BALD Token Mania 👨‍🦲

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Good Morning,

I hate my life as I was outside touching grass when I could’ve turned $1,000 to $1,000,000 by investing in a token called $BALD.

Over the weekend, degens bridged their funds to Coinbase’s L2 network called BASE, to ape on memecoins despite knowing that they can’t bridge their funds back (yet). This is why we’re all still here. Cheers.

P.S. Curve is experiencing a re-entrancy exploit, which might further impact other DeFi pools liquidity. Stay cautious.

In Today's Email:

• What Matters: Coinbase L2 and BALD mania 👨‍🦲

• Products: Beam, crypto’s own Venmo 📱

• Charts: crvUSD growth, ETH DEX volume patterns 📈

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WHAT MATTERS

Coinbase Layer 2 Degens

State of play: Coinbase's L2 network, Base, launched its developer mainnet ahead of schedule on July 13. Unsurprisingly, it experienced a surge in activity and the introduction of several meme tokens between 29-30 July.

• According to DEX Screener's report, Base witnessed an impressive 276,000 transactions between 29-30 July.

• BALD, a meme token on Base network, surged 30,000x to $70M+ in market cap. Base chain itself has seen 25K+ ETH deposited, with LeetSwap’s BALD/WETH pool itself having 9.8K WETH liquidity.

• Dune Analytics data indicates that the network has received more than $48M worth of ether transfers.

4 addresses bought 50M $BALD (50% of total supply) with 0.534 ETH ($1K) within 4 minutes of the start of trading. Later, they sold 37M $BALD for 554 ETH ($1.04M). Here are the 4 addresses:

• 0x95CabFF33049a0Ea34f26Ca3D797D1D818b46Fb7

• 0x5a608B8a56ABb71cd7D2cB68e656cA669Bc1E4B0

• 0x2Eb0a3591f0CAE962202E8A1F28931af8d6304c8

• 0x590D731Da879cc05BD15443d95949C6ceDE64CB3

What’s next: Base is currently only available for builders, and it is scheduled to be accessible to the public in early August.

• If you bridge to Base now to catch up with the degens, YOU CAN’T bridge your funds back to Ethereum mainnet (yet).

Our take: This type of activities show that there’s no influx of new capital in crypto.

• The remaining market activities are being driven by crypto natives users, trying new products and trading against one another.

For builders and investors: When there’s a new chain such as Base, assess what you can do to capitalize on the technology and momentum of that chain.

• Builders should see how it can improve their products, investors should try the technology — don’t be that crypto VC that never touches any chain other than Ethereum.

Take a peek at our referral reward at the bottom of this issue. Share this newsletter and receive our list of 100 smart crypto investors' wallet addresses 👇

PRODUCTS OF THE WEEK

Beam, a P2P Crypto Transfer Service

A decentralized payments project that aims to be the “global Venmo”. Beam is a project from Eco Inc., a payments startup backed by a16z, which has accumulated $95M in funding thus far.

• Beam's wallet is non-custodial, ensuring no centralized party, like a bank or exchange, can access users' funds.

• Beam's smart contract access keys are sharded into three places: Twitter account, a self-set password, and browser.

• Any two of the access keys can reconstruct the original key.

• Beam’s users can create their own ENS names by paying with the native ECO tokens.

• Beam is powered by Optimism and Coinbase’s Base.

Other cool products:

• Brewlabs, a complete suite of blockchain utility and products.

• Obscuro, an L2 rollup that hyper-scales and encrypts Ethereum.

• Linkko, a solutions to token-gate content, apps, and websites.

• Paylink, a gateway to easy, multi-chain payment requests.

• DeCipher, a GPT-based tool to generate documentation from any Smart Contract URL on EVM Block Explorers.

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

CrvUSD Growth

State of play: crvUSD is growing fast, reaching $67.35M in market capitalization. It’s currently the 16th position largest stablecoin.

• Curve claims that crvUSD liquidation mechanism is superior as it doesn’t auto liquidate users in one go when the price drops below the “liquidation price”.

• Instead, the collateral slowly converted to USD on the way down and back to collateral on the way up.

  

  Curve

Our take: This mechanism simply means taking more liquidation-losses risk by not directly liquidating users — a system long implemented in TradFi when banks are dealing with large clients with good reputations.

Ethereum DEX Volumes During Collapses

State of Play: Ethereum DEX volume increased significantly during a collapse. @jphackworth42 list the event of collapses that are correlated with the increasing Ethereum DEX volume:

• 9th May 2022, Luna collapse, DEX volume increased to ~$12.5B.

• 13th June 2022, the beginning of 3AC/Celcius collapse, DEX volume increased to ~$7.5B.

• 8th November 2022, FTX collapse, DEX volume increased to near $10B.

• 11 March 2023, SVB collapse, DEX volume increased to ~$19B.

Our take: The volume increases are correlated with the amount lost from the collapse, and the panic that ensues.

• For example, UST and LUNA lost ~$45B in market value, which then led to ~$12.5B in DEX trading volume.

QUICK BITES

• Binance wins operational license in Dubai

• Meta lost $3.7B in its metaverse division in Q2 2023.

• DOJ continues push to revoke Bankman-Fried's bond.

• Curve undergoes re-entrancy exploit, putting $100M+ at risk

• Coinbase CEO says SEC asked it to delist all crypto except Bitcoin.

• Japan Blockchain Association requests crypto tax revision.

• Elizabeth Warren reintroduces crypto bill with backing from banking policy group.

• Indian Supreme Court pushing government for clear crypto regulation.

• Circle-Gemini-Wintermute-FalconX expands into Asia via Singapore.

MEME & NOTEWORTHY READS

• Our Network’s read on EthCC’s biggest winners.

• Christine Kim’s read on Ethereum core dev consensus call #114.

• Molly White’s read on Worldcoin, a solution in search of its problem.

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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 advic