Aave has becomes one of the largest crypto lending protocol by total value locked.
Grayscale’s has started a new fund which offers exposure to Aave’s AAVE token, the asset manager said on Thursday, in what has been a series of novel products from the crypto asset manager.
Aave is a decentralized lending platform based on the Ethereum blockchain that offers automated loans of cryptocurrency using other tokens you own as collateral. It also lets users lend out their crypto to earn interest.
While the platform’s native token stands at a market capitalization of $2.3 billion, a relatively small number compared to most well-known tokens, the protocol has become the largest cryptocurrency lending protocol by total value locked (TVL), according to data by DeFiLlama.
“Grayscale Aave Trust gives investors exposure to a protocol with the potential to revolutionize traditional finance,” Grayscale’s head of product and research, Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, said in a statement.
“By leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts, Aave’s decentralized platform aims to optimize lending and borrowing while removing intermediaries and reducing reliance on human judgment,” he said.
The launch comes only a few weeks after Grayscale rolled out its most recent fund, the Grayscale Avalanche Trust, offering investors exposure to the AVAX (AVAX) token. The asset manager currently offers over 20 different crypto investment products, a number that has grown after the launch of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January, which spurred interest for publicly tradable products tracking cryptocurrencies.
Grayscale is the issuer of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and the Grayscale Mini Bitcoin Trust (BTC) as well as the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE), which all launched earlier this year.
TIA has outperformed the CoinDesk 20 Index by a wide margin.
TIA, the token of data-availability blockchain network Celestia, posted its best monthly gain this year, outperforming the broader market by a significant margin and confounding traders who’d positioned for a drop in the price as the result of a $1.13 billion token unlock due next month.
The market-beating 40% surge, the biggest since December 2023, contrasts with a 13% gain in the CoinDesk 20 Index, a measure of the largest, most liquid cryptocurrencies. It takes place against a background of some market participants seeking downside hedges due to concerns the massive token unlock due Oct. 31 will flood the market and depress prices.
Next month’s unlock will release 175.74 million TIA. That’s 16% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply and worth $1.13 billion, or 82% of the market capitalization, according to data source CryptoRank. Such large unlocks often create bearish pressures in the market.
“There has been an uptick in TIA hedging demand ahead of the Oct. 31 unlock – both via exchange-traded perpetuals, alongside OTC forward agreements with market makers/trading desks,” Jake Ostovskis, an over-the-counter trader at Wintermute, told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.
Short squeeze
The bias for shorts, likely stemming from the hedging activity, might have led to a “short squeeze,” contributing to the TIA rally. A short squeeze happens when the asset price remains resilient, contrary to expectations, forcing bears to close their positions, which are bets that an asset will drop. That, in turn, puts upward pressure on prices.
“Traders tried to sell ahead of the [unlock] event from Julyish. I’d argue the squeeze has already happened,” Ostovskis said.
That’s evident from the recovery in funding rates tied to TIA perpetuals, which have rebounded to nearly zero, or neutral, having been in negative territory since July. As suggested by Ostovskis, rates below zero are a sign of traders taking bearish bets to protect against the downside price risk posed by the influx of so many tokens.
The recovery to neutral alongside the TIA price rally suggests shorts have been crowded out and might have inadvertently squeezed the price higher.
The $100 million fundraise
A $100 million fundraise announced this week likely gave bears another solid reason to exit shorts, adding upward momentum. The fresh round raised the foundation’s cash stash to $155 million, although the team did not detail how it plans to use the funds.
Some pseudonymous observers have suggested the fundraising was an OTC deal at a $3.4 billion valuation directly with the foundation, with the token sale priced at $3 and one-third of the same to be unlocked on Oct. 31.
According to Ostovskis, the impending unlock may have been priced in.
“Some commentators have seen their OTC sale sales as controversial, however, the result that a large cliff has been removed and enabling the pre-hedging unlocks has overall been positive, allowing the market to price in this event in advance,” Ostovskis noted.
Cat-themed tokens have emerged as a new cohort alongside dog-themed Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, among the biggest gainers in the 2020-2021 bull run.
Cat-themed memecoins aren’t just meowing but roaring back in an indication of risk-on sentiment starting to return to the broader crypto market.
Tokens such as Solana-based POPCAT, cat in a dog’s world (MEW), Ethereum-based MOG, and BNB Chain-based Simon’s Cat (CAT) have climbed up to 40% in a one-week period, with a bulk of gains coming since Wednesday when the U.S. Federal Reserve cut rates by 50 basis points for the first time in four years – fuelling prices of risk assets, including bitcoin (BTC).
Popcat, a token tied to a meme of a cat with its mouth popped open, is nearing $1 billion market cap. Culture coin mog has jumped 70% in the past two weeks amid its strong cult following on social platforms, where the community often replies to posts with “mogging” and “mogged” to improve its visibility.
The newly released CAT has quickly climbed to become one of the biggest cat memes, seeing over $145 million in exchange bets in the past 24 hours. The token is officially tied to the Simon’s Cat comic series.
Since early 2023, meme tokens have been increasingly seen as a leveraged way to bet on the growth of their underlying blockchains, and crypto traders refer to them as beta bets.
Cat-themed tokens have emerged as a new cohort alongside dog-themed Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), among the biggest gainers in the 2020-2021 bull run.
Their relatively smaller total market capitalization makes cat memes a stronger attraction than their dog-themed counterparts: The dog memes sector tracked by CoinGecko shows a 4% average gain in the past 24 hours, compared to a 14% bump on cat tokens.
Some market makers expect memecoins, alongside alternative tokens, to continue surging in the coming months.
“Memecoins are experiencing a surge largely due to the anticipation of increased liquidity following the Federal Reserve’s recent 0.5% interest rate cut,” Alex Andryunin, founder of Gotbit Hedge Fund, known for backing memecoinds, said in a message to CoinDesk. “Market expectations for lower rates have converged, and with the prospect of more liquidity entering the financial system, investors are adopting a bullish sentiment.”
“We anticipate that the memecoin market could grow significantly over the next two months. The increased liquidity and a heightened appetite for risk may drive investors toward these high-risk, high-reward assets, potentially leading to a boom similar to previous cycles,” Andryunin added.
The online casino and gaming platform will be released in November.
SINGAPORE – Former Grammy-nominated artist and entrepreneur Iggy Azalea will release Motherland, a new online casino that uses her MOTHER token, in November.
Azalea unveiled the project alongside business partner Joe McCann, founder of crypto investment firm Asymmetric and manager Reece Pearson at her Motherland Rodeo event at Breakpoint in Singapore on Friday.
Motherland is slated to offer a variety of casino games — such as slots, blackjack, roulette, and poker — and players will enjoy live dealer games, tournaments and sports betting.
“Motherland is a digital homeland for the crypto community unlike any other,” said Azalea in a prepared statement. “This is all about merging culture and entertainment beyond hype cycles to create long-term value.”
“Motherland is a perfect example of how Iggy is taking the token beyond speculation and into real-world applications,” said McCann. “Memecoins are built on internet culture and the attention economy. No one does that better than Iggy — $MOTHER provides sustainable value creation by offering real utility,
MOTHER was one of the memecoins issued amid a short-lived celebrity token frenzy on the Solana blockchain in late May. Several such tokens have lost nearly all their value, but Azalea’s backing has helped buoy the token in the past few months.
In June, Azalea started to support the purchase of phones and monthly cell plans from his telecommunications company using mother tokens, boosting their value at the time.
Tech stocks such as Tesla and Netflix, which crypto prices tend to correlate with, sold off during the day as investors shied away from risk assets.
Cryptocurrencies slid lower Thursday with bitcoin (BTC) revisiting the bottom threshold of its month-long trading range, while Chainlink’s LINK rallied solo among the largest crypto assets.
BTC’s price dipped to as low as $29,593 during the afternoon hours, near its lowest point in a month. The largest cryptocurrency by market value has been see-sawing in a tight channel since June 21, bouncing from the $29,500 level multiple times to trade as high as $31,809.
Ether (ETH) buckled below $1,900 to change hands 1% lower than 24 hours ago.
Ripple’s XRP pared some of its impressive gains from previous days, dropping some 6% in the last 24 hours. The token’s price almost doubled to 93 cents a week ago, following a partial court victory against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). After the decline, it was still trading at around 79 cents.
LINK, the native token of the Chainlink ecosystem, defied the market slump and was the only crypto asset with sizable gains among the 40 largest tokens by market capitalization.
The token surged 15% through the day above $8 for the first time in nearly three months as some large investors – whales in crypto jargon – acquired $6 million of tokens. The price action came after Chainlink released this week an interoperability protocol that facilitates communication between blockchains and banks, tested by interbank communication system Swift.
The CoinDesk Market Index, which tracks the performance of a basket of digital assets, gained early in the day then retreated and was down 1.26% over the last 24 hours.
Crypto investors might have been concerned by a sell-off in tech stocks. The NASDAQ 100 index (NDQ) declined 2% during the day, as investors dumped shares of tech giants Tesla (TSLA) and Netflix (NFLX) after their underwhelming quarterly earnings reports, dropping some 9%.
Cryptocurrency prices have a history of correlating with risk assets such as the tech-heavy NDQ, although the relationship has wobbled this year.
“Seems like we are just having a risk-off day in general after a massive run for weeks, with investors taking profits and rebalancing,” Brett Sifling, director at investment firm Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, told CoinDesk in a call.
A bunch of actual hamsters are racing on a new platform, and returns-starved traders are placing BUSD-based bets on who wins.
Bitcoin (BTC) yatay seyrederken ve merkezi olmayan finans (DeFi) sektörü, ayı piyasası durgunluğundan tamamen kurtulamadığı için, kripto tüccarları getiri elde etmenin yeni bir yolunu buldu.
Blockchain tabanlı platform Hamsters.gg, kullanıcıların gerçek hamster yarışlarına bahis oynamasına izin verir. “Hamsterler gerçek ve bahisler gerçek. Hamsterler bir parkurda koşuyor ve bitiş çizgisini geçen ilk hamster kazanıyor,” diye açıklıyor site.
“Rocky” ve “Buster” gibi yıldız hamster yarışçıları şimdiden yarış başına 500$’a varan bahisler çekiyor. “CK” gibi diğerleri o kadar şanslı değil – 326 yarış kaybediyor; sadece 8 kazanıyor. Görünüşe göre bu yarışlar birkaç saatte bir gerçekleşiyor, bu sırada bir sohbet kutusu aydınlanıyor, en az 1.000 izleyici çekiyor ve sanal bira ve sosisli sandviç emojileriyle tamamlanıyor.
“Sipping wine, betting on hamster racing…does it get any better than this?,” a recent message on the Hamsters chatbox reads. Some others are trying to mathematically win: “Whos got some stats on these hamsters? do we have weight classes?”
Crypto traders has a knack for jumping on gambling platforms and memecoins, mainly after the rise of tokens such as dogecoin (DOGE) and shiba inu (SHIB) – which jumped to tens of billions in market capitalization in the previous bull market.
Anyone can call a smart contract and issue tokens on Ethereum (or other blockchains) for a few cents, and the presence of decentralized exchanges means tokens can instantly be issued, supplied with liquidity and traded soon after.
Most of these do not last beyond a few weeks. Last year saw hopefuls bet on articles from the English language to McDonald’s branded Grimacecoins, both of which fell to nearly zero after a few weeks of trading. But some, like Pepecoin (PEPE), jump to billions in market capitalization and seem to become big-name projects.
Data shows HamstersGG went live earlier in July and live-streamed a series of races through Twitch on Thursday. Bets could be placed via U.S. dollar-pegged binance USD (BUSD) by depositing tokens from either Ethereum or BNB Chain.
Racer “Teddy” won a race in Asian morning hours – raking in thousands of dollars for those who bet on its victory. (Hamsters.gg)
And – to little surprise – there’s a HAMS token as well. A whitepaper on the Hamsters.gg site explains the platform takes a 5% cut of all bets, of which 4% is distributed to HAMS token holders.
The Ethereum-based HAMS has zooted to over $6 million capitalization nearly overnight. On-chain data shows each HAMS exchanges hands for 60 cents at writing time in Asian morning hours, a nearly 1,000% increase compared to Thursday. A Uniswap pool holds $450,000 in liquidity and has garnered $9 million in trading volumes over the past 24 hours.
Bu arada, Hamsters.gg geliştiricileri bunun yeni hamster bahis platformunun sadece başlangıcı olduğunu söylüyor. Geçen hafta bir tweet’te “Vizyonumuz uzun vadeli geliştirme ve ölçeklenebilirlik. Bu proje üzerinde üç aydan fazla bir süredir çalışıyoruz ve kendimizi sürdürülebilir ve gelişen bir ekosistem oluşturmaya adadık” dediler.
Gülünç ya da değil. Eğlenceli. Tıpkı kriptonun vahşi batısının olması gerektiği gibi.
Unlocks are staggered releases of cryptocurrencies that had been frozen to prevent early investors or project team members from selling in large numbers.
Bir süredir kripto piyasasını takip ediyorsanız, muhtemelen token kilidinin açıldığını duymuşsunuzdur. Süreç, erken yatırımcıların veya proje ekibi üyelerinin çok sayıda satış yapmasını önlemek için dondurulmuş olan belirli miktarlarda kripto para birimlerinin kademeli olarak serbest bırakılmasını ifade eder.
Serbest likiditenin kilidini açar ve bazı gözlemciler yalnızca mevcut piyasa eğilimini vurguladıklarını söylese de, yaygın olarak düşüş eğilimi gösterirler.
Analitik firması The Tie tarafından yapılan yeni araştırma, madeni paraların ortalama olarak etkinlik öncesinde düştüğünü gösteriyor. Bununla birlikte, serbest kalan likidite ortalama günlük hacmin %100’ünden fazlasını temsil ettiğinde, fiyatlar hızlı bir şekilde toparlandı ve kilidi açtıktan sonraki iki hafta içinde daha da derine indi. Firma, 100’den fazla belirteci içeren 350.000’den fazla benzersiz kilit açma olayıyla ilgili bir çalışma yürüttü.
“In cases where the unlock represented more than 100% of the average daily volume, prices tended to rebound faster, albeit for a brief period. This could be attributed to traders feeling relieved that the unlock did not flood the market with new tokens immediately,” Lawrence Lewitinn, the director of content at The Tie, wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter.
“Nonetheless, within two weeks, prices of tokens facing such significant unlocks fell below their initial levels at the time of the unlock,” he wrote. “This may suggest that holders preferred to wait a few days before selling into the market.”
The Tie’s research also showed an exponential increase in trading volumes in coins that saw large unlocks.
Grafik, ortalama işlem hacmine göre büyük kilit açma işlemlerine maruz kalan tokenlerin, olayı takip eden iki hafta içinde daha derin kayıplar yaşadığını gösteriyor. (Kravat) (Kravat)
A project leader called for adding lawyers, jurisdictions and trustees for Abracadabra DAO, the entity overseeing Magic Internet Money (MIM) and SPELL tokens.
Centralized business structures are continuing their creep into decentralized finance (DeFi), with the builders of tokens Magic Internet Money (MIM) and SPELL on Wednesday pitching a traditional legal structure to supplant the DAO overseeing the stablecoin with a nearly $700 million market cap.
In a forum post, a project leader called on Abracadabra DAO to support a “transition of power” to a centralized entity complete with lawyers, jurisdictions and trustees. Those trappings of a traditional corporation are seemingly antithetical to the notion of a DAO, the form of crypto-based business governance in which token holders directly call the shots.
“Despite our commitment to decentralization, we’ve recognized the importance of introducing a certain degree of centralized legal structure,” the AbracadabraTeam account wrote. “The purpose here is not to disrupt the decentralized nature of Abracadabra; in fact, it’s to protect it.”
Abracadabra DAO is the latest crypto project swapping the lofty idealism of decentralized governance for some degree of centralization, alongside SushiSwap and other projects. The reasons for these transitions range from heightened regulatory scrutiny to more mundane business concerns.
For Abracadabra DAO, the publicly-shared reasons seem to tilt toward vanilla. AbracadabraTeam said the centralized entity would manage the DAO’s intellectual property as well as server expenses “while still keeping control in the hands of SPELL token holders.”
Holders of SPELL (Abracadabra DAO’s governance token) will vote the project through three phases of transition, starting with picking a jurisdiction for the new entity. Four countries are on the table: Switzerland, Singapore, Malta and Bermuda.
Phases two and three will define what the new entity’s roles are and how it will operate, according to the post.
At press time, the SPELL token was trading 2.8% lower over the past 24 hours.
The anetaBTC project aims to attract bitcoin liquidity to the Cardano ecosystem.
Wrapped bitcoin token cBTC has gone live on the Cardano testnet, with the project’s developers aiming to attract bitcoin (BTC) users to the nascent Cardano decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
Users can now mint cBTC tokens from the anetaBTC protocol, and use the tokens to fund, trade, or provide liquidity to Cardano testnet protocols. These wrapped tokens are a 1:1 representation of bitcoin, but on the Cardano blockchain.
Wrapped tokens make it easy to transfer value across blockchains, which otherwise lack interoperability, allowing users to access different DeFi protocols without requiring the native tokens of that protocol.
Various DeFi enhancements have aided the rise of such protocols on Cardano since the start of 2023, with total value locked (TVL) rising from under $50 million to over $150 million in this period.
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DeFi exchanges such as Minswap, Indigo and Wingriders hold most of the TVL on Cardano, with stablecoin project Djed attracting over $15 million since its early March launch.
