Hamster Racing, On The Blockchain?

A weekly recap of the largest crypto events and narratives, with an extra dose of insight.

Here’s what we have for you:

• Hamster Racing

• Unibot X

• GNS new tokenomics

• CCIP

• UniswapX

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Hamster racing.

That’s it for this week’s big story. Thank you.

No, I’m serious.

This week, devs managed to put hamster racing on the blockchain. The project is called Hamsters.GG and promises to revolutionise the entire world. If speculating on meme coins wasn’t enough, crypto degens can now bet on whether Sparky (my favourite contestant) is going to beat three other hamsters.

Before you even ask, of course, there is a token $HAMS. 🐹

What does the token do?,

HamstersGG takes a 5% cut of all bets. And with a fee switch turned on from day one, HAMS receives 4% of that cut.

In a shocking turn of events, someone managed to FUD the hamsters, saying that the hamster racing was fake and that the platform was just looping the streams but renaming the hamsters. However, it was later clarified that races were pre-recoded, but very much real, and the site was simply crashing from too much traffic.

If you bought the HAMS token anytime before July 19th, you’re likely up at least 100x. Yes, I feel your pain too.

Where does this bring us?

Evidently, it seems like speculation is still crypto’s main use case, for better or for worse.

But more importantly, it seems like the meta has changed. If you ask yourself, would HAMS or HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu have been worth $20M and $50M respectively six months ago? It feels like the answer would probably be know.

We’ve entered a new paradigm that’s even more degen than DOGE and SHIB. In the current meta, tokens go up not just cause of the meme, but also its associations and if people like what’s behind it.

-RektRadar

Since the beginning of the year, DeFi’s TVL has stayed relatively flat. Only increasing ~10% from $40B to $45B. However, DeFi lending has slowly picked back up.

Since January, the total dollar amount of active loans has increased by nearly 50% to its current $5.3B.

Why could this be happening?

There are two main reasons I think this could be happening.

1. Increase of leverage in the system

   As the market slowly warms up and we slowly get more and more positive catalysts between spot ETF approvals and the XRP news, traders could be using more leverage through borrowing to position themselves.

2. Growth of LSTs

   LSTs are one of DeFi’s biggest sectors today and shows no signs of slowing down. One of the most common things users are doing to boost returns is leveraged looping, where they are depositing their LSTs as collateral, and then borrowing ETH against it to stake. This could be a large driver of active loan volume.

UniswapX, a new “not so” revolutionary auction based protocol.

What does all of that mean?

Previously, if you were trading on Uniswap, you could only market buy or sell. This means that you have to take whatever price that the Uniswap liquidity pool offered you.

With UniswapX, one can sign an offchain order. e.g. I want to buy 2 ETH at a price of $1800. A solver will then come in, look for all the liquidity out there, including liquidity outside of Uniswap or through other aggregators, or even on centralised exchanges, and help you execute your order.

What are the implications?

First of all, UniswapX has essentially combined the designs of 1Inch and Cowswap 🐮, there’s no shame in hiding that.

Second of all, a large number of crypto users still trade through Uniswap. Which means that you may start using Uniswap’s aggregator instead of other aggregators such as 1Inch or Paraswap. So this should be pretty bearish aggregator tokens. 📉

Lastly, UniswapX will also have the ability for solvers to help with cross-chain swapping and bridging. Which means that UniswapX can help you bridge your tokens. And if UniswapX can do everything, why would you bother interacting with other bridges? 🌉

The Superapp Thesis

I’ve always believed that one day, there will be a DeFi superapp. It looks like Uniswap is slowly but surely becoming that superapp.

Between Uniswap wallet, Uniswap V4, and UniswapX, Uniswap is primed to be the one interface where everyone does much of their DeFi trading, which is still DeFi’s largest sector today by activity.

Sure, you could argue that Unibot is also making moves into becoming the “go to” platform that everyone trades on, but Uniswap is still the underlying DEX with huge network effects in its liquidity, and Unibot is a drop in the pond compared to Uniswap. 💧