🤔Solana rallied... now what?
PLUS your best map for SOL airdrops.
🗞 Market commentary.
Good morning to you, crypto bulliever!
After Uptober, we are so far enjoying Upvember, and no matter how much our bera friends may want to, we can't shake the feeling that the cards needed for a genuine bull run are on the table. It just might be the time to focus more on whether we own enough chips to play.
Macro doomers have been getting slapped by Bitcoin since January, and even though some price pullback is inevitable sooner or later and the bears will have their moment of glory, the path to new all-time highs looks clearer than it has in a very long time.
Let's eyeball the current poker table:
The casino overseers at the Fed this Wednesday announced a pause in raising interest rates, and one can feel that Jerome Powell's regular shows no longer pack the same juice as last year. Garry Gensler will delay spot ETFs as much as he can, but even he admits that the SEC is currently reviewing 10 ETF applications, and we all know that BlackRock always gets what it wants (in the case of ETFs, historically 99% of the time).
Executives of Fidelity, a financial giant holding $12 trillion in assets, are literally shilling BTC saying it is an "exponential gold". Searches for Bitcoin are popping back up after years, just as the world is uptight and uncertain about the economic future.
While the US government is announcing its plan to borrow another Bidenomics fashioned $1.5 trillion, Bitcoin becomes increasingly appealing and intuitively makes sense as a haven of safety, a cryptographically certain, sane economic system where, compared to today's world financial mess, users feel like they know what to expect. The boogeyman of price volatility suddenly doesn’t seem to be all that scary.
Zooming in, we see global liquidity starting to point back up, especially as China and Japan attempt to continuously stimulate the economy. Digital asset investment products are enjoying the largest inflows of capital since July 2022. The TOTAL2 chart depicting the crypto market besides Bitcoin is teasing us with a breakout & possible continuation. Even the NFT market seems to have possibly found a bottom as we watch the volumes rebound from two-year lows.
Crypto is once again becoming an important part of the conversation, not only in finance but, for example, also in the AI scene as the White House issues a stringent regulatory order to keep artificial intelligence under control. As Erik Voorhees mentioned, “The importance of decentralizing AI is approaching the importance of decentralizing money”.
Everything is lining up; the whole game seems to be bullish. Beware though – the enemy players will always, always try to fake you out of your hand. Realize what’s at stake and do not give into emotion, because there are plenty of those coming our way.
🤓 In today’s email.
Degen corner. Solana Manlets rejoice!
DeFi insights. 14 alpha-packed crypto insights
ICYMI. blocmates dive into Mozaic Finance & Jedi sits with Chris of SummerFi to discuss why this might be the best DeFi app
Tweet of the day. Googly finds out why they can’t locate Trabuco
And finally. Elon Musk making Ordinals holders happy again
🔥 Degen corner.
Solana Manlets rejoice!
Do you feel it, Manlets? The old familiar whiff of tribalistic wars of the L1 networks. After nearly a year and a half full of L2 updates and Ultra Sound Money tweets, Ethereum (at least according to the CT sentiment) suddenly appears to be a contrarian bet – while Solana is taking over the campaign in the typical crypto “most hated rally” style.
Let's set aside price predictions and focus on the foundation of this whole thing – while the majority of crypto market participants still regard Solana as the same, Sam-contaminated blockchain full of outages and tokens with inflated FDV, more attentive degens realize that the current price rise (including SOL/ETH strength) is now driven by fundamentally sound underpinnings rapidly coming to the surface.
The ETH god himself, Vitalik approves this message and has stated that "...opportunistic money is now gone, and from what I hear, Solana has a bright future thanks to a loyal community of developers."
Before we get to the meat of this thing (which are your favorite token picks and airdrop tips – not financial advice), let's grab a hold of the fundamentals because this is what seems to have slipped by the general CT timeline.
It's worth mentioning that Solana has arguably undergone an evolutionary process as significant as Ethereum did during its transition to Ethereum 2.0. Network upgrades such as isolated fee markets, QUIC, Stake-weighted quality of service, or even recently announced native private transactions have turned Solana into one of the fastest and possibly most utilizable blockchains for mass-adopted applications.
According to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, it's fair to say that Solana has basically solved scaling and can now fully focus on developing viral dApps.
The proof of truth for Solana 2.0 is strikingly evident especially now, with the launch of the FireDancer client and the overall positive evolution of the Solana validator client space. One of the main criticisms of Solana was the network's repeated outages and centralization, which is understandably unacceptable in crypto ecosystems.
Now, however, about 2200 validators produce blocks, the network has 870 RPC nodes and a Nakamoto coefficient of 23 (the minimum number of nodes that would need to collude to halt the network), being one of the highest among PoS networks.
Thanks to new clients like FireDancer and Jito, Solana is now among one of the only two blockchains with more than one validator client – setting itself right alongside Ethereum. An interesting metric of decentralization is also the very healthy ratio of Validator Node Hosting Distribution, which can present an exogenous threat to a blockchain network in case it becomes overly centralized:
Alright, Solana is "Good Tech". Time to game.
The main hot debates now revolve around upcoming token drops – especially after the airdrop of the Pyth Network (check eligibility here). Another driver of the current hype wave is Jupiter Exchange, the most popular AMM, which announced its $JUP token and an airdrop to the community in the form of 40% of the entire supply yesterday.
The apes are now fully attacking the possible upcoming drops, and if you are one of them, here is your assault map:
Tensor – NFT Marketplace (Blur of Solana)
Jito – the above-mentioned LSD protocol (LIDO of Solana), TVL here has grown 10x since summer
Backpack – xNFTs, launching its own exchange soon
Drift Protocol – perpetual swap Exchange (GMX of Solana), volume is seeing stable growth
MarginFi – lending protocol (AAVE of Solana), seeing a 20x rise in TVL since summer
Phantom – wallet (Metamask of Solana), is definitely the favorite SOL wallet
Drip House – NFT drops for collectors, a strong base of around 500K collectors
Sonar Watch – portfolio tracker (DeBank of Solana)
GenesysGo – web3 data storage (Filecoin of Solana)
In the end, it is necessary to mention the bare fact that what we are now witnessing is the start of a brand-new Solana chapter, which includes both the launch of quality dApps and a shift away from Solana 1.0 tokenomics, which were typically characterized by low float and extreme FDV numbers.
Moreover, it can now be confidently stated that at this moment, Solana does not deserve the hate from a significant part of the crypto community anymore. The efforts of developers and the community for the success and adoption of this ecosystem are tangible and intuitively positive.
Lastly, if we want crypto as such to succeed, alternative L1 ecosystems are just another part of decentralization – realistically, none of us knows if, for example, Ethereum might eventually hit a dead end and the whole L2 network path fails.
This isn’t an attempt to put down Ethereum and hype up Solana, but rather a statement that the crypto world should be happy about having yet another die-hard community trying to build a global network of the future, and perhaps serving as a kind of safety net, in case other chains falter in their evolutionary attempts.
👌 Recommendation of the day.
But before we get to today’s DeFi insights a quick word from our friend Kirby from Kirb’s Crypto Alerts.
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👀 DeFi insights.
The important bits.
Vertex (Order Book DEX) – Liquidity bootstrapping event is coming November 13 (+Guide) - read
Hyperliquid (Perpetual DEX) - Reward points program begins November 1 - read
MUX (Perpetual DEX) - veMUX Reaching over 70% APR for Lockers - read
Redacted Cartel (LSD & Liquidity Management) – New GMX Pirex vault launched - read
imgnAI (AI art platform) - Accepted to Nvidia Inception Program - read
Year Finance (DeFi) - DeFi summer APRs seem to be back - read
Mozaic (AI-Optimized Yield) - MOZ/ETH trading pair dominates Camelot volumes and fees - read
Lybra (Options) - Partnership with Silent DAO announced - read
Curve (DeFi) - crvUSD holders are up 15% showing consistent growth - read
DMT (Gaming & Streaming) - SankoTv launched - read
Hashflow (Cross-chain DEX) - Revenue sharing with token holders started - read
GOOD ENTRY (Perpetual DEX with liquidation protection) - TGE announced for November 2 - read
HXRO (DeFi platform for Solana) - Holders receive $PYTH Airdrop - read
Render (Computing) - RNDT migration to Solana is now live - read
Jupiter (Solana AMM DEX) - Announces Circle’s CCTP implementation bringing native USDC to Solana - read
📰 DeFi news.
Even more important bits.
DCG Hires Trump’s Lawyer for Defense
SBF found guilty on seven out of seven criminal counts - read
PayPal UK Unit registers as a crypto provider - read
Metaverse and gaming crypto sectors showing signs of returning strength - read
VanEck sees long-term price target for $SOL at $3,211 - read
US Lawmakers are Pushing for Legal Action Against Binance and Tether - read
Hong Kong is being bullish on tokenization, RWAs, and stablecoins - read
Tether touts highest ever percentage of cash and cash equivalents in reserves - read
🫠 ICYMI.
Life gets busy so here’s what you’ve missed.
Bumper: Exploring the Scenarios, Opportunities, and Advantages
Research
We're returning to the groundbreaking Bumper Finance, following their stunning v1 launch.
Is LPD-Fi The Next Big Crypto Narrative? With Orange Finance
Podcast
Dan sits down with the Orange Finance team to talk about two of the potentially hottest upcoming narratives in crypto.
Tune in on YouTube →
Lending & Borrowing with Summer.fi
Podcast
Jedi invited Chris to discuss exactly why summer.fi really does bring the best of DeFi onto one app.
Tune in on Spotify | YouTube →
🐥 Tweet of the day.
To save you doom scrolling.
Exactly Googly… no wonder they can’t find Trabuco.
🦍 And finally…
Looking into the crystal crypto ball simply seems positive, and if you have gone through the year 2022 without your vision for crypto being shaken, then probably nothing shall waver your conviction.
There's still much to look forward to, such as the good old Elon Musk shills. Elon recently came back into the CT spotlight after announcing plans to transform X into a full-fledged financial platform. One cannot help but recall the Dogecoin season of 2021, and we don't need too much imagination to envision what the speculation around the financialization of X will bring during 2024 and 2025.
Another topic, much like Solana, almost forgotten and disliked by the mainstream, which Elon inadvertently kicked off, is the NFT scene on Bitcoin, powered by the Ordinals protocol. Musk mentioned during the JRE podcast that in his opinion, the only real NFTs are those that are written directly on the blockchain, including the data of the images themselves, which essentially describes exactly how Ordinals function.
Will the Ordinals scene on Bitcoin be another overlooked sector until it suddenly awakens, just like the aforementioned Solana? What will be the Bitcoin Ether Rocks? The game is on. Let us know what you think in the comments!
much love,
blocmates team 🫡
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🤝 A final word.
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It's funny to hear Musk refer to NFTs as being only valid as tokens. Because that's what Ordinals are. And the collapse in interest in NFTs has been driven by the lack of functionality the majority of NFT projects have for holders other than speculation.
Though there are places in the NFT world bucking that trend are innovation led projects in web3 gaming and places like DRiP who are experimenting with expanded functionality and seeing growing levels of user engagement and adoption.
Oh Elon. What happened? He's become the Jim Cramer of technology trends. Now if he says buy you better sell! And vica versa. The classic example being the Twitter/Tesla trade of over a year ago.
The illusion that Musk can do no wrong is well and truly shattered. The financial and product failures of the recent past pale in comparison to the failure that Twitter has been (and likely what future issues at Tesla and SpaceX will).
He's well out of his depth and sinking faster each day. Twitter will be hugely influential to crypto but only as a ready source of users for web3 social media just waiting to be onboarded. Friend.Tech and it's copy cats are only just the start of many successful vampire attacks to come on the platform as Musk seemingly tries to force users out as he fast as he can (and the price of Twitter to zero).
Counterintuitively I think Twitter will be the space to watch in this regard as whichever apps can nail the onboard from Twitter to their platform will likely emerge as the leading players in this space. It'll be the leading indicator as we know that it normally takes a while for users to switch over fully to a new social media platform after initially onboarding.
Apps will know they're making a dent when Musk starts banning links to them and/or their Twitter profiles. When that happens you want to start taking notice.