Fungible NFTs, Wormhole Airdrop
Market Update
- Bitcoin surged to a four-week peak, trading at ~$45,400 in tandem with the U.S. stock indexes reaching all-time highs. After dipping to a low of $42,700 on Wednesday, Bitcoin's value increased by nearly 5%, marking its highest point since January 11. ETH is also moving higher, topping $2.4k with a 3% increase. Ethereum's two-week peak follows an amendment of the joint spot ETH ETF application by asset managers Ark Invest and 21Shares. The highly anticipated Dencun upgrade, renowned for its fee-lowering "proto-dank sharding" capability, had its launch date revealed as March 13 during a Thursday conference with leading Ethereum blockchain developers. DYM is leading the top 100 in gains, rising 31% over the last day. After launching through an airdrop just two days ago, DYM has nearly doubled its fully-diluted valuation to $7.8 billion, even amidst a troubled mainnet launch characterized by transactional glitches and network stalls. This valuation indicates robust market enthusiasm and confidence in the project's potential to develop application-specific blockchains, known as RollApps, a new primitive aiming to tackle scalability and efficiency issues within current blockchain structures.
- The crypto world recently witnessed the introduction of a novel token standard, ERC-404, which merges the concepts of fungible (ERC-20) and non-fungible tokens (ERC-721), promising to become a significant innovation. To explain ERC-404, let's consider an example. Pandora was the pioneering project to adopt this standard, which issued 10,000 fungible tokens alongside 10,000 NFTs. Ownership of a fungible token grants the holder a corresponding NFT, and each transaction involving PANDORA results in the minting or burning of the associated NFT. Projects utilizing ERC-404, including Pandora, have experienced significant growth recently, with their values surging exponentially in a matter of days. This standard also seamlessly aligns with the ongoing trend of meme token trading, which has seen significant volume over the last few months. ERC-404 aims to address a crucial challenge in the NFT sector: liquidity, potentially revolutionizing the NFT market. However, despite its growing popularity, this new token standard faces challenges that warrant consideration. ERC-404 has not undergone an audit and did not pass the typical EIP process for new token standards, indicating potentially unknown security risks.
- Wormhole, a cross-chain protocol, has announced an airdrop involving 1.7 billion W tokens, targeting wallets that were previously snapshot for eligibility. This protocol facilitates the transfer of messages and assets across different blockchains, initially connecting Ethereum and Solana and now encompassing nearly 30 networks. Since its inception in late 2020, Wormhole has achieved a $2.5 billion valuation, bolstered by a $225 million funding round in November 2022. The protocol plans to release 10 billion W tokens over four years, with an initial circulating supply of 1.8 billion. With a scheduled unlocking plan, the distribution strategy includes allocations for guardian nodes, the community, core contributors, strategic network partners, ecosystem maintenance, and the foundation treasury. The airdrop aims to decentralize governance, allowing W holders to participate in community and treasury decisions. However, the journey has seen challenges, notably a $320 million hack in February 2022, which was mitigated with the help of Jump Crypto, which replenished the stolen assets.
Daily Technical Strategy
Mark L. Newton, CMT
Head of Technical Strategy
This week's upward acceleration in STX has helped to jumpstart the near-term momentum in a way that should lead to a coming test and breakout above January's highs in the weeks ahead. Stacks has rallied 20% in just the last two trading sessions which has helped to recoup more than 50% of the drawdown from early this year. Rallies back to $2.06 look likely in the coming weeks which likely won't hold but give way to movement up to $2.26 and then an eventual move to $2.89 which has importance as a 100% alternative projection to the initial move up from last Fall. Volume has spiked to support Thursday's move, reaching the highest levels since mid-January which is constructive towards confirming this most recent rally. Overall, Stacks looks attractive here technically and its gains in recent days should help this recent upward to continue into late February before much consolidation gets underway.
Daily Important Metrics
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All metrics as of February 8, 2024 1:49 PM
All Funding rates are in bps
Crypto Prices
| Symbol | Market Cap | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
 BTC | $892B | $45,443 | ↑ 2.88% | ↑ 7.60% | |
 ETH | $291B | $2,425 | ↓ -0.42% | ↑ 6.57% | ↓ -1.03% |
 SOL | $45B | $103 | ↑ 4.68% | ↑ 1.19% | ↓ -6.41% |
 ADA | $19B | $0.5301 | ↑ 6.36% | ↓ -11% | ↓ -18% |
 DOGE | $11B | $0.0804 | ↑ 0.43% | ↓ -9.68% | ↓ -17% |
 LINK | $11B | $18.19 | ↓ -2.59% | ↑ 22% | ↑ 14% |
 DOT | $9.0B | $7.07 | ↑ 1.79% | ↓ -13% | ↓ -20% |
 MATIC | $8.1B | $0.8455 | ↑ 1.28% | ↓ -12% | ↓ -20% |
 NEAR | $3.0B | $2.92 | ↑ 1.73% | ↓ -19% | ↓ -26% |
Exchange Traded Products (ETPs)
| Symbol | Premium to Nav | Last Price | Daily Change | Year to Date | Relative to BTC YTD |
| GBTC | ↓ -0.43% | $37.25 | ↑ 4.78% | ↑ 1.09% | ↓ -6.51% |
| BITW | ↓ -37% | $24.10 | ↑ 3.88% | ↓ -1.87% | ↓ -9.47% |
| ETHE | ↓ -12% | $19.73 | ↑ 4.50% | ↑ 1.39% | ↓ -6.21% |
| BTCC | ↓ -0.17% | $8.07 | ↑ 3.46% | ↓ -1.34% | ↓ -8.94% |
News
QUICK BITS
CoinDesk Crypto Firm Bakkt Warns It Might Not Be Able to Remain in Business The company, backed by the owner of the NYSE, was introduced in 2018 with the initial goal of helping Starbucks customers buy coffee with bitcoin. |
BTC Manager CleanSpark to double hash rate with new mining facility acquisitions ahead of Bitcoin halving Publicly traded Bitcoin (BTC) mining firm CleanSpark has expanded its operations through the acquisition of four new mining facilities, significantly increasing... |
Decrypt.co Wormhole Airdrop: W Tokenomics, Unlock Schedule and Eligibility Wormhole, a cross-chain protocol, said it's already taken a snapshot of the wallets eligible to claim a share of 1.7 billion W in the airdrop. |
PRODUCT UPDATES AND PARTNERSHIPS
The Block Frax launches Layer 2 network Fraxtal with partner apps Fraxtal rolled out an Ethereum-compatible optimistic rollup network developed using the OP Stack. |
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