Breakpoint happened this week and the Solana news has non-stop. Too much to list out in here, so I’ll focus a few and you can check out a full article for more.
Sailing the Seas of Cheese
Price action is currently in the gutter, and you know what that means: it’s time for everyone to start fighting. Instead of slinging mud over who has the "best" chain, we could...actually look at the data.
Ultimately, this industry lives or dies by its users. We should be obsessing over onboarding the masses into on-chain DeFi, regardless of the logo on the landing page. Stop the tribalism and start the growth.
Macro Chaos and Market Movers
It currently feels like we’re being tossed around by the 10/10 waves of market manipulation. Wintermute is out here selling like they’ve got a personal vendetta against green candles. I’m genuinely curious to see how long this "price discovery" theater lasts once a real market structure bill finally passes in the USA.
In the meantime, everyone is staring nervously at Japan. The Yen Carry Trade is the ghost in the machine right now. As Japan whispers about interest rate hikes, that sweet, cheap yen borrowing becomes a lot less attractive. When the interest rate differential narrows between the Yen and the USD, the carry trade unwinds, and global volatility spikes.
TL;DR: Macro is messy, Wintermute is dumping, and the Yen is the tail wagging the crypto dog. Stay nimble and expect volatility.
Price Movements on the Week
The Cypherpunk Hackathon (@colosseum) projects and winners were announced and there’s so much cool stuff coming our way. The amount of people who took part was pretty crazy. Privacy is coming.
Speaking of privacy, @Arcium is introducing C-SPL, a new confidential token standard that encrypts balances and transfer amounts for any Solana token!
Arcium also debuted Cerberus Protocol, the first practical dishonest majority protocol for zero-trust. I'm pretty bullish Arcium.
Aave (@aave) is having some battles within their community over the role and power of token holders in the DAO vs the Labs who actually make and deploy all the code. Who owns the protocol revenue? The @CoWSwap partner fees no longer flow to the DAO treasury. Should they? Do $AAVE token holders deserve more of the profits?
@DefiIgnas did a solid write up on the situation, but also make sure to read the comments from Stani, Kolten, etc. Invested in Aave or not, this has some interesting implications and arguments around Dao’s vs Labs.
Wen Firedancer (@jump_firedancer)? It’s finally live on mainnet and Solana is officially “out of beta”.
@solanamobile partnered with chipmakers behind 2B+ Android phones to get the solana dapp store and wallets accessible to orders of magnitudes more people.
@Kamino announced 6 new products, expanding your lending options and bringing more ways for institutions to get involved https://x.com/kamino/status/1999401802844742122?s=20
Why are barely any people on Solana using DeFi? @vidor_solflare said only 6% of
@solflare users are using DeFi! What the heck do you all do with your funds? Can’t be gamble on memes anymore
Zooko (@zooko) mentioned that Crosslink, by @ShieldedLabs, is far enough along that we can start inviting independent experts to scrutinize it, starting with @nikete. Will we see staking introduced to ZCash? Crosslink is a hybrid PoW/PoS consensus algorithm for Zcash. Zooko also got named as an advisor to @cypherpunk (ZEC DAT) and will be attending an SEC roundtable on crypto, financial surveillance, and privacy on Dec 15th. Big week!
Two big NFT collections dropped this week that couldn’t have had more opposite approaches. Doodles (@doodles) decided to drop 25k cubes on Solana with all new art, but tons of problems happened and confusion on tiny windows to mint, leading them to reduce the collection down to 8888 after being way off their mark of selling out. Each box was 1 sol or 3 sol for a cube with a higher chance of getting a rare. Once they reduced the collection, it did end up selling out, but the sale page on Magic Eden ( @MagicEden) was really confusing and hard to tell which group you were in and if you could mint. Personally, I’ve always liked the art by @burnttoast, who admitted, “we overshot demand. course correction is healthy. these characters are essential to the brand”. The collection art has not been revealed yet from the cubes and cubes are going for around 1.15 SOL (15% above mint price).
The other big NFT surprise this week came from @sagamonkes who dropped Wave03. No whitelist, no pre-sale, no claim site. The monkes were airdropped for free. 1026 new Saga Monkes were distributed, completely free, to users who believed in the idea of
@solanamobile back when we didn't even know where $SOL would bottom. I was fortunate enough to receive my first one, after missing the original cut off by only a day.
@krtvdept and @NifteeNFT have been community focused and the antithesis of most brands. I’m biased here, but the monke community is filled with builders, artists and people who give back. Only a small handful of the Wave03 have hit the market since being air dropped into wallets. Floor is still being established, but seems to be between 3-5 SOL
Are we living in the upside down?
Not only did Paul Atkins (@SECPaulSAtkins) say he thinks all stocks will be tokenized in the next few years onchain, but the SEC released a guide on using crypto wallets?
The SEC also issued a No-Action Letter to @The_DTCC, which paves the way to possibly tokenize over $100 trillion in assets.
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