Moni's Edge #33: Divided in Halves

Alpha, Early Projects, Market overview, random thoughts, and just magic – wagmi.

Moni, Garri, MiguelRare, and 2 others

Apr 20, 2024

Yo substacker.
Let's kick off our 33rd digest with a milestone event - the Bitcoin halving.
Let's dive in!

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HA-HA-HALVING

Cheers, friends, Bitcoin's about to become even scarcer, which likely means it'll be pricier in the future (unless the internet ceases to exist, of course).
Yet, this pivotal moment remains obscure to many and means little to most. But by the time they catch on, it might just be too late - so let’s enjoy being ahead of the curve, anon.

Meanwhile, in the market…

In the week leading up to the halving, Bitcoin hit 60k several times but managed to bounce back each time. Does this suggest that there’s an effort to prevent it from falling below 60k?
Possibly, since dropping below that could trigger a wave of massive sell-offs and liquidations. But, such a correction seems inevitable, doesn't it?

The Fear and Greed Index hovered below 70 all week. Many altcoins were also in a downward sideways trend, much like the chart below

This week saw a $92 million long liquidation on Friday, April 19th - not the largest in the last two weeks, but still significant

When the Dust Settles

With block 840,000, where the halving occurred, something else noteworthy happened related to the Bitcoin ecosystem - the launch of Rune. You can learn more about it from Ignas DeFi Research:

But also, a valuable lesson from this week's conferences in Dubai: apply the same approach we use for main and side events to our investments.

Weekly summary by Glassnode

The Ethereum ecosystem is debating proposed changes the ETH issuance rate, aimed at slowing down the expansion of the staking pool. The goal is to mitigate the influence of innovations like Liquid Staking and Restaking, which are acting to enhance the yield opportunities, and thus demand from users.
The surge in staking—now at 31.4M ETH or roughly 26% of the total supply—has been driven by Restaking protocols like Eigenlayer. These developments are increasingly leading to the proliferation of of liquid staking tokens, which over the long-term may start to undermine Ethereum's role as a money asset. The Ethereum Foundation has suggested capping annual issuance to slow the growth of the staking pool, however these proposals have been met with significant resistance from the community.

Read full report here: Ethereum's Staking Issue

🧠 Stay strong, stay solvent, and you'll be rewarded with the best days coming to make a lifechange moni.

Narratives for Rotatooors

TON

Everyone was waiting for Pavel Durov's speech at the Token2049 conference in Dubai for a long time and believed that there would be incredible announcements that would affect the token price positively. But it turned out to be the opposite, mostly Pavel talked about new updates in Telegram, such as revenue sharing, tips and NFT stickers. Also announced was a partnership between TON and USDT, rewards for using stablecoin on TON and integration of chain on some CEXes so users can withdraw tokens to the TON network. Alas, this wasn't enough to continue the growth and the token dropped from $7 to $6.

But these are actually very cool announcements that will, in our opinion, have a long-term impact on the growth of the ecosystem. At the moment, there is little discussion on Twitter about TON and projects on this blockchain, and it's almost as if there are no projects, but that's not the case at all. We think the ecosystem is definitely worth keeping an eye on, in addition to stablecoin, which will now be there and will likely attract even more liquidity, we are interested in two other pieces of news:

- Tips will be in TON token, which will add some utility and use to it, as Telegram already has a wallet integrated for this token.

- NFT stickers. An extremely underrated area! Everyone in Telegram uses stickers and soon the Telegram team plans to tokenize them and 95% of the earnings will go to sticker artists.

Just imagine how huge a market this is! The key thing here is how well the team implements it. Unfortunately, I have little faith that we will see a really cool degen implementation of buying/selling stickers and speculating on them, most likely this feature will be primarily targeted at normies and including a huge number of artists, if revenue is large, this could definitely attract them and we will see sticker summer on TON. This product should appeal to the audience of this ecosystem also because one of the most popular and liquid areas on this blockchain - memecoins and various simple games like NOTCOIN.

So, if you don't want to dive fully into the TON ecosystem because you're tired of the dozens of new blockchains, we recommend that you at least just keep an eye out for the launch of onchain stickers.

Runes

Unlike TON, we don't have a lot of thoughts on this. Runes launched during halving, quite recently and to mint it at launch people paid huge fees. At the moment it is not clear what is the most valuable. The impression is that so far people are buying what better temporarily grabs their attention and seems to be hype. The most expensive tokens remain Runestone by Leonidas, as well as Pups. Two of these tokens were originally BRC-20, but promised to make the migration to Runes, which is pretty much what happened.

It's like there's a choice here, either be degen and buy what you think will pump in the future, or wait for things to calm down a bit and then pick the best RUNES in your opinion. It is likely that in the future we will see the listing of the new standard on top exchanges such as Binance. In turn, when ORDI appeared, the situation was roughly similar, although there was much less hype. First there was a strong growth, then dump and a long accumulation, and then huge pump after announcements about listings. Is it possible that this will happen with runes? Definitely yes, but still, you have to take into account the very different market sentiment, the amount of liquidity, as well as the interest in the Bitcoin eco.

By the way, we also recommend you not to hate BRC-20 tokens, as there are new updates coming there too, which can greatly improve the ecosystem.

Gems of this week:

Heroglyphs
Heroglyphs is a protocol designed to enhance Ethereum's liquid staking by encouraging roles that combine both economic and operational contributions, known as "complete validators".
This approach aims to decentralize network validation and increase its economic efficiency by leveraging refined blockchain operations similar to how petroleum refinement works.
- Chain: Ethereum
- Segment: DeFi
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hero_glyphs
  The project first appeared on the Moni Discover off-chain analytics app on 18 April at 469 followers
Project: Archetype
The team is creating the most beautiful and functional platform that serves as a DEX aggregator with a unique "price protection" feature using the Premia protocol options. It offers everything - perpetuals, intents, and yields.
- Chain: Ethereum
- Segment: DeFi
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/archetype_blue
The project first appeared on the Moni Discover off-chain analytics app on 15 April at 470 followers
Superseed
Superseed is a cutting-edge Layer 2 blockchain built on top of the OP Stack, leveraging the robust foundation of Optimism. It offers enhanced scalability, rapid finality, and inherits the battle-tested technology of Optimism.
- Chain: L2
- Segment: Infrastructure
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuperseedXYZ
  The project first appeared on the Moni Discover off-chain analytics app on 15 April at 102 followers
Anomaly
Anomaly is an AI-gaming layer 3 app chain that integrates custom AI engine built mini-games DIRECTLY into platforms like Telegram, Discord, Twitter and other social platforms.
The company aims to make games a social-first experience utilizing its DePin architecture.
- Chain: -
- Segment: GameFi
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/anomalygamesinc
  The project first appeared on the Moni Discover off-chain analytics app on 18 April at 35 followers