Bitcoin Price Breaks Out Above $72K
We're getting close to setting a new BTC ATH which stands at $73k. Market moves upwards cause spike in short liquidations. Plus the news, reports, stats, and top funding rounds of the week.
Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. This is our 174th issue, you can search our archives here. We review the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 250k weekly subscribers. This week, Bitcoin broke $72k, Do Kwon was found liable for fraud, Ripple plans to launch a USD stablecoin, and we saw big new venture rounds for Ellipsis Labs ($20M) and Agora ($12M).
Published by Coinstack Partners
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.
Thanks to Our 2024 Coinstack Sponsors…
Amphibian Capital is a market/delta neutral fund of the world's leading crypto funds, returning approximately 7.11% net for Q1 2024, 202%+ net (pro-forma) since '19 and aim to deeply mitigate downside. Amphibian offers BTC, ETH and USD share classes. Deck here: www.amphibiancapital.com
Dimitra is enhancing agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers worldwide, setting the Agtech standard with cutting-edge AI, blockchain, and real-world application technologies that ensure transparency and optimized yields. Visit their website at dimitra.io or follow them on X for more information @dimitratech.
Consensus by CoinDesk is the world's largest, longest-running and most influential gathering that brings together all sides of the cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3 community. From hard-hitting conversations with visionary speakers to hands-on workshops aimed at solving industry challenges, developers, investors, founders, brands, policymakers and more will walk away with the tools and insights needed to continue laying the foundation of a more decentralized future. Use code COINSTACK for 15% off your ticket.
Become a Coinstack Sponsor
To reach our weekly audience of 250,000 crypto insiders, view our sponsor deck and schedule a call to discuss sponsoring Coinstack.
💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals
Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…
Agora, a stablecoin, has raised $12M in seed funding, led by Dragonfly
Raiinmaker, the web3 artificial intelligence firm raised $7.5M in a seed funding led by Jump Crypto
🗞️ 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 price breaks out above $72,000 as market volatility causes spike in liquidations: Bitcoin short positions bore the brunt of market volatility damage as the digital asset surged above the $72,000 mark on Monday. The ATH remains at $73,738 from mid-March. According to Coinglass data, there were over $47 million in bitcoin short liquidations.
⚖️ Terra Founder Do Kwon Found Liable for Fraud in SEC Lawsuit: A New York jury has determined that Terraform Labs and its founder, Do Kwon, are liable for civil fraud charges, siding with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday, according to a Reuters report.
💸 Ripple to launch USD stablecoin that CTO David Schwartz hopes will rival USDT and USDC:Ripple has announced plans to launch a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin that will initially be available on the Ledger and Ethereum blockchains.
🪓 Binance NFT Marketplace Axes Support for Bitcoin Ordinals: Crypto exchange Binance has announced that its NFT marketplace will no longer support Bitcoin Ordinals.
💼 BlackRock names Citi, Citadel, Goldman Sachs as APs for its spot bitcoin ETF: Citi, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Citadel have joined JP Morgan and Jane Street as authorized participants for the world's largest asset manager's spot bitcoin ETF, according to an amendment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday to the ETF's Form S-1.
Coinstack Daily
We’re launching a new daily edition Coinstack that covers all the day’s news and funding announcements. If you’d like to join our daily edition, subscribe here.
💬 Tweet of the Week
📊 Key Stats of the Week
Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...
1. Last month decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes reached a new 12 month high, with over $167.7B in total volume across the space. Overall, this represents an increase of 120% from February and is the most since November 2021 ($180.6B). During this time, Uniswap Labs once again led the way and was responsible for $89B of this volume (53% of the entire market).
2. Activity on Coinbase Layer 2 network Base continues to gain momentum as more than 2.6M daily transactions have been settled on the network, a new record and an increase of 550% month-over-month. To put this into perspective, this is more daily volume than leading L2 networks Arbitrum (1.6M) and Optimism (680K) have seen combined.
3. One of the more particularly interesting data points to me around Coinbase L2 Base's recent growth is that the network is now responsible for more than 46% of all new tokens appearing on DEXs. This signals that users aren't simply spamming the network and farming activity (which certainly does exist to some extent), but are actually doing relatively meaningful things on the network.
4. Bitcoin is facing some macro headwinds, with several indicators in my macro state regime model turning negative in recent weeks. However, the longer term liquidity cycle remains extremely favorable for $BTC and #crypto in general.
5. Applications that link utility, usability, and fun (which often gets lost in the process) can be extremely powerful. Pump.fun has all of these qualities and also iterates on existing mechanisms and legacy processes to make token launches more optimal. Daily revenue on Pump is now more than $528,000 as users continue to leverage the platform to launch and buy tokens. Overall, total monthly revenue on the platform has surpassed $5.2M
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…
Omni - VeradiVerdict - Issue #289
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.
Omni brings Ethereum-native interoperability to the network’s rollup ecosystem, allowing Ethereum to once again function as a single, unified operating system for decentralized applications.
Introduction
Rollups are the present and future of Ethereum scaling. After a gradual increase in usage from 2021 to 2023, rollup adoption has recently accelerated, providing Ethereum L1 with a nearly 10x increase in transaction throughput.
Rollups help Ethereum handle more transactions efficiently by processing them off-chain and only storing data or proofs on-chain on Ethereum L1. This method allows rollups to inherit the security of Ethereum L1 while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum’s vast developer tooling and application ecosystem.
However, because rollups scale Ethereum via isolated off-chain environments, they introduce negative externalities that degrade Ethereum’s network effects. Specifically, liquidity, users, and developers are fragmented between disparate ecosystems. The expanding variety of rollup designs and their growing adoption will only exacerbate these issues. Consequently, Ethereum requires a native interoperability protocol that realigns the network with its original vision of being a single, unified operating system for decentralized applications.
Omni’s Key Innovations
Omni is an Ethereum-native interoperability protocol that establishes low latency communications between all Ethereum rollups, allowing Ethereum to function as a cohesive system in the modular age. Built by a team with deep industry experience, Omni is positioned to unify Ethereum’s fragmented rollup ecosystem with the following defining features.
Security
Interoperability protocols have historically struggled with security. The first generation of protocols relied on nothing more than a set of trusted actors verifying and relaying messages between networks. Over the years, these protocols have been the subject of many exploits, cumulatively costing the industry over $1 billion.
A second generation of protocols improved on this design by applying cryptoeconomic security to the network. Under this approach, actors stake the protocol’s native asset to participate in the verification process. This is a step in the right direction, but relying on a native asset makes the protocol’s security guarantees unstable.
Using EigenLayer, Omni introduces a fundamentally new security model for interoperability protocols. Omni secures its validator set using restaked $ETH, allowing the protocol’s security to scale in line with Ethereum L1’s security budget. With more than $100 billion securing the network, Ethereum’s current security budget is an order of magnitude larger than any other PoS network. By leveraging restaked $ETH, a highly liquid, low volatility asset, Omni’s security achieves significantly greater stability than its predecessors. Moreover, by deriving security from Ethereum, Omni aligns its security base with the rollups it connects, facilitating a security model that grows in tandem with Ethereum’s modular ecosystem.
Omni is setting the standard for action among EigenLayer’s Actively Validated Services (AVS). Omni became the first protocol to reach a deal with a liquid restaking (LRT) provider when it agreed to rent $600 million worth of restaked $ETH from EtherFi. Omni’s team struck agreements with multiple other LRT providers to push its day one security budget over $1 billion. This will allow Omni to offer industry-leading security at launch without requiring the protocol to incur excessive costs bootstrapping the network. As the only Actively Validated Service (AVS) operating on testnet, apart from EigenDA, Omni is positioned as the most production-ready AVS on the market.
🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week
Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...
Coin Bureau - Huge Potential! RWA Cryptos Will Go Higher Than You Think!
Nathaniel Whittemore: The Biggest Bitcoin Narratives of the New Cycle
Additional Coinstack Sponsors
Hive Digital is a leader in providing SEO and PPC services for blockchain, DeFi, Web3, and crypto companies. If you want to expand your organic presence and paid leads from Google and Facebook, get a proposal from Hive Digital at www.hivedigital.com.
💬 Join The Coinstack Telegram Community
Join our Telegram Channel here to chat with our community, ask questions, and learn more about the future of money as we move to a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone.
💬 The People We’re Following Closely on Twitter
📚 How To Get Started With Crypto Learning
Crypto: Explain It Like I’m 5 (Article)
Bankless - The DeFi community (Substack + Podcast + Discord)
Understanding Polkadot - The Next Generation Blockchain Tech (Website)
Blockgeeks Video Tutorials (Video)
The Coinstack Website (Website)
2008 Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF)
2013 Ethereum Whitepaper (PDF)
📰 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.
Comments and thoughts are welcome on our Telegram channel:
Website at Coinstack.co
Substack at Coinstack.substack.com
Twitter at twitter.com/coinstackcrypto
Telegram channel at t.me/thecoinstack
Sponsors: See our Coinstack sponsor deck
Please share with your friends and colleagues.