TLDR Crypto 2024-05-13

Binance has secured approval to re-enter India from the country's Financial Intelligence Unit. Both Binance and KuCoin were banned from operating in India earlier this year due to non-compliance issues. The two exchanges are two of the first off-shore exchanges to re-enter the Indian market.

Kraken has responded to the SEC's complaint with a final brief arguing for dismissal, criticizing the SEC for failing to define a specific investment contract trading on the platform and instead citing vague investment-like "expectations" and "concepts." The exchange insists on the necessity of a concrete contract for an investment contract, challenging the SEC's broader interpretations and advocating for clearer regulatory frameworks.

PBFT and BBCA-Chain are Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocols that share similarities in their three-phase flow but differ in how they handle view changes and achieve parallelism. BBCA-Chain places consensus inside a DAG, allowing for parallel block transmission and reduced communication complexity compared to PBFT, which relies on a single leader to propose blocks sequentially. BBCA-Chain is most similar to Bullshark, which is used in Aleo.

Ethereum's original danksharding plan required 32MB blocks, which is not possible with the current network stack. Data availability sampling can be broken up into its core components, creating an efficient mechanism for making data available and having nodes use sampling to efficiently check this data. LiteDAS is proposed as a low-latency, bandwidth-efficient sampling protocol. Improvements are still needed for connecting peers for data dispersal and sampling.

There are three main components to blockchain bottlenecks – execution, which is solved via parallel processing and faster VMs, data, which has been remedied through EIP-4844, and DA layers like Celestia, and state. Ethereum's state growth, the amount of data needed to be stored by nodes, leads to bloat and slower transaction times, and rollups do not solve the problem. Fuel's approach is to leverage the UTXO transaction model and state minimized techniques to add more capability to Ethereum rollups.

Governance tokens are essentially memecoins as they do not have revenue sharing and are not effective at community-oriented decision-making. Since they launch at massive VC-backed valuations, they prevent retail investors from getting a fair acquisition price. Memecoins are evolving into their own asset class, facilitating capital coordination and early community formation, before later becoming the backbone for decentralized protocols. Though VCs deserve profit for the risks they take, the investment process should be more transparent and open.

Context, a product studio, recently saw its NFT aggregator, mint.fun, acquired by Zora. Since then, it has launched a new project, rug.fun, aimed at changing memecoin engagement. Context wants to create innovative experiences that capture more centralized engagement within the memecoin space and broader crypto landscape.

Interest derivatives market Pendle has grown exponentially by capturing tokenized yield from LSTs and LRTs, and becoming a go-to protocol for speculating on points. It dominates the yield swap market, which is expected to grow with more integrations and products. Pendle V3, expected to launch later this year, will introduce intents-based execution and a native cross-margin engine – part of the reason Pendle's value is expected to increase by over 10x by the end of 2027.

Bitcoin's annual volatility, resembling gold in its early stages, is now lower than that of several large-cap tech stocks (Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla), marking a significant shift towards its maturation as a stable asset class.

Onchain media's value is its power to be both abundant and valuable, with provenance for creators and programmability for developers.

Bitcoin's Runes protocol, released in the same block as the halving, generated $135 million in fees in its first week but has now dropped to below $10 million per week.

This post articulates why the low gas cost on Ethereum L1 and the increasing number of transactions on Ethereum L2s is a good sign for the Ethereum ecosystem.