Arbitrum TVL Holds Steady While Others Bleed

🌅 Welcome!

We hope you enjoyed your break as much as we did. Here’s to a great year in 2023!

Today, we take a look at Arbitrum’s TVL while our Research team explores Urbit’s vision.

This is the Delphi Daily. Let’s dive in.

🚨 In Case You Missed It

• Cameron Winklevoss claims Barry Silbert owes $900M to Gemini.
• Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) pleads not guilty to U.S. criminal charges.
• Uniswap patches a critical vulnerability found by Dedaub. All user funds are safe.
• SBF asks the judge to redact the names of two individuals who co-signed his bond.

📊 Arbitrum TVL Holds Steady While Others Bleed

• Since the start of November, the Total Value Locked (TVL) on Arbitrum has remained unchanged while all other blockchains have suffered significant damages.
• TVL on Ethereum is down -28%, Polygon is down -19%, and Fantom is down -17%. Solana was the worst hit with TVL down -77%. In comparison, the market price for ETH is down -23%, MATIC is down -11%, FTM is down -18%, and SOL is down -65%.
• TVL measures the value stored on-chain for a particular blockchain. When much of the on-chain value is due to the underlying token, TVL changes are highly correlated to price changes of token.
• Arbitrum’s TVL may have remained unchanged due to users farming a potential future airdrop. Users may interact with leading protocols on Arbitrum to increase the amount of ARBI they may potentially receive once the token launches.

⚡ An Urbit in Our Stars

• Access to the internet and our online data is controlled by a conglomerate of Web2 companies that sit at the center of the modern client-server network stack.
• These entities have used this central position to censor information and build an entire industry around surveillance capitalism.

• Urbit’s vision is to create a fully P2P network of personal servers owned and operated by the people who use them. Rather than accessing someone else’s servers when going online, users would directly connect P2P with others on the network, removing middlemen and the power they hold.

• Urbit’s design has three main components: the OS itself, the persistent IDs, and the network protocol that creates their P2P network.

• The user experience of using the Urbit OS is reasonably straightforward. Users “host” an Urbit OS instance on some device, and then log into it through a web browser.
• Urbit instances are hardware-agnostic personal servers with unique IDs that users can migrate to new devices as long as they have the keys. As Urbit scales, the network can be populated by 4B unique IDs self-organizing into an encrypted, P2P permissionless internet.
• The current suite of operating systems don’t offer any sort of persistent network presence. IP addresses change, MAC addresses can be spoofed, and VPNs are everywhere. This is great for privacy, but terrible for the current web’s Sybil resistance.
• Urbit fixes this issue by providing users with a unique persistent network ID. If someone uses an Urbit ID for malicious purposes, other IDs on the Urbit network will refuse to connect with it.
• Without P2P connections on the Urbit network, the ID becomes essentially worthless, and the users will need to purchase a new one.

• Urbit’s P2P network is structured differently from other networks. Urbit uses a unique hierarchical ID scheme for addressing and routing in place of the usual IP/DNS.
• At the center of the network are the Galaxies, followed by the Stars, Planets, Moons, and Comet IDs. Each of these identities (aka ships) is just a simple base-256 number with a mnemonic name and sigil attached to it.
• An Urbit instance is like a ship floating around a celestial body, and its name  is where it’s located in the Universe. The network uses these identities for packet routing and discovery on the network.
• Urbit’s unique addressing scheme allows for ~4B unique identifiers on the network. Placing a hard cap on addresses is Urbit’s approach to Sybil resistance. By limiting Urbit’s address space, the identities gain a monetary value which reduces the likelihood of malicious use.
• For more on Urbit, Delphi members can read our Delphi Pro report here.

🐣 Notable Tweets

LSD Narrative Heading Into Shanghai

1/N: 🍄👽🌌♾💭🌈🌀😵LSDs – what are you playing for into Shanghai?

$LDO – reduction in their hefty $35m/yr emissions (vs $1bn mkt cap) + most accessible leveraged long retail LSD + lowest TVL to FDV. Early investors have all unlocked.

–Ouroboros Capital (@OuroborosCap8) Jan 3, 2023

First Time NFT Buyers

This chart looks at new wallets making a first NFT buy

For prices to do well, we need new collectors entering the space, or it’s just the same people jumping from project to project

Interested to track this metric & see what might bring new people to the space in 2023

-NFTstatistics.eth (@punk9059) Jan 2, 2023