💡 Bitcoin price to end third quarter with 15% loss. Staking on Ethereum in 2023. Upbit briefly suspends withdrawals from Aptos after a security incident. Optimism falls ahead of $30 million token unlocking. DeFi Protocol Synapse responds to selling pressure with a 17% bounce. Polkadot is considering supporting 1,000 parachains in the future.
Bitcoin (BTC) is poised to conclude the third quarter of 2023 with a negative performance of approximately 15%, marking its most unfavorable quarterly outcome since the fourth quarter of 2022, during which the cryptocurrency similarly incurred a 15% decline.
The preeminent cryptocurrency, boasting the highest market capitalization globally, was valued at approximately $513 billion as of September 25th. At present, it is trading in the low $26,000 range, reflecting a 17% decrease from its peak in the upper $31,000s during the summer of 2023.
By every conceivable measure, the Ethereum Proof of Stake (PoS) transition has achieved remarkable success. Presently, the total amount of staked ETH stands at an impressive $41.5 billion, constituting a substantial 46% of the total staked assets across all blockchain platforms. Staked ETH now represents a significant 21.7% of the entire supply, marking a substantial increase compared to the 6.5% and 15.1% figures observed at the activation of the Merge and Shapella upgrades, respectively.
When evaluated against other supply-related metrics, this adoption becomes even more noteworthy. The supply of ETH that is staked has recently surpassed the 50% mark and has reached an impressive 65% of the supply that has been active over the past year and six months, respectively.
It is worth noting that during this period of rapid expansion, the network has exhibited remarkable stability, with only two relatively minor incidents where block finalization temporarily failed for a few minutes, but subsequently, the network autonomously recovered without significant disruption.
Upbit, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, recently uncovered counterfeit Aptos tokens generated by malicious actors. Consequently, the exchange has temporarily halted both deposits and withdrawals of this particular asset.
Based on blockchain data, it has come to light that fraudsters successfully created fake Aptos tokens, distributing them to nearly 400,000 wallets. The Upbit team issued a statement explaining that their security system inadvertently identified the fraudulent tokens as genuine, prompting the suspension of deposit and withdrawal services.
As of the time of this announcement, the exchange has resumed normal account operations. However, Upbit has cautioned its users that the value of the coin may vary significantly across different trading platforms.
Despite this unfortunate incident, investor interest in the Aptos asset has surged. APT/KRW has emerged as the trading pair with the highest volume on Upbit over the past 24 hours. Remarkably, the asset has ascended to the 38th position in market capitalization, boasting a daily trading volume of approximately $107 million.
Optimism (OP) witnessed a decline in its price on Monday, primarily in anticipation of an impending increase in its circulating supply within the Ethereum scaling network's native token ecosystem.
The token is scheduled to undergo an unlocking event this coming Saturday, as reported by Token.Unlocks. This event will result in the release of 24.16 million OP tokens, equivalent to 3% of its circulating supply, with an approximate value of $30 million. Of this sum, $16 million will be allocated to core contributors of the project, while the remaining $14 million has been earmarked for investors.
In the past 24 hours, OP has experienced a decline of 3.6%, a notable underperformance when compared to the mostly range-bound trends seen in the broader cryptocurrency markets. This decline marks a significant setback for the token, as it has now lost approximately 10% of its value within the span of a week, making it the poorest performer among the top 50 digital assets.
The native token of Synapse, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol with a focus on facilitating data transfers across cross-chain bridges, has experienced a notable resurgence, surging by more than 17% from its recent low of $0.30. This rebound was initiated by a liquidity provider's sale of SYN tokens on Monday.
Earlier this year, Synapse had emerged as one of the top-performing cryptocurrencies, achieving a remarkable 44% increase in a single day back in February. This surge was largely driven by growing optimism surrounding the adoption of cross-chain bridges.
In the wake of the recent sell-off, the trading volume for SYN has seen substantial growth, exceeding $25 million within the past 24 hours alone. To put this in perspective, the highest recorded trading volume in the previous week amounted to $5.9 million, as reported by CoinMarketCap.
The heightened interest in the token resulted in a price spike to $0.425, following a flurry of activity on the Binance platform during Asian trading hours on Wednesday. However, it should be noted that the price has retraced somewhat since then and is currently trading at $0.358.
The protocol has total value locked (TVL) of $113 million
In other news, the core development team at Polkadot is actively exploring ways to expand the current limit of 100 parachains within the ecosystem, with the ambitious goal of eventually accommodating up to 1,000 parachains through software updates in the future.
To facilitate this expansion, an asynchronous backing release is in the pipeline and is expected to be deployed to Polkadot's Rococo testnet within approximately two weeks. This announcement was made by Parity Technologies, a prominent contributor to the Polkadot project, during the sub0 developer conference in Lisbon. It's important to note that the exact timeline for the mainnet release of these updates remains provisional at this stage.
Polkadot operates as an interoperability network, serving as a connective framework for a multitude of application-specific blockchains, known as parachains. These parachains rely on the security provided by a central blockchain known as the Relay Chain.
The implementation of asynchronous backing holds the potential to significantly expand Polkadot's network capabilities. In addition to increasing the number of parachains, it is anticipated that this development will enable Polkadot to grow its roster of Polkadot validators to over 1,000 by the conclusion of 2024, more than tripling the current count. This expansion is poised to enhance the network's overall functionality and scalability.
Get acquainted with the investments of the Binance Labs in 2023:
Crypto lender Celsius confirmed Friday it invested $54 million in bitcoin miner Core Scientific.The funding is part of Celsius' planned $200 million investment in bitcoin mining in North America, according to the company. Celsius said the investment, which occurred during the second quarter, would make it one of the largest U.S. investors in the bitcoin mining industry.Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky described the deal as "good for our community." He added: "They have a lot of assets. That's safer than just investing in a [decentralized finance] project."Core Scientific is the largest host of bitcoin mining machines in North America.The announcement comes just two days after Core Scientific said that it planned to list its shares on Nasdaq through a merger with Power & Digital Infrastructure Acquisition. The miner will have a value of $4.3 billion.
Proof of Play announced $33 million in seed funding to fuel the growth of its invite-only, on-chain pirate RPG, Pirate Nation. Players build ships, recruit crew members and battle enemies to compete for glory on the leaderboard.
Since its beta release in December 2022, Pirate Nation has shipped weekly updates. These include card-based combat, island building and community-led world boss raids.Pirate Nation’s infrastructure is entirely blockchain-based. However, the company plans to quickly immerse players in the game rather than front-loading it with technical barriers to entry. Currently, Pirate Nation is in the process of welcoming its first free-to-play players.
Mesh Connect Inc., a startup that provides a system for enterprise businesses to manage digital assets, said Thursday that it completed a $22 million funding round to build out its platform, which helps customers maintain control over virtual assets such as cryptocurrencies.Using Mesh’s platform, businesses can let customers deposit, hold and move digital assets across different platforms, assets that can include cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum. The system is embeddable into customers’ existing infrastructure and apps, which allows them to perform payments and transfers as well as interact with more than 300 cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets without leaving their own system.Mesh claims that it has gained so far inked deals with more than 70 companies across finance and digital assets within a year of pivoting to an enterprise-focused platform.
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According to Etherscan data, since May 2023, the average gas cost on the Ethereum network has remained in the range of 26-40 Gwei (~$1 at the current exchange rate at the time of writing), with peak values reaching several tens of thousands of Gwei. This is not much for large transfers but still too expensive for everyday payments and interactions with smart contracts.
For this reason, second-layer networks (L2) are gaining popularity. More and more projects are striving to provide users with cheap and fast transactions through their own L2 blockchains.
One of the recent solutions is the Mantle ecosystem, which combines the technical advantages of L2 networks and governance through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Mantle Network is a second-layer network aimed at creating an efficient, accessible, and EVM-compatible environment for blockchain developers.
The project is relatively young. In November 2022, the developers announced the launch of the solution for a limited audience. In January 2023, the team opened access to the testnet, and in July of the same year, to the mainnet.
Mantle Network reduces transaction costs, the deployment and maintenance of smart contracts, and it has a higher throughput than Ethereum. Additionally, it is an L2 network launched and governed by a DAO, which already has experience in decentralized decision-making and the necessary infrastructure.
Mantle Network and the ecosystem built on it are managed by the organization of the same name, Mantle, formerly known as BitDAO.
BitDAO and ByBit are also integrated at the ecosystem level, so the trading platform is actively involved in the development of Mantle.
In May 2023, the BitDAO community voted for the rebranding of BitDAO to Mantle, along with the subsequent transformation of BIT tokens into MNT. The BitDAO website states that the merger is taking place gradually. Based on the table provided on the website, a significant portion of the work in this direction has already been completed.
As of August 2023, BitDAO has undergone almost complete transformation into Mantle and is now operating as the governing DAO of the new ecosystem.
The main difference of Mantle from its competitors lies in its comprehensive approach to project development. The second-layer blockchain is just one element of the concept, which includes:
We will delve into the architecture of Mantle Network in more detail below.
In the Mantle ecosystem, Mantle Network and approved MIPs have separate funding. You can track the reserves and treasury operations through the project's website.
The team is also working on a solution for liquid staking called Mantle LSD.
A modular architecture was used in the creation of Mantle Network. Unlike monolithic blockchains where nodes handle both transaction processing and data storage, in the Mantle network, these functions are separated into distinct modules with their own resources and actors:
Mantle DA is a temporary solution based on EigenLayer's EigenDA product. Once the full staking protocol is launched, the data availability layer of Mantle Network will be migrated to EigenDA, effectively integrating the network into the project's ecosystem.
Like other L2 networks, Mantle uses the Ethereum consensus layer. In simpler terms, transaction finality is ensured by validators who verify the blockchain state data provided by the sequencer.
A detailed schematic of how Mantle Network operates, depicting interactions between its core elements, is provided below.
This architecture allows for a reduction in the load on the main Ethereum blockchain by decreasing the volume of recorded data. It also provides the ability to finely tune the parameters of the L2 network. Additionally, developers can integrate individual modules into applications according to their specific needs.
The Mantle ecosystem boasts the following features:
In addition, Mantle declares one of its goals to be interoperability, meaning integration with other blockchains and L2 networks to provide a seamless user experience. To achieve this, the team has launched a cross-chain bridge and integrated the LayerZero omni-chain protocol.
The combination of modular architecture, decentralized governance, and an ecosystem with one of the largest treasuries in the market could be a key factor in Mantle's success.
As of the time of writing the article, the Mantle ecosystem includes 104 projects in various categories such as DeFi, GameFi, cryptocurrency wallets, infrastructure solutions, and more. Over 30 of these projects are already launched on the mainnet. Some of the key projects include:
Several dozen other projects are in development and available on the testnet.
Catalysts for the growth of the Mantle ecosystem include compatibility with EVM and the availability of a set of development tools from the partner company Thirdweb. This simplifies the creation and deployment of protocols on the Mantle Network. Additionally, the project has already launched a grant program, and there is a proposal under consideration by the DAO to create the $200 million Mantle EcoFund to incentivize application developers.
Mantle (MNT) is the token that governs the Mantle network and ecosystem. Technically, it is an ERC-20 standard token with a total supply of approximately 6.2 billion MNT.
The token was not distributed through early sales or ICOs. Instead, according to the tokenomics, during the initial distribution on July 7, 2023, 51% of MNT was released into circulation, while the remaining 49% remained in the Mantle treasury.
The treasury tokens are in a vesting period, and the timelines and amounts of their unlocking will be determined in accordance with community proposals. MNT in circulation can be purchased or traded on one of the supported centralized exchanges (such as Bybit, Gate, MEXC) or decentralized exchanges (like Uniswap).
Within the Mantle ecosystem, MNT serves three primary functions:
In addition to the interchangeable token, the project has also introduced the Mantle Citizen NFT collection, available to early and active network participants. The team indicates that these avatars will integrate with ecosystem projects and change based on the owner's participation in Mantle activities.
Conferences are a great opportunity to grab the attention of the whales in the crypto industry, spread the word about your project and win some funds! A quick line-up of the upcoming conferences below!
