🔴 Banking Crisis = Emergency Liquidity

🗞 Market commentary.

Grand Morning. 

Papa Bitcoin’s teasing us this week, flirting with the over seventy-thousand promised land but refusing to seal the deal. Even though the market structure and outlook remain undoubtedly bullish, it’s best to mentally prepare for a possible slowdown and one more pullback before the big show begins. 

So, how do we get over the edge and blast upwards? A dash of emergency liquidity might just do the trick. Yesterday evening, news broke that 63 banks in the USA are on the brink of insolvency due to banks sitting on $517 billion in unrealized losses. This is eerily reminiscent of March last year when the macro experts assured us that FDIC-provided emergency liquidity wouldn’t affect markets in any way. We all know what has happened since then.

In other news, is the meme coin slash on-chain mania reaching a fever pitch? Google Trends agrees as we see a historical all-time high for “onchain” searches. It's definitely a thing to look out for; no narrative lasts forever. 

📊 Luke’s Chart of the Day

FTM/USDT 12H Binance Log Chart

The Fantom structure looks similar to our Friday chart ($TNSR—played out nicely). Range-bound accumulation (purple box), breakout, and retest of the top of the range. Point of control (red line) reclaim in progress. There is lots of building there at the moment with the Sonic upgrade. Gaz covered it recently in this Blocmates.com piece—worth a read for a good overview. Andrew Saul in Discord also had some great things to say about Defi and memecoin opportunities.

Network activity is nowhere near where it got to last cycle, but bridged TVL is ramping. We must be early, right?

Come by the Lucky Luke Discord channel for comments, to roast my picks or to pump your own bags. All banter is welcome any time!

🔥 Degen corner.

Zee Kay

You might have noticed the little beef around the “ZK” ticker lately, for which Matter Labs, builders of zkSync, eventually had to drop all trademarks. No matter the ticker, it seems like zkSync is coming sooner rather than later (the hints are stacking up). 

In preparation for the zk season fueled by one of the largest upcoming airdrops and ecosystem incentives, let’s have a look at 4 interesting ecosystem projects that we can find and watch before the stimmy check-fueled liquidity arrives:

• Holdstation

A smart contract wallet provides account abstraction and futures trading in the zkSync Era. 

• Koi

Koi, previously Mute, is one of the leading DEXs on zkSync, competing with the more well-known SyncSwap.

• It’s me, Zorro

As we all know, every ecosystem has its memecoin mascots. This one is attempting to be the one for zkSync. 

• Zeek

First cat token on zkSync.

👀 DeFi insights.

The important bits.

• MOG (Meme) - Listed on Bybit - read

• Aave (DeFi) - Achieves larger TVL than all L2 chains - read

• Pudgy Penguins (NFT) - Launching a mobile game next year - read

• Arbitrum (L2) - Features CowSwap news in a tweet - read

• 21co (DeFi) - Provides Bitcoin on Solana - read

• IntentX (DEX) - INTX token now available on Merchant More - read

• ionet (GPU, AI) - Introduces Season 3 - read

• Arena (SocialFi) - Sets out airdrop plans - read

• Ondo (RWA) - Partners with Mantra - read

📰 DeFi news.

Even more important bits.

• Ark Invest abandons Ethereum ETF application - read

• RoaringKitty reveals a $210 million $GME call position - read

• Hong Kong government voice support for DeFi - read

• A16Z tops up crypto election fund by $25 mil - read

• Yuga Labs made $124M in 2022 but still in loss of -$11M  - read

• Chamath: “Bitcoin can go to $200k - $500k” - read

• Salafic cleric writes a Fatwa deeming Bitcoin acceptable under Islam - read

• Bitpanda solidifies ties with Deutsche Bank - read

• Dapper Labs agrees to $4 million settlement - read

• Saylor to pay $40 million to settle tax fraud lawsuit- read

🫠 ICYMI.

Life gets busy so here’s what you’ve missed.

Is The Fun Moving to Fantom? All You Need To Know About The Sonic Upgrade

Research

All we know is the Sonic upgrade is coming, it's looking solid, and if Andre has it his way, the resurgence could be pretty big.

If that's the case, performance will be critical - precisely what Sonic is centered around...

Read More →

Merging Web2 and Web3 Gaming Worlds: From Guild FI to Zentry

Podcast

In this episode of the blocmates podcast, Jedi is joined by Jaindr as they explore the intricate world of Zentry (formerly Guild Fi).

They take an insightful look into its technical details and the innovative products their team has developed.

Tune in on Spotify | YouTube →

🐥 Tweet of the day.

To save you doom scrolling.

The amount of people concerned about the compliance of a fellow degen, all the while there are people like Nancy right inside the US government, is quite amusing…

🦍 And finally…

The proper crypto gaming season is yet to happen in this cycle. I’m looking around for picks for my portfolio, and so far, I’m still arriving at Zentry, previously GuildFi. Their $150M treasury is massive, and it’ll be interesting to watch how it’s used, especially once the proper gaming narrative hits again.

If you haven’t already… hit the subscribe button and get the coolest welcome email in crypto!