📊 ETH's Short-Lived Pump to $3K

In today’s edition: 🚀 Starknet token distribution goes live, 📈 VanEck, WisdomTree's surprising surge, 🚫 Circle halts USDC on TRON, 🪂 Optimism's fourth airdrop, and more!

February 21, 2024

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Union is the first sovereign interoperability layer pioneering trustless bridging between appchains, L1s, and L2s without depending on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC. Looking to future-proof blockchain bridging, it is the only protocol that fully addresses the sovereign bridging trilemma, unlocking a horizontally-scaled future.

Celestia, a data availability layer for blockchains, was launched last October to much fanfare. The platform takes a modular approach to blockchains, allowing developers to post data onto it without the need for smart contracts or execution. This makes it extremely useful for scaling roll-ups and other layer two technologies.

Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam and COO Nick White join Unchained to discuss what Celestia is and how it works, how data availability sampling allows for more scalability, how Celestia compares with other data availability layers, whether Celestia could become a data availability layer for Bitcoin, and comparisons between Celestia and Solana.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or watch it on YouTube.

What’s Poppin’?

by Sam Sriram, Juan Aranovich, and Sage Young

Ether’s trip to $3,000 may have been short-lived, but onchain data and the state of the wider ecosystem suggest that there’s reason to be optimistic about the digital asset.

Starknet’s token (STRK) goes live and its fully diluted valuation (FDV) has already surpassed those of long-standing blockchain networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Avalanche, all of which have more locked value in their smart contracts than the zero-knowledge rollup.

The volume for VanEck Bitcoin Trust on Tuesday was about 14.5 times its daily average, while WisdomTree Bitcoin Fund’s volume was more than 10 times its daily average. 

Circle will cease minting of USDC on TRON effective immediately, and will discontinue support in a phased manner, as part of an effort to ensure USDC “remains trusted, transparent, and safe.”

Over 10.3 million OP tokens, valued at around $42 million, are set to be distributed in its fourth airdrop.

Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️

  • 💵 Michael Saylor, co-founder of MicroStrategy, remains steadfast in his strategy of persistent bitcoin investment as the firm's bitcoin holdings near a valuation of $10 billion, despite rising competition from newly established bitcoin ETFs.

  • 🔒 Curve DAO identified around $290,000 in fees awaiting collection in its various liquidity pools, aiming to distribute these accumulated funds to its veCRV stakeholders.

  • ⚖️ The lawsuit brought by supermarket chain Trader Joe's against the decentralized exchange Trader Joe DEX has been dismissed.

Today in Crypto Adoption...

  • 🔁 Hong Kong is advancing towards introducing regulatory bills for stablecoins and over-the-counter crypto trading, following a period of public consultation on these frameworks.

The $$$ Corner…

  • 💸 Hack VC amassed $150 million for its inaugural venture fund, dedicated to supporting emerging web3 and AI startups, boosting its total management portfolio to $425 million.

  • 👥 The crypto-focused Super PAC Fairshake raised a total of $4.9 million from the Winklevoss twins, which contributes to its fund of over $85 million to endorse pro-crypto political candidates.

What Do You Meme?

Recommended Reads

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is down 1.7%, trading at $51,345

  • ETH is down .2%, trading at $2,922

  • BTC dominance: 49.24%

  • Crypto market cap: $2.05T

*All data as of today, 06:22 am ET. Source: CoinGecko

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