26 July 2024
Macro/TradFi
The U.S. ETH ETFs went live on Tuesday 23 July, attracting over US$106M in net inflows on day one, before seeing outflows on days two and three. Overall net flows were US$178M of outflows, with over US$3B in trading volume Of note, Grayscale’s converted Ethereum Trust (ETHE) has seen over US$1.1B in outflows, while their new Ethereum mini-trust has captured around ~US$120M in inflows. This was largely expected given many investors have been locked into the Grayscale Trust for many years, and its fees are also the highest out of all the new ETH ETFs (2.5%, versus 0 - 0.25% for the others).
Hamilton Lane, an alternative asset manager with US$920B in assets under management, has become the first asset manager to launch a fund on Solana. The SCOPE fund will be a private credit fund for tokenized RWAs.
Ferrari is set to accept BTC and ETH payments in Europe, following a successful launch in the U.S.
Jersey City is set to allocate 2% of its pension fund to purchase Bitcoin ETFs.
U.S. GDP grew 2.8% in Q2, higher than the 2.0% expected, and much higher than 1.4% from Q1.
Galaxy has raised US$113M for a new crypto venture fund, with an ultimate target of US$150M. The fund will seek to build a portfolio of ~30 investments.
Crypto
L1/L2:
The BNB Foundation burnt US$971M of BNB tokens in its 28th quarterly BNB burn event.
Bitcoin BitVM-based Layer-2, Bitlayer, has raised US$11M in a Series A round led by Franklin Templeton.
Caldera announced a US$15M Series A round to build Metaplayer. This will be a unifying layer for Ethereum L2s & L3 designed to simplify the user and developer experience and enable rollup connectivity.
Ethereum zk-rollup, Zircuit, announced its mainnet funding round. Zircuit is building a fully EVM-compatible ZK rollup with AI-enabled sequencer level security and has over US$2.9B staked.
DeFi:
Prediction market, Polymarket, has reached all-time highs in multiple metrics, including over US$271M in monthly volume and over 33K monthly active traders. Open interest is also at an all-time high, at ~US$55M, with 47K new monthly accounts in July so far.
Leading Solana DeFi player, Jito, released the code for a Solana restaking program.
Solana lending protocol, Solend, has rebranded to Save and launched dumpydotfun, a protocol to short memecoins. This comes the same time as MarginFi has introduced The Arena, which allows users to long/short Solana tokens with leverage.
Cross-chain transfer protocol, DeBridge, has announced a token launch on Solana in August. The airdrop snapshot was based on activity since April and taken on July 23.
dYdX is reportedly in talks to sell some of their v3 derivatives trading software according to a Bloomberg report.
Proton, a privacy-focused service provider best known for its email client, has announced a self-custodial Bitcoin wallet, called Proton Wallet.
Avail, the modular data availability layer, has launched its mainnet and the $AVAIL token.
NFTs, Gaming & Social:
Igloo, the parent company behind Pudgy Penguins, has raised US$11M to establish a new venture, Cube Labs, in order to develop their consumer-focused L2 blockchain called Abstract.
Binance Labs has led an investment round for Pluto Studio, the GameFi platform behind the Telegram mini-game Catizen.
OpenSocial Protocol, an infra layer for web3 social, has raised a US$6M funding round.
Others:
SingularityNET has disclosed a US$53M investment into building a modular supercomputer for decentralized AI.
aPriori, a liquid staking platform building on Monad, has raised US$8M in a seed round. Kintsu, who are also building liquid staking on Monad, raised US$4M.
Web3 AI firm, Network3, has raised US$5.5M in pre-seed and seed rounds.
Small Language Model (“SLM”) - focused Web3 AI startup, Assisterr, has announced a US$1.7M pre-seed round.
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