TLDR Crypto 2024-04-16

Senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Eric Balchunas speculates that the upcoming Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs will not have substantial inflows or market effects. The ETFs will not be available to Chinese locals, and the Hong Kong ETF market is only $50 billion. With no big players involved and less liquidity, the market will be less efficient with spreads beyond where Bitcoin normally trades. These factors and relatively high 1-2% fees make this more of a moral victory than a financial one for Bitcoin.

OKX, a major cryptocurrency exchange, has launched its own Ethereum layer-2 scaling network called X Layer, built using Polygon's AggLayer solution. X Layer aims to provide faster and cheaper transactions, as well as seamless interoperability across different blockchains. The launch positions OKX as a competitor to Coinbase's Base, another layer-2 network built on Optimism's OP Stack.

Offchain Labs has released Arbitrum BOLD on testnet, a new dispute resolution protocol for optimistic rollups that enhances permissionless validation and security. Now, anyone can secure claims about Arbitrum's state on Ethereum, promising increased network security and democratizing the validation process. Following thorough testing, including community engagement and a tally vote, BOLD is expected to further align Arbitrum with Ethereum's decentralization goals.

Subscription Minting is being launched as a solution to high gas fees and minting inconveniences, allowing users to prepay for future mints at lower costs, with the flexibility to opt in or out of specific mints while still adhering to the established allowlist process. This system aims to relieve stress for collectors by providing a quick, secure way to manage mints without bots or season passes, ensuring a fair chance for all participants.

General Partner at Electric Capital Maria Shen divides her list of the most innovative onchain experiments from the last 3 years into four categories. For human coordination mechanisms, she highlights Nouns DAO for its complex treasury system and spin-off projects and Curta for its recognition of solving hard problems. In the “pricing historically difficult assets” category, Love on Leverage prices momentum during a live dating show and Orb Land allows users to access Q&As with influencers. Her “markets for unique assets” category includes liquid NFT markets. The final category is for incentive mechanisms for onchain art, represented by the 5/9 chess engine's NFT-per-move mechanic.

Franklin Templeton Digital Assets highlights the upcoming Runes standard and its significance for Bitcoin. After the success of Ordinals, which has a market cap of around $2 billion, creator Casey Rodarmor is introducing Runes as a more efficient version of BRC-20 tokens that better uses Bitcoin's UTXO design. Specifically, Runes will be entirely onchain, Lightning network compatible, and will not require wasted UTXO transactions. Bitcoin's current fungible token market cap is $600 million, but the adoption of Runes could drive it higher.

The most suitable asset for staking should be the one that mirrors the denomination of risk, minimizing cross-volatility risks. Ethereum is identified as the most common digital asset for risk denomination in internet-native applications, especially with the rise of Ethereum rollups.

Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra's recent paper about intents researches how effort, congestion, and entry costs affect intent markets. To receive the most tokens during an intent swap, reduced competition helps since it increases the win rate of solvers, reducing their cost. A system similar to a Dutch auction can be used to maximize user utility when there's no possible arbitrage between an onchain AMM and a solver.

Eigen DA is the most scalable, Avail offers the fastest finality, Celestia has the first-mover advantage, and NEAR claims to be the cheapest option by over 30x.

The first update to address Solana's network congestion issues has been released.

Blockchain presents an opportunity to reshape how we think about ownership and collecting, but we need to be careful to prevent scams to make blockchain applications more mainstream.

The floor price of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs has decreased to its lowest since August 2021 (10.9 eth - $34k), marking a decline of over 90% from its peak in April 2022 (128 eth - $395k).