Recent Research

📊 Solana the Monolith – 5/31

• This report focuses on the new and upcoming optimizations for Solana, including isolated fee markets, Firedancer, MEV, state compression, DePIN, DeFi, and SVM rollups.
• It will also cover Solana’s validator decentralization, economics, and some centralization concerns that arise.
• As it stands today, the majority of SOL fees are from voting, usually making up anywhere from 65-85% of validators’ income.
• Until the Solana network starts to generate meaningful fee revenue outside of votes, the minimum stake required to be a profitable validator will be quite high.
• Now, if you’re asking the question “Should Solana just become a rollup on Ethereum?” the answer is a resounding no.

📊 Bull v Bear – Nvidia to Crypto? – 5/31

• In Market Matters, we dissect Nvidia’s soaring performance fuelled by an upswing in AI use, and whether the performance will trickle down on the wider market and crypto.

📊 Reddit Avatars: NFTs as Digital Identity – 5/30

• It was a big step for NFT adoption when Reddit introduced its Reddit Collectible Avatars in 2022, but what have been the implications of this for Web3 adoption?
• These avatars serve as a novel and expressive means for Reddit’s nearly 1 billion users to represent themselves within the platform’s vast array of communities.
• Reddit Gen 3 avatars are among the top 5 NFT collections traded on Polygon, alongside y00ts, Trump Digital Trading Cards, Sandbox Lands, and ArcheWorld Lands.
• Reddit avatars are stored in a digital wallet known as a “vault” on Reddit, powered by the Polygon blockchain.
• 82% of avatars are held by wallets that own only a single Reddit avatar. This distribution pattern suggests that most users are keeping and using their avatars rather than trying to accumulate more for speculative reasons.

📊 Check the Chain – What’s the Best Cosmos Index? – 5/26

• In this insightful episode of Check the Chain, Ceteris guides us through the cutting edge developments of the Cosmos ecosystem. We dive into Stride’s innovative liquid staking solution and the potential impact of Neutron’s impending auction and launch event.

📊 Bitcoin – Back From the Future – 5/25

• In approximately 320 days, Bitcoin’s block rewards will be halved from 6.25 BTC per block to 3.125.
• The prior halvings occurred in a different macro environment when crypto was still a niche market and arguably so small that macro events like interest rates had little impact.
• A halvening’s effect on Bitcoin diminishes 4x-6x with each successive halvening.
• NVT is a tool best used for networks whose primary goal is transacting value. But Bitcoin has evolved past this narrative into a digital commodity/gold where users are encouraged to hodl instead of spend it.
• One of the most noticeable effects of Ordinals for Bitcoin is the commodification of Bitcoin’s blockspace. Users are now spending millions of dollars to store things on Bitcoin and demand for blockspace is high.

Relevant Reminder

📌 Market Note: INJ – 5/23

• The day of the Avalanche Rush announcement led to a 28% gain for the AVAX token, followed by a nearly sixfold surge in price over the subsequent three months.
• This success didn’t go unnoticed, prompting other L1 platforms to launch similar programs in an attempt to replicate Avalanche’s success.
• We explored the impact of such programs for Fantom, Harmony, NEAR, and Injective.
• Injective Protocol will have to bootstrap organic activity and demand for it to continue its momentum, or else it too will likely meet the fate of its cousins.