The Cross-Chain Roundup #24
The Cross-Chain Roundup #24
Week Roundup (May 01 - 07, 2023)
The meme coin party is over, but what a run it’s been. But although frog and dog coins are selling off massively, it’s part of a broader market malaise. While the market’s looked shaky for weeks, with bears emphasizing that meme coin season is generally a top signal, the sell-off appears to have been triggered by an entity who has little time for meme coinery – Vitalilk Buterin.
Onchain data suggests that the sale of significant amounts of ETH by Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation prompted two whales to dump another $35.7 million ETH on Uniswap after the Ethereum Foundation offloaded 15,000 ETH ($29.7 million) to Kraken. Binance pausing withdrawals on Sunday hasn’t helped an already shaky market either.
It’s not all doom and gloom though: for those who didn’t buy the top of frog/dog/cat, there’s still dry powder and no shortage of emerging networks on which to deploy it when the time is right. A handful of them is featured below in our roundup of stories that have caused the cross-chain ecosystem to buzz this week.
📰Cross-Chain Updates
StarkNet’s long-awaited token is imminent and to tie in with the launch Argent Wallet has launched the StarkNet Xplorer campaign. This will entail eight NFT drops over eight weeks and has predictably prompted speculation that there could be an airdrop for participants. Anyone interested in taking part in the campaign will require an Argent X wallet and funds on StarkNet.
Wormhole has introduced Wormhole Connect, an easy-to-integrate widget that allows developers to add cross-chain asset bridging directly into their dApp. It requires as few as three lines of code. Connect will soon surface multiple Wormhole-powered services (e.g. cross-chain asset swaps) that enable other forms of bridging more suitable for certain use cases.
Nexa Network has unveiled the Chain-Agnostic Token (CAT) standard. This protocol enables tokens and NFTs to be natively issued on multiple chains and to be fungible across chains. Tokens including NFTs can now be seamlessly transferred and exist in a connected manner across all chains. When CATs are transferred, the tokens are burned on the source chain and the same amount is minted on the destination chain.
The past week’s craze around PEPE drove a dramatic increase in the profitability for validators running the Ethereum network at the heart of the action. Ethereum validators saw profits from MEV-Boost payments spike over the weekend. The total revenue including transaction fees nearly matched what validators made during the trading frenzy that accompanied the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange.
Linea Voyage has commenced in the form of “a 9-week odyssey to unravel the Linea ecosystem, build L2 knowledge, and support our mainnet launch.” It’s a means of spurring third-party development of Linea and onboarding users who will be incentivized to participate by the economic opportunities that being early on a nascent network presents. The first week has run into issues, however, as occasionally happens when new chains are readied for launch.
Fees on the Bitcoin blockchain have surged to two-year highs as the ‘Bitcoin Request for Comment’ (BRC-20) tokens and the rising popularity of the Ordinals protocol drives demand for block space. Average transaction fees on the Bitcoin network were hovering at just under $20 on Monday, May 8, a bump from last week’s average $1.20 level. Such levels were previously seen in May 2021, when bitcoin prices set a then-record peak of $60,000.
📊Bridge Stats
Key data insights from the bridging ecosystem in the past week👇
7-Day Bridge Statistics
Daily Active Users
Total Bridge Fees Collected
Total Value Locked
Disclaimer: Bridges covered are Stargate, Synapse, Across, Connext, Hop Protocol, Ren, and Allbridge. Data sourced from Token Terminal.
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