The Weekly Airdrop: 0x58

March 31, 2023 // Overall market (-1.6%) stood relatively strong amid new Coinbase & Binance lawsuits, nearly 90% of all ETH is now in self-custody & DEX activity is on the rise

Mar 31, 2023

MARKET UPDATE

The overall market (-1.6%) remained relatively resilient through a wave of regulatory pressure on the crypto industry, in a week where Binance, the largest CEX in the world, was served a lawsuit by the CFTC.

BTC: -1.6.%

ETH: -1.5%

Onchain Activity

Derivatives DEXs continue to see increased usage as centralized entities continue to lose users and volume amid serious regulatory pressure. GMX, dYdX, Synthetix & Gains Network saw $56.9bn in trade volume over the last 30 days, up +27.0%, resulting in $20.7m in monthly revenues
ETH supply on exchanges hit an all time low of 16.75m ETH (~13.9% of the circulating supply), meaning that ~86% of all ETH is in self custody

Binance saw a net outflow of $1.9bn of assets from the exchange over the past week as users react to the CFTC lawsuit

Offchain Activity

Metamask Institutional partnered with Allnodes, Blockdaemon, and Kiln to launch an institutional staking marketplace, which provides simple, one-click staking to institutions and will include ConsenSys’ own staking product
Nasdaq plans to launch its crypto custody service by the end of Q2, proving that major players remain bullish on the opportunities within crypto despite the intense regulatory pushback

DEFI OVERVIEW

Offchain Activity

dYdX launched a private testnet of its upcoming Cosmos-based app-chain, which is expected to officially launch in September this year
Polygon’s zkEVM mainnet went live on March 27th, with Vitalik Buterin making the first official transaction on the chain

Onchain Activity

Arbitrum TVL increased +12.3% as DeFi activity was led by increased DEX trading volume on the L2, with Uniswap and Trader Joe seeing increase in trade volume of +81.6% w/w to $3.82bn and +181.0% w/w to $43.2m accordingly
Stargate had a strong week, with TVL increasing +11.0% to $366m, while DAUs hit a 2-month high of 6.2k, pointing to its ability to service strong demand for cross-chain services

WEB3 OVERVIEW

Offchain Activity

Injective and Eclipse have partnered to launch Cascade: the first ever Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) compatible rollup, which allows for the easy migration of Solana dApps to Cosmos
Instadapp released a proposal to distribute all of the protocol’s revenue to the DAO treasury, which passed with 100% of the votes

Onchain Activity

Lens Protocol usage at an ATH with DAUs reaching 28.3k, +40.7% w/w, and the number of daily posts hitting a new high of 50.9k on March 27th

Arweave weekly transactions reached a new ATH of 22.6m, +48.6% w/w driven by the launch of RareWeave, the first Arweave-native NFT marketplace

PROTOCOL HIGHLIGHT

The last week of March marked a historic and highly anticipated event with the launch of two Ethereum scaling solutions, namely zkSync ERA and Polygon zkEVM. We dive into zkSync’s zkEVM - Era.

Despite being in alpha testing, and launching only a few days ago, zkSync is already attracting a lot of interest and gaining significant traction among users. Its innovative solution offers a promising alternative that addresses some of the limitations of existing scaling solutions.

What is zkSync

zkSync is a zero-knowledge proof-based scaling solution that utilizes a zkEVM virtual machine and cryptographic validity proofs, called SNARKs, to ensure the validity of transactions and to reduce the amount of data that Ethereum nodes must validate, which greatly improves transaction throughput and reduces gas fees for users.

Why:

Native Account Abstraction: No seed phrases as users can sign into Ethereum with a Web2 profile, customize permissions individually, & pay gas fees in any token
High Developer UX: Using the LLVM Compiler, developers don’t need to rewrite code in a new language or use different tooling to deploy applications onto the network
High Performance: Era publishes state differences instead of transaction inputs, which has the following advantages: data compression, frequent oracle updates, cheap privacy & seamless offchain storage

Network Metrics: