GM Digest #50

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

Thodex CEO 11,000 Years in Jail

• The former CEO of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, Faruk Fatih Özer, was sentenced to be 11,196 years in jail by a Turkish court

• Thodex was the largest CEX in Turkey before it imploded in 2021. Faruk fled the country with $2bn worth of customer assets

• Faruk was caught in Albania in 2022 before getting extradited back to Turkey in April 2023

Coinbase Expansion

• Coinbase has flagged several countries: European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Singapore and Australia as “near-term priority markets.”

• “Every part of the world is seeing progress on crypto-forward regulation — except for the U.S., which is opting for a ‘strategy’ of enforcement of existing rules and new regulations through the courts. US is sidelining itself”

Thoughts: We’ve seen CEXs with “Move fast & break things” mentality slowly crumbling down, FTX broke down first, Binance has started to see more cracks as Top Executives continue on leaving the firm. This presents an opportunity for Coinbase, one of the most regulated Crypto Exchange in the world, to expand East and capture European & Asian market shares

Espresso v2

• @EspressoTG has just released its v2 with new features that help streamline the deployment process

• New features -> Multiple connected wallets, Cheaper deployments, Step-by-step live updates, Add Liquidity and Remove Limits countdown, Resume failed deployments, Advanced Deployed Token section

• $ESPR pumped 15% overnight upon the news and is currently trading at $765k MCap

Thoughts: Espresso Team continues to ship their products despite market downturn. Even though the market may not be in the best shape for another Meme coin season, once a bull run kicks in, Espresso will be one of the most utilized tool due to its ability to create meme coins + you also get support from the team as the success of Espresso lies in the projects that it launch

Brine Raised $16.5m

• @BrineFinance The cross-chain, gasless decentralized order-book exchange powered by Starkware, has successfully raised $16.5m in a round led by @PanteraCapital

• Brine Mainnet is currently live on Ethereum & Polygon, users can trade freely / instantly without paying gas fees

• $SALT is not live yet but you can earn it by trading more, referring friends, and being active on Brine Community → Referral Code (if anyone wanna try it out): JYTLBZ

Thoughts: Pretty amazing to see a Defi project raising $16.5m in the current market climate. The value proposition of cross-chain, zero gas, instantaneous trading is massive and unlike any exchanges we’ve seen in the market.

Base Trade Rugged?

• @basetrade_xyz had their liquidity pulled, around ~6.5 E in total was pulled for two LPs

• Base Trade launched in August with Overflow Model, successfully raising 100 E in the process. Since then the platform continued declining — nobody provided TVL or used the platform

• Their social & their website are still live but the team hasn’t been active since IDO

Thoughts: One of the legitimate-looking Perp on Base that I’ve participated in in their IDO, the team basically stopped devving after their launch. Have not seen anybody talking about this because it was only ~6.5 E pulled but be careful out there if you’re investing in random projects on Base (or anywhere)

Ethereum Proto-danksharding

• Gentle Reminder that Proto-danksharding upgrade will be coming in Q4 2023

• Proto-danksharding will reduce gas fees on L2s by 95%, driving more volume to Arbitrum, zkSync, Base, Optimism, Linea, Mantle, and other L2s

Thoughts: Proto-danksharding will kickstart a full-on run on certain L2s with good traction / communities / and great projects in place. Based on the current trajectory, it could be Arbitrum & Base as the first two main beneficiaries

More Unibot Updates

• @TeamUnibot has made some changes to their tokenomics

⇢ The team is reducing their share of the trading tax to bring the total from 5% to 4%

⇢ All token holders eligible for revenue sharing will receive 2% of the $UNIBOT trading

⇢ Auto-compounding is enabled by default for revenue sharing

**Thoughts: $**UNIBOT price continues to decline with current price $72 (fell 14% overnight). We’re starting to see more liquidity from Unibot flows into Banana. More decline in Unibot price could be coming leading up to Banana TGE earlier next week (Mon or Tues)

CFTC Goes after DeFi Derivatives Companies

• The CFTC charged Opyn, Inc., ZeroEx (0x), Inc. and Deridex, Inc. with offering illegal derivatives trading

• They were asked to pay penalties of $250,000, $200,000, and $100,000, respectively and cease those violations which they agreed to and settled the charges

Thoughts: No proper insights on this. Time to jeet US and move to Southeast Asia (SEA)

Friend Tech Activity Picks Up

• @friendtech TVL has increased by 25% from $10m to $13m. The increase in activity is likely to be driven by the overall boring market → people go to Friend Tech to play around and accumulate points

• Not much updates have been happening but the application feels lighter & faster to use. Creators can directly reply on chats now and you also get personalized recommendations based on the keys your friends hold in the new For You list

Thoughts: Friend Tech appears to be more user-friendly since the upgrades that the team has been continuously rolling out. We’ve also seen a few Defi primitives building on top of FT, one good example is friend lend which aims to allow users to collateralized their keys and borrow money from it. While FT is moving at a slow pace, it has proven its PMF and will likely continue to grow given many creators & users already have their demand for the FT product

Arrakis LST Vaults

• @ArrakisFinance introduces Arrakis LST Vaults, the first Arrakis V2 Public Vaults specifically for liquid staking tokens

• The first deployed LST Vaults will be Lido Finance — Users can earn (These include Liquidity Mining Rewards in the form of wstETH & OP)

⇢ 67% APR on wstETH/ETH (Ethereum)

⇢ 229% APR on wstETH/USDC (Optimism)

⇢ 416% APR on wstETH/USDC (Ethereum)

Thoughts: Arrakis LST Vaults open up doors for users to earn better-managed LST v3 liquidity positions. As Arrakis is well-known to be the best liquidity manager in the space, you can expect to earn juicy yields with liquidity mining rewards on top along with potential for Arrakis token airdrop (in the future)

Great Newsletter to Follow

• Hercules_DeFi Substack with Deep Dives, Protocols Analysis, and Alpha

• Artemis Substack Go-to Source for On-Chain Fundamentals

• Blocmates Substack Everything Crypto is Here

• Crypto Linn Substack This should be the #1 Substack you should follow (if you haven’t already)

Great Weekend Reads

• Binance TG Bots Landscape (If you haven’t been catching up on TG Bots, this is a bit old already though)

• Decentralized Sequencers by Paul Veradittakit (Pantera Capital)

• Eigen Layer — crypto rehypothecation and the infinite trust machine

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