TLDR Crypto 2024-09-02

During Trump's discussion with BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey, he was promised $100 million in donations and 5 million re-election votes for promoting pro-crypto policy. Since then, $25 million has been raised. 48% of all corporate money raised this cycle is from crypto. Pro-crypto money has led to 85% win rates for candidates. More than $4 million in crypto like USDC, ETH, and BTC has been directly donated. Ripple and Coinbase have been the biggest backers of pro-crypto PACs.

The SEC has warned FTX that it may oppose the bankrupt exchange's plan to repay creditors using stablecoins or other digital assets. The agency also objects to provisions that would limit future legal liabilities for FTX's estate, aligning with the U.S. Trustee's concerns over discharge provisions that protect the debtors from further claims.

Points have become the primary protocol reward mechanism, but users are frustrated with their lack of transferability. Rumpel wraps points into a Rumpel Point Token stored in a multisig wallet, allowing points to be traded onchain. Liquid points markets create more user interest and speculation, increasing protocol market awareness.

EigenLayer's data availability AVS, EigenDA, has over $9 billion of restaked capital protecting the availability of rollup data for transaction verification. Though the DA space is saturated with competitors, EigenDA has higher throughput and Ethereum alignment but may not offer as high restaking rewards as other AVSs. EigenDA must reach $160k monthly revenue, or around 11 rollups, to break even.

On an L1, all the network's nodes have to process transactions and store data onchain, which is an expensive process causing high transaction fees. L2s use cheaper data and batch transactions together to be executed by an offchain entity, allowing for hundreds more transactions per second than L1s. L2s submit transaction proofs secured by cryptography or staked assets to the L1 for settlement.

In the competitive crypto protocol industry, it is essential to understand moats and how entrenched specific protocols are. This framework focuses on six verticals — money markets, DEXs, stablecoins, LSTs, third-party bridges, and social apps — and analyzes them for their defensibility. Each vertical has “un-forkable” properties, like liquidity for a DEX, that keep the incumbents in power, though some properties are stronger than others.

Restaking expands what staked capital can do, while the EIGEN token and intersubjectivity expand the use cases of governance tokens. The protocol will have outsized impacts on validator economics, and there will undoubtedly be unforeseen challenges in the AVS ecosystem. While complex, restaking could lead to more resilient and responsive blockchain systems through community-driven resolution of disputes and expanding decentralized collaboration.

Zynga, the game studio behind hit games like Farmville and Words With Friends, has divested from its Web3 game Sugartown. The IP was sold to D20 Labs, a company led by two Sugartown game developers. A follow-up post promised more details about the project's future in the coming weeks.

The Bloomberg Terminal is reportedly adding Polymarket election data to its election dashboard, providing users with real-time insights on the prediction market's numbers.

Yuga Labs' CEO has created a special team, named "The Workshop," dedicated to developing dApps for its ApeChain blockchain.

DeFi protocols like Aave could become the backbone for all credit extensions through the tokenization of real-world assets.

Pump.fun, a memecoin launchpad, has exceeded $100 million in revenue since its January 2024 launch, while Polymarket's trading volume in August outpaced the entire NFT market.