’s mainnet Layer-2. A major component of the upgrade was optimized data compression, which lowers the overall transaction costs for users by approximately 55% based on recent data. Additionally, Bedrock decouples the OP Stack from the proof framework allowing the chain to adopt validity proofs (zk-SNARK) in the future for transaction verification. There is already an RFP out for building a zk prover for the OP Stack issued by the Base team. Altogether, the Bedrock upgrade is the first step towards Optimism’s superchain vision in which multiple rollups like Coinbase’s Base can efficiently share resources for better user and developer experiences.
RiscZero x Layer N ZK Fraud Proofs
RiscZero and LayerN have come together to build a ZK Fraud Proof (ZKFP) system for optimistic rollups, effectively combining optimistic rollups with zk-rollups. The ZKFP takes a hybrid approach to prove transaction validity that only executes the ZKFP when there is the possibility of fraud which lowers the overall transaction costs compared to zk layers that prove all transactions.
Architecturally, RiscZero provides a zero-knowledge virtual environment (zkVM) that is a general, provable execution environment. General execution means it can execute various languages, such as C/C++, Rust, etc., inside of its environment, and this includes EVM execution. With the recently released continuations, RiscZero can now prove any EVM transaction. In the future, the team hopes to release Bonsai, a general-purpose zero-knowledge proving network that is able to act as a secure off-chain execution and compute layer for a wide range of use cases.
Sovereign Labs SDK Release
Sovereign Labs, the team building an “internet of rollups,” has released the alpha version of their rollup SDK. The SDK comes with standardized interfaces and modules to give developers a straightforward way to launch their applications as zk-rollups. There are three logical components of the SDK as defined by the team: rollup interface, the module system, and the full node. The rollup interface defines core aspects of the rollup, such as the data availability (DA) layer, so that developers can simply choose a DA provider and not worry about integration work. Abstracting core interfaces away and making them unopinionated about the application logic gives developers the freedom to design applications by using the Module System. The Module System provides some off-the-shelf packages, such as state storage, and is configurable, effectively giving rollup developers the freedom to create custom state transition functions (application logic). Altogether, Sovereign aims to build an interconnected web of zk-rollups by making it easy to build scalable infrastructure via their SDK.
Succinct Telepathy
Succinct has released Telepathy, a decentralized and secure zkSNARK interoperability protocol for Ethereum. It allows users to send messages from Ethereum to any other chain and read Ethereum state on any other chain trustlessly with the security of Ethereum's light client protocol. Succinct uses zkSNARK proofs to overcome the traditional computationally expensive operation of a light client. This enables cross-chain connections without the need for points-of-failure like multisigs or centralized entities. Potential applications include cross-chain collateral, governance, and trustless bridging. Telepathy is now live on Ethereum mainnet and 8 supported EVM chains.
🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week
Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...
Real Vision Crypto - The Power of Culture in Web3: The GMoney Story
Coin Bureau - Crypto Crash Coming?! Impact of The Debt Ceiling Deal!!
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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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