$1.4B TVL Ethena Token Launch

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Good Morning. The FTX saga has finally come to an end (somewhat). SBF was sentenced to 25 years in jail. Deciding whether that’s too long or not enough is above my pay grade.

All that matters is that FTX creditors are expected to get almost full recovery. Yes, they lost the opportunity cost of the price increase, but hey, they might have sold their SOL for $20 if they had access to the capital.

In Today's Email:

• What Matters: Ethena’s ENA Launch 🪂 

• Founders Highlight: Lasse & Christoper of 1kx 👨‍💻

• Deal Flows: 0G Labs’s $35M Pre-Seed 💰️ 

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WHAT MATTERS

Ethena's $ENA Set to Launch Next Tuesday

State of play: Ethena announced that it will launch its governance token $ENA on April 2.

• Ethena will airdrop 750M of ENA (5% of the total supply).

• ENA total supply is 15B and the initial circulating supply is 1.425B.

• At the time of writing, USDe’s circulating supply is at $1.4B.

Ethena users have gathered "Shards" over the past 6 weeks. These shards will determine the distribution of 750m ENA allocated linearly based on shard accumulation.

• The Shard Campaign will conclude on 1st April and a second season of incentives will begin immediately on 2nd April.

• Any user who unstake, unlocks, or sells all of their USDe before 1st April will not be eligible for the airdrop.

• The top 2000 wallets will be subject to a 50% linear, pro-rata vesting over 6 months.

Why it Matters: Ethena’s USDe is the fastest USD-denominated asset to reach $1B+ in supply. Ethena also became the highest earning protocol in the industry in just 3 weeks while growing the Reserve Fund to over $25M in a month.

For builders and investors: Ethena issued ~8.3B shards/day, yesterday the shard issued so far was at ~300B and is predicted to reach 340B by the end of the campaign.

• If there are 340B Shards in total and 750M ENA will airdropped, then 1 ENA = 453 Shards. Currently, the floor price of 1 Shard on Whales Market is $0.0015.

• It means ENA is now trading at $0.6795 ($0.0015*453) on Whales Market.

• Yesterday, ENA was trading in the range of $0.515 to $0.795 on Aevo.

BUILDER-INVESTOR HIGHLIGHT

Lasse & Christoper of 1kx

Intro: Lasse Clausen and Christopher Heymann are the co-founders of 1kx, a crypto investment firm that specializes in ecosystem growth and is now focusing on areas including crypto applications targeted at consumers.

• Marc Andreessen, Accolade Partners, and Galaxy Digital are among the investors in crypto VC firm 1kx’s latest fund.

• Accolade is the anchor investor in the latest vehicle.

• 1kx has raised about $200M for its existing open-ended fund since early 2022.

Previous background: Before founding 1kx, Lasse founded and led two startups in Berlin called FOUNDD and Daily Ride.

• He also served as Director of e-Ventures of Deutsches Anwalts Zentrum GmbH and COO of Tomfy International.

• Christoper was the Mobile Lead at FOUNDD and became the CTO of MassMatics and reunited with Lasse at Daily Ride in 2015. However, Christoper is still serving at Daily Ride today.

The big idea: 1kx states its edge in architecting network success, particularly by helping founders in ecosystem growth. This includes bootstrapping token network, hands-on advisory, and design of token models.

Take a peek at our referral reward at the bottom of this issue. Share this newsletter and receive our list of 500 crypto VC individuals 👇

INSIGHTS

Lazarus’s Stolen HTX/Heco Funds Movement

Credits to @tayvano_ for the original tweet.

Tay, a crypto security expert and an onchain sleuth, reported the movement of HTX/Heco Bridge funds that were stolen by Lazarus.

• For 11 days from March 13-24, Lazarus transferred nearly 48,200 ETH (~$174M), to Tornado Cash using 506 separate transactions.

• Lazarus is following their usual routine by converting the stolen Ether into Bitcoin after running it through Thorswap.

• While they haven't finished yet, they've already converted over 41,000 ETH into BTC in 680 transactions.

DEAL FLOWS

0G Labs’s $35M Pre-Seed Round

Deal flows remained strong this week, we saw $238M+ in deals 💼 

0G Labs secured $35M in a pre-seed round from more than 40 crypto funds, led by Hack VC and including Blockchain Builders Fund, Alliance, Animoca Brands, Delphi Digital, and OKX Ventures.

• Michael Heinrich said that 0G Labs wanted to raise just $5M initially, but the company got more than $100M in interest.

• 0G Labs (ZeroGravity) is building a modular AI blockchain to fix web3's on-chain AI issues.

• Heinrich stated that 0G Labs will release a token in the future.

Deal flows in the past week:

• 0G Labs, $35M Pre-Seed Round

• Unstable, $2.5M Seed Round

• BloodLoop, $4M Seed Round

• Sablier, $4.5M Seed Round

• Flock, $6M Seed Round

• BOB, $10M Seed Round

• Elixir Games, $14M Seed Round

• Succinct, $55M Seed + Series A Round

• BEVM, Undisclosed $ Seed Round

• Rollie Finance, Undisclosed $ Seed Round

• MyShell, $11M Pre-Series A Round

• Illuvium, $12M Series A Round

• Hive, $13M Series A Round

• Peaq, $15M Series A Round

• Gam3s.gg, $2M Strategic Round

• Alex, $10M Strategic Round

• Gunzilla Games, $30M Strategic Round

• Entangle, Undisclosed $ Strategic Round

• Biconomy, Undisclosed $ Strategic Round

• StakeStone, Undisclosed $ Private Round

• BottoDAO, $1.67M OTC

• Myprize, $13M Equity + Token Round

QUICK BITES

• Crypto losses hit $336M in Q1.

• SBF to serve 25 years in prison.

• Bitwise files for spot Ethereum ETF.

• Tokenized US Treasuries surpass $1B in AUM.

• Detained Binance exec sues Nigerian government.

• US & UK investigate $20B USDT entering Garantex.

• OKX’s Global Compliance Chief left after six months.

• Vitalik emphasizes the need for Ethereum parallelization.

• Google allows wallet address searches for certain blockchains.

• Taiwan approved the formation of a crypto industry association.

• Ethereum hit by blobscriptions in first stress test since EIP-4844.

• Fidelity expresses concerns over Ethereum’s rising validator count.

• Near’s Co-Founder emphasizes chain abstraction as key to mainstream crypto adoption.

NOTEWORTHY READS

• Balaji’s read on all it takes is all you got.

• Haseeb’s read on an overview of decentralized AI inference.

• Vitalik’s read on Ethereum has blobs; where do we go from here?

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advice.