GM Digest #47

Gm with Valuable Alphas / Insights — Make Sure to DYOR. All of This is Not Financial Advice. Ape at Your Own Peril

USDC on Base & OP

• Users on both Base & Optimism will be able to use USDC natively without using the bridged version

• Circle also indicated that it’s working with “ecosystem partners” to ensure that all bridged versions of its stablecoin can be swapped out for the native version

• The natively issued USDC will always be redeemable by Circle. Bridged USDC isn’t issued by Circle and is not compatible with Circle Account or Circle APIs

Thoughts: This is good news for the Base ecosystem signaling confidence in the chain. The main issue with bridged assets is that those assets are not redeemable in the event there is an exploit on the bridge. USDC native redemptions on Base means that users on Base no longer have to worry about bridge exploits on Base which takes away a layer of risk.

GMBL Exploit

• A few hours earlier, @gmblcomputer hacker was able to spoof a call and obtain a signature to pull almost 500ETH worth of $GMBL out of the contract. @PeckShieldAlert confirms that it was due to signing key leakage

• The good news is that the hacker is fully doxxed and the @gmblcomputer team is offering the hacker to return 90% of the funds back to the team in exchange for the remaining 10% as a white hat bounty. Alternatively, the team will proceed with legal action if they do not receive the funds back

Thoughts: Unfortunate for the $GMBL team to be exploited on launch day. However, I think that the likelihood of the team recovering the funds is high since the hacker is fully doxxed but this will still take a toll on the overrall reputation of the team. $GMBL dumped by -64% in the last 24 hours and is currently around $0.1. Congrats on those who read my previous GM Digest episodes and opt-out of the Presale & LBP

Metamask Phising Sites

• @MetaMask scammers run rampant, taking over government-owned websites, turning them to phishing scams

• Official government websites from India, Nigeria, Egypt, Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam and other jurisdictions have been found redirecting to fake MetaMask websites

• Make sure to practice digital hygiene by book marking your favorite sites and use Defillama Directory when you want to check out new protocols’ sites instead of searching on Google

MetaMask Sell Button

• MetaMask’s latest feature is “Sell” — it allows you to jeet whatever you have out to fiat instantly when you have a ngmi mindset

• The feature is currently available in the US, UK, and parts of Europe, supporting ETH on Mainnet initially and will expand to L2s soon

Base Faces Issues with Block Production

• It was reported today that @BuildOnBase stopped producing blocks and no new blocks were added to the chain for 45 minutes

• Since then the team deployed a fix and confirmed that the chain is now operating as usual

Thoughts: Base team was quick to resolve the issue with block production however it wasn’t clear of the root cause of the issue. All that was communicated by the team was that an issue was identified and the team deployed a fix. No significant impact or consequences were observed from this issue, Base TVL continues to increase — poised to outrank Avalanche soon.

The last time an L2 ran into issues was during June earlier this year on Arbitrum where their sequencers ran out of gas and failed to post transactions back onto Mainnet.

Base New Interesting Projects

• @fxdxdex — DEX with Perpetuals and Swaps, recently went live on Base. FXDX is backed by Blockchain Founders Fund, Ripple, Shima Capital. There’s an airdrop program ongoing if you play around on their platform

• @stackfinance_io — Onchain Structured Products, Options Perps, not live on Base yet. Interesting to monitor given they’ve partnered with many native Base projects during the past weeks

Thoughts: It is nice to see unique projects continue building on Base which signals builder confidence there. Will continue to monitor and look out for more. The pattern of projects establishing themselves on Base has started to emerge, it mimics the pattern of New Defi Primitives launching on Arbitrum earlier this year

$SYN Dump

• $SYN saw a huge dump in their tokens yesterday. CT quickly spotted that it was due to a sell pressure of 9m $SYN tokens split into 2 transactions- 4.5m respectively

• The $SYN token was trading at around $0.41 before the sell and dumped all the way to $0.31

• Liquidity on the Synapse bridge also saw an outflow of about $26m on the same day

• CT speculates that these 2 events are caused by Nima Capital. There was a proposal on 19th March for Nima Capital to provide $40m of locked stablecoin liquidity for 12 months in exchange for $SYN grant.

Thoughts: Speculators on CT suspect that the huge sell-off and sudden pull of liquidity was from Nima Capital. The withdrawal of the liquidity is a bad look for Nima Capital and the space in general because it is clearly a breach of an agreement between the 2 parties. What other OTC deals have you heard of recently where large whales bought large amounts of tokens OTC with only a “handshake agreement” to not dump for 6 months? Looking at $CRV 👀

It is also worth noting the “irresponsible dumping” of Nima Capital by not using an aggregator and swapping the tokens solely on Sushiswap causing a huge price impact. I guess the real winners here are the MEV bots and block proposers.

sFRAX Governance Proposal

• There is a new governance proposal by the @fraxfinance Core Team to introduce stakes $FRAX (sFRAX) which allow users to earn interest- the FRAX Staking Rate. Users will be able to deposit $FRAX and receive sFRAX- the yield bearing staked token.

• The yield will be from the protocol’s revenue from the balance sheet deployment in AMOs and RWA strategies and the interest rate will attempt to mimic the Federal Reserve Interest on Reserve Deposit Rate (IORB). However, the protocol will always aim to maintain the stablecoin at 100% CR first before returning the excess to sFRAX holders

Thoughts: Bullish on the FRAX team to keep shipping. Frax finance has a suite of protocols and is one of the most innovative protocols in the space. If this proposal is implemented, there will be more demand for $FRAX as users will all want to earn yield off of their stablecoins

Solana X Visa

• @Visa announced the expansion of its stablecoin settlement options to @solana

• According to @TheBlock__ , Visa has already moved millions of USDC between its partners over the Solana and Ethereum blockchain networks to settle fiat-denominated payments authorized over VisaNet

• Visa said that it would begin to send USDC to select merchants via Solana blockchain. The decision comes because of Solana’s capacity to process transitions more quickly than Ethereum’s

Thoughts: A big win for crypto adoption in general. Solana is generally a faster blockchain as compared to Ethereum and it makes sense for Solana. Solana seems to be focused more on payment systems currently which can be seen from their previous integrations with Stripe and Shopify. Will be exciting to see how Solana performs with payment systems in the future

FloorDAO Exploit

• @PeckShieldAlert alerted that @FloorDAO was exploited for 40ETH and the stolen funds have already been transferred into TornadoCash

• Since then, the Floor Treasury has completed the first redeployment of Protocol Owned Liquidity

• FloorDAO is a NFT-Fi liquidity layer that automates weekly sweeps of collection floors and earns yield by deploying these assets to DeFi

Thoughts: This is one of the less-punishing exploits, only 40 E was stolen. There’s red scam wick on $FLOOR since capital was drained but since the team has redeployed back liquidity, $FLOOR is trading at the same price level of $4.6

“What You Should Know” Section

Azuro

• Azuro is an infrastructure/liquidity layer for on-chain betting. It utilizes a new Liquidity Pool design, the Liquidity Tree, which creates and maintains market liquidity

• Azuro integrates with betting protocols such as Betswirl & BookbieBot by offering deep liquidity & betting engines

• Betting on Azuro-integrated protocols will earn you Azuro points which can then be converted into $AZURO at TGE

Banana

• Banana Gun Bot is able to dominate and win almost every snipe because of its “Group Bundling”

• Banana takes miner bribes from all its users that bribe (for that CA) and combines them together, allowing them to successfully the first block of txn

• For pre-launch snipe, you can get over max supply txn limit by sniping small across 5 wallets. For example, if a project limits 0.2% supply buy per wallet, you can spread the snipe small across 5 wallets to get a total of 1% supply → All of this can be easily done with Banana

TG Bots

• TG Bots allows you to one-click snipe, buy/sell any coins within a few seconds. The experience is a lot better than swapping on Uniswap or Defillama Swap

• Suggests setting up a Banana Bot, follow the manuals on their gitbook and try it out yourself (You’ll have an enlightenment moment)

Taxes are Important

• For TG Bots or projects that don’t do large presale or public sale, taxes are one of the main source of revenue that keep the project alive

• Taxes create a flywheel of revenue sharing that attract users to buy & hold the token instead of just speculating on it

• Tax flywheel has shown to work particularly well, better than sloppy emissions-based staking tokenomics

• Some teams have started to opt for years of lockups and vesting in their tokenomics and focus on making money from taxes alone (One of those team is Banana)

Great Picks on Base

• $ALB → Not the best tokens to just buy & hold due to its high emissions paid on its farms. Alien Base is #1 DEX on Base. Worth farming it & holding some, next catalyst will be real yields APR switch (yields from Area 51 [AlienBase MemeDEX] will funnel to $ALB stakers)

• $BOOST → Aggregator & P2P Perps powered by LSDs. It’s been almost a month since $BOOST token launched. Price has sustained extremely well compared to other protocols on Base. Perps is coming out very soon, high chance $BOOST pop off once that happen

*Reminder to Size Your Entry for Degen Plays and Take Your Principal Out (Take Profits) Whenever You Hit Your Target*