Faucet Collector Full Crack: 🟪 Sobriety and circuses

September 15, 2024 | Read Online

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Happy Sunday, folks! Welcome to another edition of the weekend newsletter, where I hope you'll excuse another few paragraphs on the often-rowdy intersection of crypto and politics.

To wit: This week saw two historic events, namely a Congressional hearing on decentralized finance and a not-entirely-boring slugfest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

To be honest, I was sort of relieved that Trump and Harris skipped crypto — though I did hold my breath when Harris paid lip service to AI startups. I don't believe this year is a "crypto election" (in that Americans actually care two figs about crypto policy), though one imagines they'd prefer their investments be taxed as little as possible. Policy is best crafted in a sober, un-circus-like environment, and I think the kind of fair rules that innovators want won't emerge from whatever the heck transpired Tuesday.

As expected, the DeFi hearing earlier that day featured the usual characters sniping each other from across the room on Capitol Hill. Chalk it up as more of a let's-say-the-usual-things event than something that might spark meaningful reform.

At this juncture, the crypto industry is betting that its $160 million-plus in campaign donations and PAC spend will do the trick. How much of a return they'll get is an open question. Remember: Once you become a special interest, you sort of have to just keep paying… and paying. Here's hoping the coffers stay deep.

As for Trump, well, he's about to formally debut World Liberty Financial. This is pure speculation, but here's my guess: They're going to let you invest or "lend" money to the Trump business empire via their properties and receive some kind of exposure or dividend in return. I guess I'll have to tune into X later this month and see for myself.

And now, on to the roundup:

— Michael McSweeney

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Avantgarde Finance dives into the DEX aggregator landscape in this latest report. Key takeaways include:

1inch has seen market share decline on metrics such as volume
ParaSwap and CoW look relatively undervalued on market cap to fundamental ratios
Token utility varies significantly, such as with PSP offering notable staking benefits yielding up to 31%
New features set to differentiate protocols further and may serve as catalysts to narrow existing valuation gaps

Download our report today to find out more!

Access the report

Election burnout has come for political memecoins

Political memecoins — or PolitiFi — are just as down in the dumps about the whole affair as anyone.

Political memecoins aren't doing so hot. Maybe it's a summer malaise thing. Maybe people are tired of gambling. Maybe the memes weren't so funny after all. Either way, Empire's got the real data to chew on. Dig in.

Our industry is in limbo. WTF is going on?

I was excited about being on the precipice of realigning societal incentives and solving many issues plaguing our modern financial world.

The On the Margin team put it well this week in their Thursday subject line: "WTF is going on?" eToro settlements, an XRP trust — it's been a weird transition from summer to fall. Spin up this week's editions to get on the current page.

🟣 Bitcoin L2: Narrowing the definition

The term "layer-2" is somewhat loosely applied to a wide variety of Bitcoin scaling solutions.

The 0xResearch newsletter team continues tumbling down the Bitcoin L2 rabbit hole. But what's a Bitcoin L2 exactly? It's a loose phrase, as the team explores. Either way, scaling is the name of the game. See you there.

ORE's developer hopes their seed round will reverse the currency's fortunes

Regolith Labs, the software company that spun out of the viral ORE project, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

ORE-n't you glad to hear that the viral Solana project has raised some cash? Specifically, Lightspeed exclusively reported that Regolith Labs has bagged $3 million in seed cash. Or pebble cash. The goal: Keep building out their Solana-based proof-of-work project. A true blast from the past.

🟪 Stablecoins are just doing it

But they still have a lot of work to do.

Are stablecoins changing the international payments game? As Byron suggested this week, it's sort of looking like that. Tether's success seems to be in spite of the US government's suspicions — and yet, it's amassed a fortune in US Treasurys and huge quarterly profits.

Byron concluded: "The US government has not yet formally endorsed that compromise form of KYC, but stablecoins seem well on their way to joining the select group of technologies that changed the laws that they challenged."

Your all-time favorite newsletter author will be IRL at Permissionless chatting with the top liquid token fund managers on how they seek and find alpha in the digital asset space. Don't miss it!

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