👑 “DeFi” is Dead, Long Live DeFi

🗞 Market commentary.

GM, the vibes are improving.

As we march toward Friday’s quad witching, it feels like the bears are running out of time. Their attempt to break $64,000 per BTC turned out to be weak, and from where we’re looking, we are poised for a stronger bounce. With quad-witching dates often marking the bottom, it’s worth considering that BTC may have already hit it.

The most crucial observation is that, along with an increasingly likely turnaround in Bitcoin dominance, we’re seeing a resurgence in DeFi interest. The recent Curve Finance liquidation drama underscores a classic market truth: markets bottom out on capitulation and high volume. Social trends are backing our bias, with interest shifting sharply toward DeFi.

Protocols like Pendle are paving the way for more product-market-fit projects to follow suit. Meanwhile, in the background, there are tons of projects waiting to start announcing what they were working in preparation for the big TradFi money entry. Just remember things like project Mariana, The Bank For International Settlements testing Curve’s AMM technology, and possibilities of tokenization. 

As we mentioned at the start of the week, DeFi is likely the main rotation of this bull run, and right now, it’s barely leaving the bear market.

📊 Luke’s Chart of the Day

ENS/USDT 1W

There have been 2.5 years of consolidation for $ENS, and it looks ready to push higher here. A re-architected ENSv2 is in the works, which means a new L2 with lower fees. This is likely a good spot-hold if Ethereum is due to cross over into mainstream trading. Normies don’t like lengthy 0x addresses. 

Price-wise, we have already had three or four taps at the $27.50 level. There’s a chance we go for one more pullback, so in addition to a small bag, I have limit bids set from $23 down to $20 (purple box). There’s not much resistance until the mid-40s, and with this long of consolidation, I am expecting a decent breakout that could go much higher, provided, of course, that ETH continues to show strength.

NFA as per usual, please always do your own research.

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.

Searching for the DeFi Pump

The rotation is becoming clear: DeFi is back. After Convex, the so-far clear leader of the DeFi Pump, we might want to examine Convex-like protocols, overall Curve ecosystem protocols, and future money markets.

• Convergence Finance

Convergence functions as a meta governance blackhole, and just last month, it integrated its Void product with Convex. Their main yielding asset, ysCVG, provides passive exposure to the finest cash-flowing DeFi assets. Thanks to all the drama caused by volume around Curve and Convex, ysCVG is currently yielding 110% APR. 

CVX is still a micro-cap, and if nothing bad, like exploits, happens, there’s massive room for growth here.

• Stake DAO

StakeDAO is a massive CRV holder that provides automated strategies and liquid lockers. Thanks to these, you can boost your yield and voting power while keeping liquidity on your governance tokens by converting them to sdTokens. 

The current market cap is only around $15M. 

• Tapioca 

I mentioned Tapioca very briefly this week, but the more I see, the more I believe this beauty has a chance to provide us with a Pendle-like run.

This is undoubtedly the best project on Layer Zero so far.

👀 DeFi insights.

The important bits.

• AAVE (DeFi) - Flipped Maker in revenue - read

• Eigen Layer (LRT) - Phase 2 claims are live - read

• Blast (L2) - Airdrop goes live next week - read

• Milady (NFT) - Teases “MILADYBOORU” - read

• eBTC (DeFi) - eBTC pool now 3rd highest yielding (34%) pool on Curve - read

• Gnosis (DeFi) - Passed a vote for $30M buyback - read

• Sophon (L1) - Sophon Farming launched - read

• Marinade (Solana LST) - Unveils “auction marketplace” - read

• Layer Zero (Omnichain) - Airdrop claim is live - read

📰 DeFi news.

Even more important bits.

• Binance to pay $2.5M  penalty to India's financial intelligence unit - read

• Australia's largest stock exchange lists its first spot bitcoin etf - read

• Zachxbt wins Arkham's $150k bounty - read

• MicroStrategy buys another 11,931 Bitcoin ($786 million) - read

• Over 1 million new tokens have been created since April - read

• Jeremy Allaire (Circle) presents his bullish outlook on crypto - read

• Kraken discloses it was exploited for nearly $3 million - read

🫠 ICYMI.

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

Revealed: Karak’s Three-Part Strategy for Staking Success

Podcast

In this episode of Still Early, Grant chats with Dewpey from Karak about the innovative restaking protocol they're developing.

Tune in on YouTube →

The Unstoppable DEX is Set For a Huge Q3 and Here's Why

Research

DeFi world domination is back on, and Unstoppable has not stopped blowing up our DMs about all the new UnstoppableFi features

The timing of this one makes sense. We've let CryptoTube loose on the Unstoppable dApp to test everything new and preview what's coming in Q3.

Tune in on YouTube →

🦍 And finally…

If DeFi is back, we’re laying the groundwork for what could be the greatest Layer 1 launch of this bull run: Berachain, where memes collide with decentralized finance and the science of ponzinomics.

Stay tuned for more on this soon.

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