🎰 A 50M Bet on Arbitrum
PLUS Popsicle Finance becomes WAGMI
🗞 Market commentary.
G’Day fellow REKtember bag holder,
Guess who’s back? Dani’s back, back again and WAGMI.
Or at least it might be time that we all WAGMI as Popsicile Finance and the ICE token has melted away to become the WAGMI token and DeFi suite that is said to be bull and bear market resistant.
But let’s see how that goes and whether or not being built on zkSync will inspire a zk narrative… we can only speculate. At least it gives us something else to talk about on Twitter than farming your Friend Tech friends.
ICE holders will be able to switch their ICE tokens at a 1:69 ratio with no swapbacks as the original ICE/NICE tokens will be gone forever.
In other news, thank you to YOU for not dumping the markets whilst the blocmates team was busy digging into the alpha at Token2049 to bring you the very best LARP 4 you (soon).
TLDR, VCs are sh*tcoining, AI is a HOT narrative, Arthur Hayes giga pumped his FIL bag live on stage and the Pudgy Penguins are on a mission for global domination.
That being said there’s still a lot of money floating around and we are the left behindors who will enjoy the fruits of the next bull market. In the meantime, a lot of funds are waiting on regulatory clarity as others are looking to geographic locations that have some form of clarity.
Asia is definitely the global hub for Web3 with South Korean and Japanese markets heating up.
PS. can’t believe the Holesky launch failed on the 1 year anniversary of the Eth 2.0 Merge… who’d have thought it!
🤓 In today’s email.
Degen corner. A 50M bet on Arbitrum
DeFi insights. 13, lucky for some, insights
ICYMI. Grant talks Solana with the Head of the Solana Foundation Dan Albert
Tweet of the day. inversebrah, imagine that…
And finally. FOMC tomorrow, prepare for volatility
🔥 Degen corner.
A 50M bet on Arbitrum
It has been decided.
The Arbitrum DAO is making a 50M ARB bet on incentivising projects to, once again, build on Arbitrum and bring it back to its former glory.
Ahhhh, I can hear the whispers in the air of a time long before when we were all “wen airdrop.”
Here are the important parts of the “Arbitrum short-term incentive program” you need to know plus some questions to ask.
The rationale is simple, incentivise existing dApps to help pump ecosystem activity by giving users a reason to bridge back after having fun over on Base.
The motivation is to support net worth growth and create incentive data while experimenting with incentive grants and finding new models & developer support systems.
Arbitrum defi szn 2.0?
Innovation ignition or farm ‘n’ dump season?
It’s a short-term incentive program which is designed to pump bring back the excitement in the ecosystem and inspire Arbitrum DeFi Szn 2.0 whilst the DAO designs a more robust, volume-sustaining program that generates continued ecosystem-wide growth… or something like that anyway.
The TLDR for the grantees is simple. Don’t be a douche, don’t farm your own rewards and provide useful data for the DAO to use in the future.
Concerns from the community.
User retention is the hardest challenge facing protocols across the board and a farm ‘n’ dump incentive scheme might be a short-term bandaid for a long-term issue.
What about new protocols? This AIP is focused on the big boys and girls of Arbitrum who are already well funded and can probably withstand a farm ‘n’ dump attack by incentive-hunting whales.
The community wants to see innovation, excitement and ultimately gud ponzis that can be filtered into the echo chamber of CT to puuuuump mah bags!
This proposal is a great conversation starter as something does need to be done before Base or OP becomes the Arbitrum killer with the fun starting in early October before Jim Cramer’s famous Santa Rally after November’s distribution.
👀 DeFi insights.
The important bits.
Arcton - Brings RWA to the blockchain with real-world IPOs and raises CHF 350,000 in a pre-seed round - read
Dokyo World - NFT minting on Avax, Sept 21st 2PM UTC - read
Hashverse - Get ready to enter the Hashverse in 24 hours - read
Holyheld - The Web3 debit cards allow instant cashback - read
HXRO Network - A look at last week’s major developments - read
Mori Finance - TGE this Thursday, in the meantime here’s an article discussing the contrasts of Mori vs Pendle and Lybra - read
Movement Labs - Introduces M1, a L1 blockchain in the Movement ecosystem - read
Pepe Analytics - V1 launches this week with V2 scheduled to have TWAP AI detection - read
Rampage - Sniper bot beta goes live on 20th Sept - read
Off The Grid - Built on Avalanche, a cyberpunk F2P battle royale coming to PS5, Xbox & PC gets demoed by DrDisrespect - read
Optimism - Airdrop part 3 just landed - read
Summer Finance - Use MakerDAOs Spark Protocol on Summer.Fi and become eligible for the SPK airdrop - read
The Heist - Launching soon on Mobile - read
📰 DeFi news.
Even more important bits.
Binance’s new CEO Norman Reed, former SEC & Federal Reserve Bank of NY, is said to be the right man for the job - read
Canto moves to Polygon to become a ZK (zero knowledge) Layer 2 - read
Delphi Labs “Let’s make ICOs great again” as the R&D arm of Delphi Digital is hiring a CEO of ICOs - read
Citibank announces the launch of digital tokenisation for institutional clients to use a private blockchain to transfer funds - read
North Korean hacker crew Lazarus has stolen $3.4bn since 2007 as DeFiLlama do the math and breaks the timeline down - read
🫠 ICYMI.
Life gets busy so here’s what you’ve missed.
Exclusive Podcast: Dan Albert The Head of the Solana Foundation
Listen & Watch.
Today’s exclusive talks about Solana Pay, Helium, Firedancer and the Solana x Visa announcement. Is the future of Layer 1’s hidden in Solana?
Tune in on Spotify | YouTube →
Increasing DEX:CEX Dominance with Unstoppable Finance!
Research.
Now, I have already written complete guides on Unstoppable Finance here and here. In this piece, we’ll go over the finer details of how Unstoppable is achieving its own mission of making centralised exchanges obsolete.
ZooDAO: Where DeFi, NFTs, and Degens Collide for Future Yield
Research.
On the other hand, ZooDAO introduced a fresh spin on the design in 2021, during the thick of the NFT euphoria. ZooDAO drew inspiration from Pooltogether’s pioneering no-loss concept but took it to the next level.
🐥 Tweet of the day.
To save you doom scrolling.
inversebrah, imagine that…
🦍 And finally…
11 more days of REKtember before the prosper lands… or at least that’s what the internet is saying.
FOMC meeting and conference are tomorrow so we’re expecting volatility as the FED will continue to be “data-driven” in their quest for 2% inflation. Investors and industry experts are expecting rates to stay the same in tomorrow’s meeting.
But as we know, anything can happen.
The popular narratives all seem to be fairly quiet at the moment with nothing jumping out. Will LSDfi catch a bid when Ethereum’s Decun upgrade goes live? And will that lead to another bot narrative to snipe early contracts? Who knows but it’s always worth keeping your favourites on your watchlist.
much love,
blocmates team 🫡
🤝 A final word.
A quick word from our super awesome sponsors who help us make this all possible...
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Another great newsletter.
Would love you to dig more into ICE token and the rest. That's something I don't think many have covered very well and I feel like blocmates might have some unique insights/knowledge on.