TLDR Crypto 2024-04-15

$256 million worth of long positions were liquidated in Bitcoin's recent price drop. Analysts expect this to be a short-term downturn before the market improves. Despite the dip, demand from Bitcoin whales is growing, with demand from holders outstripping the market supply of new Bitcoin for the first time.

The cryptocurrency market sharply declined over the weekend, with the broader market falling around 10% on Saturday. Though there is no concrete reason for this drop, some popular reasons include dropping liquidity because of tax payments due on April 15th and the Iranian drone strikes against Israel. The market recovered slightly after Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations said its strikes were concluded.

Wayfinder demoed an AI chatbot that finds transaction routes based on intents. Users type commands in natural language and the agent finds a series of transactions to execute on that intent. The video covers swapping, sending, bridging, and staking over a number of chains.

Pectra is Ethereum's next hardfork, expected to go live in Q4 2024/Q1 2025. The name combines ‘Prague,' the execution layer upgrade, and ‘Electra,' the consensus layer upgrade. It will include EIP-7251, which allows validators to stake more than 32 ETH, and EIP-3074, which upgrades account abstraction, among other improvements.

This author describes learnings from talking to founders and investors in Hong Kong. For example, more people in Indonesia own crypto than stocks, and their trading volume skews towards longer tail assets. The general view is that both stocks and crypto are like a casino and even institutional investors in Asia seem to have a higher tolerance for risk in buying liquid tokens.

This article compares Bitcoin's big block versus small block debate to the modern-day monolithic versus modular architecture argument between Solana and Ethereum. It states that Ethereum's approach, where the L1 is the small block basis for big block L2s, provides an ideal amount of coordination and sovereignty to facilitate interoperability yet still allow for independent ecosystems. By synergizing big and small block ideas, Ethereum achieves greater security and composability while making ETH the default unit of account for L2s.

Though NFTs have seen much less interest than in the previous bull market, they represent the evolution of how artists and collectors can place meaning on a work – by permanently inscribing it in a blockchain, timestamped at the moment, a collector realizes its importance. At the same time, the art industry is slowly developing the knowledge to value and distinguish NFT collections from one another. The movement of speculation from NFTs to memecoins has flushed out most of the market's inflated prices. As one of the original PFP collections, CryptoPunks is a market leader responsible for many of the trends and characteristics that future collections will use for inspiration, cementing its status as a pivotal work.

The next big narrative in crypto might be centered around GPU and cloud computing infrastructure, driven by the growing demand for artificial intelligence training and the asymmetry between rapidly advancing software and the slower pace of hardware development. Sam Altman's plan to raise trillions to accelerate chip manufacturing, the potential reunification of China and Taiwan, and the upcoming io.net token generation in April could catalyze interest in this narrative. Numerous projects in this sector could capitalize on this “GPU is the new oil” sentiment.

The highly-regarded Twitter account GCR broke its 1-year retirement to tell followers that this market downturn is a good time to buy into high-conviction tokens.

With fintech, consumer, and enterprise software sectors overcrowded with VCs and competition, cryptocurrencies and distributed computing are the last compelling industries with massive potential for venture investors.

After raising a second round of $100 million, Berachain has legitimized the strategy of creating a meme culture around serious blockchain infrastructure.

The divergence between PAXG and bitcoin has raised questions about bitcoin's appeal as a geopolitical hedge.