"Weekly Editor's Picks" is a "functional" column of Odaily Planet Daily. In addition to covering a large amount of real-time information every week, Planet Daily also publishes a lot of high-quality in-depth analysis content, but they may be hidden in the information flow and hot news, and pass you by.
Therefore, every Saturday, our editorial department will select some high-quality articles that are worth spending time reading and collecting from the content published in the past 7 days, and bring new inspiration to you in the crypto world from the perspectives of data analysis, industry judgment, and opinion output.
Now, come and read with us:
Investment and Entrepreneurship
In-depth research: The subtle relationship between BTC spot ETF and CME's huge short positions
When CME officially launched BTC futures trading at the end of 2017, the bull market of 2017 came to an end.
As of now, CME's total BTC futures holdings have reached 150,800 BTC, equivalent to about $10 billion, accounting for 28.75% of the entire BTC futures trading market. The current BTC futures market is not controlled by traditional cryptocurrency exchanges and retail investors, but has fallen into the hands of professional institutional traders in the United States.
CME's futures premium shows a regular fluctuation as the contract is rolled over each month (automatically moving positions to the next month's contract). This is similar to the swap contract premium of traditional cryptocurrency exchanges. They will have a higher premium when the contract is generated, and when the contract is about to expire, the premium is gradually smoothed out.
Hedge funds or institutions have made large purchases of U.S. stock ETFs and opened equal short orders on CME, making risk-free fixed arbitrage once a month to achieve a stable return of at least 12.7% annualized.
The J-Curve Rule of Crypto Investing: Maximizing Gains When Enthusiasm Fades
Guide to escaping the top: How to grasp the selling opportunity in a big market situation?
When users flocked to download Coinbase to buy coins, the top features were already obvious.
BTC's monthly chart is unable to break the historical record of 7 consecutive increases.
Observe BTC unrealized net profit/loss, HODL supply, long-term trend indicator MVRV Z-Score, Bitcoin contract open interest, Ethereum gas fee, social media activity, integer threshold Schelling point, etc.
Who made money in this bull market? Who made money in this bull market?
Bitcoin holders, CEX, Tether and other CeFi platforms, the operating teams of some public chains and DeFi products, and high-market-cap coin issuing projects whose main purpose is to sell coins (retail investors should avoid them).
Why have altcoins performed poorly in this cycle?
The token inflation concerns behind the explosion of new projects. The new liquidity entering the market is insufficient, and unlocking brings huge dilution and selling pressure.
In response, exchanges could enforce fairness in token distribution; teams could prioritize community allocations and larger pools of real users; and higher percentages could be unlocked at token issuance (perhaps implementing measures such as tiered sales taxes to discourage sell-offs).
When the market is sluggish, take this guide to increasing the value of stablecoins
The article mainly introduces the use of stablecoins to achieve relatively low-risk, high-yield interest-earning strategies through major DeFi protocols, covering the Ethereum, Solana, Starknet, Scroll, Aptos, and Sui ecosystems.
Also recommended: "LUCIDA: How do Crypto Quantitative Fund Managers Get Alpha?" "Coin Hunting Strategy: How do Meme Coin Snipers Get Hundred Times of Profit?" "Tracking Smart Money on the Chain: A Collection of the Top 10 Value Coin Position Building Expert Addresses".
Decrypting Airdrops: How Do FDV and Token Economics Affect Token Prices?
FDV launches have varied in recent years: a median of $140 million in 2020 (DeFi protocols), a surge to $1.4 billion in 2021 (NFTs, games), a decline in 2022 ($800 million for L2), and a rebound in 2023 and 2024 ($2.4 billion and $1 billion), featuring alt L1 and Solana projects.
FDV ignores short-term market shocks; therefore, circulation (public supply) is important. High FDV, low circulation tokens like World Coin ($800 million vs. $34 billion FDV) can distort true valuations.
Airdrops distribute tokens to promote protocol adoption and are often quickly cashed out by recipients. While initially lucrative, most airdropped tokens lose value over the long term, with some exceptions such as BONK (which saw a ~8x return).
airdrop
ZKSync airdrop sparks controversy, showing the dilemma of cold start of Web3 projects
Looking back at Optimism and Arbitrum, the number of interactions is used as an important reference indicator in specific activity settings. Users with more frequent interactions usually receive more rewards. However, this unspoken rule seems to have been abandoned by ZKSync. ZKSync does not involve the number of interactions in the calculation of rewards, but focuses more on the amount of funds in a single account and the willingness to allocate risky assets.
Heavy interaction brings about the problem of Sybil attacks, while proof of property brings about the problem of monopoly. For Web3 projects, when designing a cold start mechanism, it is still necessary to carefully consider the valuable user portraits for their products, and design corresponding mechanisms based on the current environment to effectively incentivize valuable users while trying to avoid Sybil attacks.
Which VC-invested projects are more likely to launch airdrops?
a16z： 15/169 = 8.87% ；Paradigm： 10/92 = 10.86% ；Binance Labs： 19/216 = 8.79% ；Coinbase Ventures： 25/394 = 6.34% ；DragonFly Capital： 25/149 = 7.38% 。
Another recommended story article: "The development history of the cryptocurrency industry in the first four years".
Bitcoin and its ecosystem
Can Bitcoin Be a Productive Asset?
Bitcoin is undergoing a remarkable evolution, and there are many different views on its nature.
Considering the ideal Bitcoin-based yield product, a gold standard product would combine the following three features: native Bitcoin consensus, native Bitcoin assets, and native Bitcoin yields. Such a product would mimic a near-perfect Bitcoin fit.
Ethereum and Scaling
Understanding Pectra: Ethereum’s Next Upgrade
Scheduled to launch in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025, Pectra combines two previously planned upgrades: Prague (for the execution layer) and Electra (for the consensus layer).
Through the merger, Pectra aims to bring multiple ambitious improvements to Ethereum, making it more flexible and optimized than ever before. Regular Ethereum accounts will be more programmable, L2 will be more affordable, smart contracts will be more efficient, and validators will be more flexibly managed.
Investing in L2 vs. Investing in ETH: Which has a brighter future?
Despite the increase in the number of listed L2s, their total fully diluted valuation (FDV) as a percentage of ETH has remained the same.
Every new L2 token listed actually dilutes the valuation of previously listed L2 tokens.
Multi-ecology and cross-chain
Panoramic discussion on Solana ecosystem development: What is the impact of L2 and application chain?
Lisks do not pay fees in SOL or use SOL as a transaction fee token, so they do not contribute value to SOL directly, except for SOL re-staking for economic security purposes, but their benefits to the SVM ecosystem are clear. Just like the network effect of the EVM, more SVM forks and Lisks will strengthen the network effect of the SVM.
For Solana, Rollups will be mostly abstracted from end users.
Unlike Ethereum, the Solana mainnet is not intended to be a “B2B chain”; it has always been and always will be a consumer chain.
With the traffic dividend, can Solana Wallet still produce new players?
There is not much room for new Solana wallet players. The positions of Phantom and Backpack are even more difficult to shake. Solana wallet's new opportunities are in the directions that leading projects are unwilling to try, reducing the user scale, such as focusing on embedded scenarios, developer orientation, serving enterprise users, Web2-friendly and other vertical directions.
In addition to wallets, the “traffic entrance” bonus is still there. In the process of the two most dazzling Solana ecosystem meme coins BOME and SLERF going viral, the Solana ecosystem’s tg bot has received huge dividends.
Compared with Ethereum and Solana, what else does TON’s DEX need?
TON's performance and pressure-bearing capacity are the only ones among all current public chains that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Solana, but TON's ecosystem is a combination of the Web2 model and the Web3 model. This combination will technically dilute Web3 in use and deepen Web3 in technology.
If Telegram Wallet takes on the CEX experience, TON Space and DEX can interact on PC and mobile terminals, and finally, Telegram's Mini App and Bot will also be the trading front end of DEX or CEX functions. These designs meet the optimization of trading experience, but the native interaction part on the back-end chain is obviously backward.
LayerPixel, a DeFi solution designed for Telegram Mini App and incubated by TON public chain's launchpad TonUP, is expected to supplement the functionality of TON DEX.
CeFi
Towards Mass Adoption, in-depth analysis of the internal logic of Paypal stablecoin payment
The reason why Paypal turned its attention to Crypto is simple: it meets the needs and is practical (fast, cheap, global payments). PYUSD is building a true stablecoin business scenario, providing a nearly frictionless and trustworthy payment experience that mainstream consumers and merchants expect.
Paypal divides the evolution of Mass Adoption into three stages: cognitive awakening (concept introduction); payment utility (integration); ubiquity (stablecoin payment).
Understanding Tether’s new platform Alloy: a new synthetic dollar platform powered by XAU₮
Tether announced the launch of the open platform "Alloy by Tether", which allows the creation of different bonded assets backed by Tether Gold. Vaults are the core of Alloy by Tether and can be used to store user collateral, unissued aUSD₮, and user collateral casting position (CMP) information. Vault will set a specific liquidation threshold based on the liquidation point or maximum MTV, and the liquidation point is 75%.
What makes aUSD₮ unique is that it is over-collateralized by Tether Gold (XAU₮), which is backed by real physical gold stored in Switzerland. That is, users can mint aUSD₮ using XAU₮ as collateral through Ethereum smart contracts.
GameFi
IOSG Ventures: Deeply explore the Cryoto Game market and explore the competitiveness behind Ronin
There are huge differences in the perceptions of project owners, VCs, players, and retail investors: VCs think it is a full-chain game and a ground-breaking gameplay innovation; project owners think it is 3A; exchanges think it is an increase in Web2 users; players think they are making a lot of money; and retail investors think it is a super high multiple.
Crypto natives are blind to this very Web2 logic. The real core competitiveness of blockchain games lies in the local marketing channels/localized operation capabilities in Southeast Asia. In addition to game players, there is also a very complex business ecosystem around P2E games, such as Internet cafes, gold-making guilds, blockchain game education media, software and hardware developers, etc. Players are exposed to new game information through these very local channels and have very localized/offline organizational connections with mature player communities, because they may be exposed to a certain game because their friends/neighbors/teachers/colleagues are playing it.
Ronin is like an isolated island, firmly keeping the user's attention and money in the ecosystem. P2E never dies, and only grows on suitable soil. The cake of the sinking market is the elephant in the room. The real competitiveness behind Ronin is Sky Mavis's localized distribution and operation capabilities.
Web3
Bankless: Reigniting the market? Review of recent key events in the AI+Crypto track
OctaneX, shown on the latest iPad Pro, is a 3D design software powered by Render Network.
As one of the most anticipated proposals in Bittensor’s history, Dynamic TAO brings fundamental changes to the network: empowering TAO holders and opening up dynamic markets for subnets.
NEAR adds “user-autonomous AI” to the next phase of its roadmap.
Hot Topics of the Week
In the past week, Biden will participate in a Bitcoin roundtable; the U.S. CFTC is investigating Jump Crypto;
In addition, in terms of policies and macro markets, the US SEC required Ripple to pay a settlement of US$102.6 million to oppose its demand for a US$10 million fine; the Australian Stock Exchange ASX will list the first Bitcoin spot ETF; the governor of Oklahoma signed a bill to exempt Bitcoin miners from electricity sales tax;
In terms of opinions and voices, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives said: USD stablecoins may become one of the largest buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds, which can help the United States avoid a debt crisis; Tether CEO: USDT is one of the top three buyers of U.S. short-term Treasury bonds in the world; Circle CEO: Stablecoins will account for 10% of global economic currency in the next decade; Glassnode: The market fluctuates violently, but ordinary BTC investors remain profitable; Analysis: ETH exchange balances reached an 8-year low, and the listing of spot ETFs may trigger a supply shock; Consensys: The SEC will end its investigation into Ethereum 2.0 and will not accuse ETH sales of securities trading; 21 Shares Lianchuang: Lack of pledge will not affect the demand for Ethereum spot ETFs, and liquidity management is critical; Forbes: CZ's current net worth is estimated to be US$61 billion, and he may hold 94 million BNB; 10x Research: The selling pressure brought about by the large-scale unlocking of altcoins is dragging down Bitcoin; ZKsync Chinese Community: Matter Labs’ uncompromising principles will destroy ZKsync; Curve founder: 10 million US dollars of CRV on Curve lending platform has been fully repaid to clear bad debts, and the UwU Lend hacker attack and CRV token destruction related erroneous information have been clarified; Farcaster co-founder: Warpcast’s customers are English users, and there is no plan for international expansion; Tether CEO: aUSDT’s stabilization mechanism is different from USDT, and it needs to be collateralized by Tether Gold to create; Arthur Hayes: Dogecoin ETF will be approved before the end of this cycle, and is increasing its positions in PENDLE and DOGE. The Bank of Japan’s selling of US bonds has triggered speculation on US dollar liquidity, and cryptocurrencies are expected to usher in a new round of bull market; He Yi: Binance’s listing strategy does not affect the flow of funds, and many VCs in the currency circle are not doing well;
In terms of institutions, large companies and leading projects, Tiger Brokers launched virtual asset trading services for retail investors in Hong Kong; Paradigm open-sourced the EVM compiler Revmc, aiming to improve EVM performance; Binance will launch HODLer airdrops for BNB holders; Coinbase launched pre-market trading services; LayerZero announced the token economic model, and the airdrop caused controversy. Users need to donate $0.1 for each ZRO to receive it; Ethena Labs, Symbiotic and LayerZero are piloting a universal re-staking framework; ZK Nation announced that the ZK airdrop is open for application;
In the meme field, the market value of Trump-themed meme coin DJT once exceeded TRUMP; Arkham offered a reward of $150,000 to find the creator of Trump-themed coin DJT, and ZachXBT has completed the task;
On the security front, Kraken and CertiK had a public standoff on social media over a series of serious security vulnerabilities...well, it's been another week of ups and downs.
Attached is a portal to the “Weekly Editor’s Picks” series.
Reunion in the second half~