Arkham not so Intelligent

Hi Raiders,

It’s Friday again. Hopefully all of you are reading this to prepare for the weekend, where you will be going out to spend some time with the girlfriend. Who am I kidding. You’re going to be sitting in front of your computer and reading twitter and trading shitcoins.

A quick market commentary. Coinbase has been absolutely ripping up. It’s up nearly 98% in the past month, and shows no sign of stopping amidst the continued fight against the SEC in the courts, and filing after filing showing progress from spot Bitcoin ETF applicants with Coinbase.

In other news, I’m sure you’ve seen Arkham Intelligence’s new intel-to-earn marketplace and the ARKM token. They’ve gotten a humungous amount of backlash from the announcement, mainly due to the fact that it seems like they’re trying to doxx everyone and their wallet addresses. Oh, let’s not forget that Palantir (big governement contractor) invested in Arkham, and Arkham’s founder, Miguel Morel, likes the CIA on LinkedIn.

EigenLayer opened up more deposit capacity, and it filled up in a few hours to nobody’s surprise. If you follower our twitter account @rektradar, we dropped the alpha early for you.

On the theme of LSTFi, Lybra will be releasing their v2 docs soon, and the testnet soon after, so keep an eye out for that. It will include flash loans, going omnichain, dynamic liquidity provisioning, bribing minting pools, and many more flashy features that should give it some good traction.

That’s it for this week! We hope you enjoy the rest of the newsletter.

-RektRadar

Are you sick of LSTFi yet and the next stETH backed stablecoin? If you are not, I am. So today, we’re not going to talk about anything LST related for this section. We’ll be talking about perps.

There are a few things on the horizon. First on the list is GMX V2. Currently on testnet, it will feature synthetic assets and trading fees that have been halved. New mechanisms will be implemented to balance open interest, and now you don’t have to provide liquidity in GLP. You can isolate what token you want exposure to when providing liquidity.

Synthetix V3’s launch is also expected soon. V3 will be a complete overhaul of the protocol, and will allow Synthetix to be a permissionless derivatives liquidity platform. This is important, cause it allows Synthetix to become a core piece of infrastructure for derivative protocols. In addition, Synthetix is considering using ETH or LSTs as part of the new multi-collateral staking system. It will also deploy onto any EVM-compatible chain. That’s a lot of catalysts if I have seen any.

Lastly, we have Vertex. They recently announced a raise from Wintermute, have started talking about automatic market making integration with Elixir protocol, and is halfway through the initial token phase where 9% of the token supply will be distributed. Vertex is one of the few DEXs that gives me the feeling of a proper CEX experience, with universal cross-margin, an interface I’m familiar with, a great off-chain order matching engine, and features such as liquidation engines that function well.

I would pay attention to perps, keep an eye on who is winning and dominating volumes, and trade accordingly.

Most crypto charts look like this since 2022. Down only. Ribbon is one of the largest options protocols and yet the token chart still looks horrific. Ribbon recently launched Aevo, an onchain derivatives exchanged that was built as a custom rollup using the OP stack.

Today, it was announced that goodbye RBN, hello AEVO. It’s still a governance proposal right now and will have to be voted on, but a few key tokenomics changes include:

• Set $RBN emissions to 0
• Allow veRBN lockers to unlock 100% without penalty
• Stop vault revenue sharing with veRBN lockers
• Current team and investors’ unvested tokens will be revested for another year

Aevo fees could eventually go to AEVO token holders, and the derivatives exchange is seeing much more adoption than Ribbon vaults. If you think a fee switch will eventually be turned on, it could be a good buy.

Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. A few days ago, Unibot hit ATH’s for total volume traded and users. And the trend does not seem to be slowing down. Dopex’s options scalps are actively being integrated as you read this, and Unibot just announced a huge partnership with Coin Gecko.

People often go to a website like Coin Gecko after hearing about a token and want to check the price, marketcap, or FDV. There aren’t a lot of details, but the partnership could be something like Coin Gecko charts in Telegram, trading from the GeckoTerminal, or something else.

The key thing here is not this partnership itself, but what other types of partnerships can Unibot achieve. For example, imagine if they managed to partner with DEX Screener, where everyone goes to check their favourite shitcoin. Imagine the volume it could drive to Unibot.

Lastly, they’re also holding a trading competition that ends this Sunday with a $20K prize pool. And we all know how crazy trading competitions can get sometimes.

We’ve all learnt not to fade Daniele Sesta. Hate him or love him, the guy has a huge following. Popsicle Finance, specifically Wagmi, is his current project. For now, it’s a concentrated liquidity AMM, but they are aiming to build a CEX onchain while leveraging the DeFi experience. Users can expect multiple LP strategies, leverage, and token farming.

Anyways, none of that matters. Tokens, that’s what we’re here for right. The $ICE token is being deprecated in favour of a new token, $WAGMI. The new token just went live and uses LayerZero’s (wink wink) OFT standard to be a multi-chain token. Users can swap their ICE tokens for WAGMI tokens today at a 1:69 ratio. If you’re looking for the instructions, here they are. We all like shiny new tokens, especially ones with silly memeable names build by legendary devs. This could be one of them.

Following that, you can look at LST volume by AMM. Despite Maverick still being a popular protocol, you can actually see that it’s losing a bit of marketshare, with Uniswap and Balancer both gaining a bit of market share in recent weeks. Maybe that’ll reflect in the token price.

However, you can see that Maverick still has the best capital efficiency, defined as trading volume divided by liquidity. So theoretically that means that Maverick LPs should be making a lot more money per dollar of liquidity assuming equal fees.

These are the type of things we like to think about when making good investment decisions. Always use data to look for trends. Don’t just rely on your favourite CT threadors to follow the narrative.