It’s Giving Crypto Bull

This week, it’s all about number go up, which hints at a bigger trend: the bull market making a comeback. 

Story One

While Bitcoin has already passed it’s all-time high in countless countries with weak national currencies, such as Japan, MetaMask is still on its way to the promised land. Recently, the team behind the most-used wallet extension shared that their active user count was on track to reach its highest since January 2022, when 31.7 million users relied on the wallet to get drained their trades done. 

MetaMask’s monthly active users have steadily grown over the past four months, marking a 55% increase. Note, however, that they count everyone who has the app and the extension installed, which means I am already 2 of those users. You do the math. 

The increase in users came alongside an announcement of making MetaMask safer to use, as countless BAYC holders demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with making sensible decisions. Blockaid to the rescue. The security tool alerts users of malicious transactions and phishing attempts. Over 30k malicious transactions have already been prevented this way – but we all know there is little joy in prevention. 

Takeaway: The security tool is a solid move to make MetaMask less insecure. Nevertheless, I don’t get why you’d use MetaMask when Rainbow has icons for native networks, and… POINTS!  

Story Two

Eigenlayer raising 100 million

Never let a lack of production-ready products stop you from raising millions in funds. So the lesson goes from the crypto crowd as soon as they sense the first precursors of an uptrend. First investors and degens aped $2 billion into the Blast multi-sig, identifying as an L2. Now, we have a16z leading a Series B for Eigenlayer Labs, closing at 100 million. One must wonder what they’re going to do with the 100 million. Maybe buy up the chip industry in a developing country? But no, this isn’t about AI.

It’s about a middleware protocol on top of Ethereum that allows the rehypothecation of Ether. In short, stake once, secure a variety of apps. The idea is simple: allowing other protocols to rely on the security of Ethereum stakers instead of bootstrapping their own. For stakers, it means getting more bang for their buck. For builders, Eigenlayer offers a way to bootstrap a network without having to build up your own validator network. 

Needless to say, re-staking like this is the new hot thing, and Eigenlayer has already secured $8 billion in deposits, enough to fund Sam Altman’s chip idea. Without any of their services being live yet. 

Takeaway: It isn’t just me who feels a little uneasy about this re-staking and re-re-staking business. Even Vitalik agrees that it introduces “high systemic risks to the ecosystem.” I, for one, remember what happened when TradFi pulled this off with mortgages. 

Story Three

Governance getting utility 

Uniswap has seen a huge increase from $7.22 to over $10 in its token price after the foundation floated the idea of distributing fees to stakers. 

So far, UNI’s native tokens’ utility has allowed holders the ability to vote. Voting is cool; making money is better – at least in crypto. And so, the hope has always been that, eventually, some of that value captured by Uniswap would be redistributed back to token holders. 

Dreams might become reality as we enter a new paradigm: vote-to-earn. Jokes aside, in this on-chain version of representative democracy, UNI stakers delegating their tokens to trustworthy individuals will be eligible for a portion of the trading fees earned through the DEX.  

Even though the idea of the fee switch has floated around ever since Uniswaps’ inception, this time, the market seems confident it’ll actually happen. As long as a16z doesn’t vote against it like the last time, they didn’t like something that benefits the degens. 

Takeaway: Voter fatigue is real. During bear markets, people stop engaging altogether as there are more important things in life than voting on how your magic internet money trading venue runs its business. Is paying people for it a good idea, though? I don’t know. We probably need a Greek Philosopher AI to get an answer for that. 

Fact of the week: Speaking of chips and all that tech… A single smartphone nowadays has 100,000 the processing power of the computers NASA used to land a person on the moon in 1969. And yet, crypto hasn’t gone to the moon.

Naomi for CoinJar

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