Fireblocks Launches Web3 Startup Toolkit Amid a Surge in New Ventures
Fireblocks, the Web3 infrastructure platform, launched a Web3 toolkit specifically designed for startups amid a proliferation of early-stage blockchain ventures, according to a July 25 press release.
The toolkit — Fireblocks for Startups — is designed to help startups quickly build and launch Web3 products and includes solutions for treasury management, self-custody, private key storage, and secure digital asset transfers, the company said.
“The short history of crypto shows that successful projects — whether crypto exchanges, DeFi bridges, or NFT platforms — go through periods of hypergrowth during market upswings, with development teams focused solely on maintaining front-end stability while neglecting security in the process,” Idan Ofrat, co-ffunder and Chief Product Officer of Fireblocks, said in a statement.
“Fireblocks for Startups ensures innovation is always in lockstep with security, providing a robust and accessible infrastructure for blockchain builders to build on without the technical and operational complexity,” Ofrat said.
The rollout follows a surge in early-stage venture investments in Web3 startups, with total investment volume jumping some 55% in the first quarter of 2024, according to the statement.
Since launching a pilot version of its startup toolkit, Fireblocks has already seen a 50% uptick in the number of startups using its Web3 infrastructure platform, according to the statement.
Approximately 25% of Fireblocks’ customers are now startups or small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), including names such as TaxNodes, Dendra, and Kunga, it said.
Fireblocks has been aggressively expanding its operations in 2024. In June, Fireblocks partnered with Coinbase International to offer derivatives and trading products to retail and institutional investors.
One month prior, Fireblocks announced the launch of an institutional crypto custody arm in the US.
“It is increasingly clear that there is a lack of qualified custodians in the United States covering digital assets,” Adam Levine, senior vice president of corporate development at Fireblocks, said in May.
Founded in 2018, Fireblocks is an enterprise Web3 platform best known for its digital asset custody and treasury management solutions.
According to the company, it has facilitated the transfer of $6 trillion in digital assets since inception and serves over 30 exchanges and 55 banks in the digital asset space.
Kwenta and Perennial Kickstart Arbitrum Expansion With 1.9M ARB
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, July 26th, 2024, Chainwire
Kwenta, the leading onchain perpetuals exchange on the Optimism network, has partnered with Perennial to launch a new joint product and incentive program on the Arbitrum network. This initiative, backed by a substantial 1.9 million ARB grant, aims to attract new users and liquidity providers to Arbitrum and spark renewed interest in onchain perpetuals trading.
Kwenta and Perennial’s Expansion Strategy
Kwenta, known for being a UX layer for perps trading on Optimism and Base, is expanding its reach to Arbitrum in a bid to build a comprehensive marketplace for onchain perpetuals. This move is facilitated by Perennial V2, an Arbitrum-native protocol designed to be a hyper-efficient liquidity layer for derivatives trading. The joint initiative is designed to revitalize the popular AMM model for leveraged trading by providing traders with a powerful, familiar interface to interact with smart contract liquidity.
Perennial’s vision is to create a single, global liquidity layer where all markets, all chains, and all liquidity converge into one decentralized nexus. By integrating Kwenta’s premier trading interface with Perennial’s advanced perps infrastructure, users on Arbitrum will benefit from an optimized trading experience. Trade orders on selected Kwenta markets will be seamlessly routed through Perennial, ensuring efficiency and reliability. This collaboration combines Kwenta’s top-tier trading platform with Perennial’s hyper-efficient trading infrastructure, delivering the best possible experience for traders.
Incentive Program Details
The newly launched incentive program focuses on two main areas:
Trading Rebates: Active traders will benefit from substantial fee rebates, making it more cost-effective to trade on the platform. This initiative is expected to drive trading volume and retain users.
Liquidity Boosting: Liquidity providers will receive incentives to supply liquidity, ensuring deep and efficient markets.
For more details on how to potentially earn rewards, users can visit Kwenta’s Rewards Blog for trading rewards details, or visit Perennial’s Discord server for information about rewards for providing liquidity.
Team Insights
Burt Rock, Marketing Lead at Kwenta, highlighted how far onchain perps have come, stating, “We’ve seen a lot of new perpetuals markets focused on improving the user experience, but most are making huge sacrifices in terms of decentralization. We want to show people you really can build decentralized apps which are incredible to use, and even better than offchain versions.”
Kevin Britz, CEO & Co-Founder at Perennial, added, “Kwenta has been a market leader in the perp vertical, regularly pushing over $100M in OI. We’re excited to welcome them to our home on Arbitrum and expand the number of teams leveraging Perennial infrastructure. In a saturated perps landscape, combining our protocol with Kwenta’s interface will lead to increased volume, deeper liquidity, and a CEX-level user experience.”
Future Outlook
The introduction of this incentive program represents a crucial step in the evolution of Kwenta and Perennial. With Kwenta concentrating on the UX and frontend aspects of trading and Perennial focusing on providing a robust liquidity layer, the collaboration is set to offer a decentralized trading experience that is both highly efficient and user-friendly. This model of specialization showcases how projects can synergize to deliver superior services in the DeFi space. The combined expertise of Kwenta and Perennial promises to elevate the standard of onchain perpetuals trading, making it more accessible and appealing to a wider audience.
For more information, users can visit Kwenta’s website and Perennial’s website. Users can also read Perennial’s launch announcement for additional details.
About Kwenta and Perennial
Kwenta: As a leading platform for derivatives trading, Kwenta has facilitated over $50 billion in volume on Optimism and Base. The platform is expanding to Arbitrum to launch its perpetuals marketplace, a single app to compare and trade on multiple onchain venues.
Perennial: Perennial is a pioneering DeFi liquidity layer that offers hyper-efficient infrastructure for a variety of trading applications. Its modular and efficient design supports customized markets, leveraging fast execution and capital efficiency to power DeFi apps.
This year was marked by many events that directly or indirectly affect the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin reacted especially noticeably to them: in 2024, its value remains extremely unstable. Currency volatility has a noticeable impact on the market, so it’s important to know what factors determine changes in value.
In his commentary for the European Association of Software Engineering, Icon.Partners lawyer Vladyslav Udianskyi shared an analysis of the factors that most strongly impact the state of Bitcoin.
What indicators impact the cryptocurrency market?
There are many indicators that determine the course of crypto assets. Among them, the expert distinguishes market sentiment, regulatory initiatives, technical factors, manipulation and fraud, political changes, etc. With so many variables, it is extremely difficult to predict the exchange rate of cryptocurrency, so it is worth considering each of the factors separately.
Market sentiments. Like the price of any commodity, the price of Bitcoin depends on supply and demand ratios, which are impacted by market sentiment as investors react to news and events. The most high-profile case in recent times is the attack on Mt.Gox, which resulted in the loss of approximately 850,000 BTC. This significantly reduced demand due to a lack of confidence in Bitcoin exchanges and also created an oversupply on the market, including the black market, as the hackers gradually sold the stolen Bitcoins. Additionally, the ongoing Mt. Gox repayments to creditors might lead to a reduction in Bitcoin’s price if those creditors decide to sell their holdings once they receive them.
Regulatory initiatives. Government interventions and regulatory updates often cause the rate to fall, as was the case in 2021 due to the Chinese government blocking crypto transactions. As a result, Bitcoin fell by around 10%, while other assets like Ethereum and Dogecoin fell by 22% and 24% respectively.
Macroeconomic factors. Changes in interest rates or inflation have almost the strongest effect on the market. For example, in April 2021, the inflation rate in the US jumped from 1.6% in March to 3%. This rise in inflation coincided with a sharp drop in the price of Bitcoin from $57,637 in April to $37,305 in May 2021.
Technical factors. Events like the Bitcoin halving have an unpredictable effect on value. Halving occurs approximately once every four years and reduces the rate at which new bitcoins are created. In the case of stable demand or its growth, this creates a shortage of supply and an increase in price. However, halving the block reward will increase the cost of production, causing less efficient miners to become unprofitable and shut down. In turn, this can cause transaction confirmation times to increase, transaction fees to potentially increase, and, as a result, the Bitcoin price to drop due to the reduced demand.
Manipulation and fraud. John Griffin, professor of finance at the University of Texas, together with Amin Shams, provided strong evidence of manipulation in the Bitcoin market in 2017. Their research showed that the Tether stablecoin was used to buy Bitcoin at strategically important times, artificially inflating its price. This manipulation created a false impression of demand and significantly contributed to the subsequent emergence of a price bubble.
Political and economic changes in the USA. The American market directly determines the course of the cryptocurrency market for many reasons:
Bitcoin is traded mostly against the dollar, making the cryptocurrency dependent on USD fluctuations.
A significant number of serious crypto investors are US residents.
The US is also home to most of the largest and most influential financial markets, including stock exchanges and futures markets where financial products related to Bitcoin are traded.
Some major crypto projects are affected by US regulatory initiatives. The indirect impact of Bitcoin’s fall has resulted in SEC filings against major exchanges such as Binance, Kraken, Genesis, and more.
The policy of the US Fed is monitored around the world and has a significant impact on financial markets. The Fed’s monetary policy decisions, such as changes in interest rates, impact investor behaviour and liquidity conditions.
The US influences the global cryptocurrency policy, which is formed mainly based on the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), adopted in 2021.
Against the background of political changes in America, it will be difficult to predict the behaviour of the currency, but these changes will have a significant impact on the price of Bitcoin and other crypto assets. US leadership in policymaking is benchmark and critical for investors in making decisions about investing in Bitcoin.
What affects Bitcoin’s lowest price limit?
There are several factors that determine the lower limit of Bitcoin’s value. Halving has a significant impact: a reduction in the supply of new bitcoins can gradually lead to an increase in price. On the other hand, mining costs set a practical minimum because prices falling below these costs make mining unprofitable.
Historical lows also give an idea, Bitcoin often finds support at these levels, recovering after reaching this support line. Market sentiment and investor behaviour play a critical role, as long-term holders and institutional investors tend to buy during major declines, preventing further declines. In addition to the mentioned, technological progress and pace of implementation, as well as regulatory actions, also impact the lowest possible cost.
Analysts at JPMorgan note that the cost of producing bitcoin has historically acted as a floor for bitcoin’s price. The midpoint of the manufacturing cost range as of April was around $26,500. This figure is expected to mechanically double to $53,000 after the halving.
We have already felt the effects of the halving with the price falling to around $55,000-$56,000, but it is quite difficult to say for sure whether the decline is over. This decline is due to a drop in Bitcoin’s hash rate, as less efficient mining rigs will stop operating as they become unprofitable.
According to analysts at JPMorgan, if the decline after the halving is not over, the midpoint of the cost of production estimate range could fall to $42,000, assuming an average electricity cost of $0.05 per kWh.
Do other assets affect the BTC rate?
The impact of falling prices of Ethereum, Solana, and other major tokens on the Bitcoin market is significant but mixed. Similar to traditional commodity markets such as gold and silver, investors often notice patterns that can repeat themselves.
However, Bitcoin generally exhibits greater stability and less vulnerability compared to other cryptocurrencies. This resilience is bolstered by its established position, reinforced by the SEC’s ruling that Bitcoin is not a security, as well as its special characteristics, such as PoW consensus rather than PoS. At most, the decline of other cryptocurrencies can free up investors’ capital to reinvest in a more stable cryptocurrency, bitcoin, which does not raise questions from regulators and is not as vulnerable.
Alkimiya’s new protocol allows for the trading of Bitcoin transaction fees to manage volatility.
The protocol was developed by Anicca Research and is backed by major investors like Castle Island Ventures.
Alkimiya, a blockspace markets protocol, has introduced a new tool that enables users to trade Bitcoin transaction fees directly. This move comes as Bitcoin transaction fees continue to exhibit high volatility, with fees known to fluctuate between 20 to 500 times their value within a single week.
Leo Zhang, founder of Alkimiya Protocol, explained the rationale behind the tool:
“Through extensive research on the structural impact of various transactions on network fee rates, we concluded that trading transaction fees offers far more accurate exposure to the ecosystem’s fundamentals compared to trading Layer 1 tokens.”
Recent events in the Bitcoin ecosystem have highlighted fee volatility issues. In mid-April, following the Bitcoin Halving, a surge in Ordinals and Runes projects caused network fees to rise from $4.8 to $125 per transaction.
In May, increased activity around the $DOG token saw fees increase from $2 to $7 per transaction.
The protocol potentially offers various uses for different participants in the crypto space. Collectors could use it to manage mint costs, while traders might use it to position themselves for anticipated network activity. Service providers, who have been vulnerable to sudden fee spikes, could use it as a hedging tool.
A recent incident underscores the potential relevance of such a tool. In June, a bug in OKX’s UTXO consolidation script resulted in fees increasing from $5.8 to $87.8 per transaction in a single day, leading to reported losses of approximately $18 million for the exchange.
Nic Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures, an investor in Alkimiya, commented:
“Fee volatility is a lingering UX challenge for blockchain users, particularly on Bitcoin. As Bitcoin enters a regime of permanent congestion, consumers of blockspace can — for the first time — manage their exposure to fees via Alkimiya.”
For miners, the protocol presents a potential way to manage future fee revenues. This comes at a time when transaction fees have become a larger portion of miners’ income post-halving, with the fees-to-reward ratio reported to fluctuate between 3% and 300%.
Developed by Anicca Research, Alkimiya is currently operational on ETH mainnet and states plans to introduce ETH and L2 gas products in the future.
The protocol has received backing from several venture capital firms in the crypto space.
Last year, Alkimiya secured $7.2 million in funding from a round led by 1kx and Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Dragonfly, Circle Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures.