Daily News | Solana Accelerates Trading through "Vote Points"; Crypto VC Flourishes, “Solana Killer” Raising $225M; EigenLayer and EigenDA Layer Appear on the Ethereum Mainnet

Crypto Daily Digest: Solana accelerates trading through “vote points”; Crypto VC flourishes, with “Solana Killer” raising $225 million; EigenLayer and EigenDA Layer Appear on the Ethereum Mainnet

First, let’s examine the trading activity of Bitcoin ETFs. According to Farside Investor data, on April 9, Grayscale’s Bitcoin spot ETF (GBTC) funds continued to Flow out of $154.9 million; Meanwhile, Fidelity Bitcoin spot ETF (FBTC) inflow was $3 million, and Bitwise Bitcoin spot ETF (BITB) inflow was $3.8 million.

Previously, Solana sparked discussions among users and developers due to network congestion issues. Based on this, Solana validators passed a proposal to reduce the “voting” delay in consensus mechanisms to accelerate transactions on the blockchain.

The proposal called for establishing a “timely voting points” mechanism on Solana and was approved with 98% of the votes on April 9. Voting is a crucial part of Solana’s consensus mechanism for confirming transactions, and this will change the way validators are incentivized to vote.

According to Solana Labs, currently, every time validators submit a consensus vote on the final block determined by the network, they receive a vote point. Over time, validators can ensure they vote on the correct fork by delaying voting for a sufficient time, thereby maximizing returns.

It is currently unclear what impact the new mechanism will have, as it is expected to be implemented this month after the Solana v1.18 upgrade, which includes patches to fix on-chain priority costs and network congestion issues. Meanwhile, if there are no other issues during testing, error fixing (involving the reconfiguration of QUIC) has been scheduled for April 15.

Paradigm, a venture capital (VC) company focused on cryptocurrencies, is leading a $225 million financing for a new Layer 1 blockchain network. According to a post on March 14, this new Layer 1 network will be 100% compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs) and can process up to 10,000 transactions per second.

This network aims to compete with Solana and other top L1 networks. Monad Labs completed this round of financing with the aim of building a new Layer-1 smart contract network that is faster and cheaper than Ethereum.

According to data analysis platform Crypto Koryo, crypto VC funds showed positive growth in the first quarter of 2024, breaking the two-year slump, with investment funds increasing by 38% compared to the previous quarter. For example, Bitcoin’s Layer 2 network Mezo announced on April 9 that it had completed a $21 million round of financing led by Pantera Capital.

On Tuesday, the re-staking platform EigenLayer and its data availability layer EigenDA were launched on the Ethereum mainnet.

According to the official statement of EigenLayer developers, this allows re-triers to delegate all of their shares to their preferred operators and will enable operators to decide whether to run Actively Validated Service (AVS) on EigenLayer. In addition, it also allows AVS to register a beta version of EigenDA.

EigenLayer allows users to stake ETH and earn liquidity staking tokens (LST), and then can restake the LSTs to receive more rewards. The native token re-staking is completed through EigenPod, a user-managed smart contract that helps monitor balance and withdrawal status.

According to the crypto data tracker DeFiLlama, the total locked value (TVL) of EigenLayer is approximately $13.4 billion. According to previous reports from The Block, EigenLayer broke the TVL threshold of $10 billion on March 3, 2024.

Market Trends: Altcoins generally decline, less than ten days away from BTC halving

The price of BTC has retreated to around $69,000, and the overall trend of Altcoins is declining. BTCD (BTC dominance) remains above 50%. Regarding macroeconomics, the US stock market has been volatile, while risk markets are waiting for today’s CPI (Consumer Price Index) data to be released in search of market direction.

Market Hotspots:

EigenLayer goes live on the Ethereum mainnet: EigenLayer announced that it will soon launch on the Ethereum mainnet. This news may trigger market expectations for EigenLayer to issue project tokens, and investors must closely monitor future developments.

Multiple projects announce token issuance:
ZeroLend (ZERO token): ZeroLend is a cross-chain lending protocol with a valuation of $25 million in the previous financing round, and participating institutions include Morningstar Capital. The token ZERO for this project is about to be issued, and the specific issuance details are waiting to be released.

Zata Markets (Z token): Zata Markets is a perpetual contract trading platform in the Solana ecosystem, with plans to airdrop 10% of Z tokens to users. This single-letter token has recently emerged in addition to the W token. The launch of this project may reignite market attention to the Solana ecosystem.

Overall, the performance of the crypto sector was lackluster today, with risk markets waiting for the release of CPI data. There may be significant market fluctuations before and after the data release, please be aware of the risks.

Macro: Focus on key data, global market cautious

On April 9, Reuters reported that on Tuesday, the day before the release of major inflation data, the NASDAQ and S&P 500 indexes slightly rose as investors waited for major US banks to start their earnings season on Friday, dragging down financial stocks.

The Nasdaq Composite Index, dominated by technology stocks, is driven by chips and enjoys a larger increase along with the S&P 500 index, which is nominally higher. The Dow Jones index fell 0.02%, the S&P 500 index rose 0.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite index rose 0.3%.

Asian stock markets are sluggish as investors closely monitor the possibility of Japanese authorities intervening to prevent the yen’s depreciation and await the release of US inflation data later Wednesday to seek clues to future interest rate trends.

Investors will closely monitor the US consumer price data released on Wednesday to seek the direction of the next interest rate trend. The data is expected to show that the overall inflation rate will increase from 3.2% in February to 3.4% year-on-year.

The financial markets are considering the prospect of the United States lowering interest rates as early as June, and inflation data is the key to the central bank’s following action. “We believe that the data will indicate that inflationary pressures are slowly weakening.”

The possibility of a June interest rate cut is currently around 60% in the federal funds futures market. A strong core CPI of 0.3% or above in the current month may further suppress the possibility of a rate cut in June, thereby putting pressure on US yields and a significant rise in the US dollar. “But if the core CPI falls below 0.3% this month, the market pricing for the June interest rate cut may only slightly rise, and the US dollar may slightly decline.”

Regarding commodities, US crude oil rose slightly to $85.31 per barrel. Brent crude oil remained unchanged at $89.42 per barrel.

Gold slightly rose, with spot gold trading at $2,352.93 per ounce.