🥹 Mantle goes live

🗞 Market commentary.

GM LARPs,

ETH CC kicks off this week, we’ll be expecting big announcements and plenty of FOMO. Keep your fingers crossed the market doesn’t dump as we all remember what happened when ETH Denver opened up with a cheery sing-song.

Last week was a momentous week as XRP (finally) won its case against the SEC. XRP has been ruled NOT a security, which gives us a glimmer of hope towards the SEC’s continued rampant attack on both Ethereum and the broader market. 

Exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken rushed to relist the now-not-a-security, token to take advantage of the monstrous 73% daily candle after the ruling was announced which trapped, liquidated and took over $200m from the bears.

As XRP now flips BNB in the top 10 rankings, one of two things may happen: the reignition of a bull run as mainstream media catches on, or Gary and his chumps get smarter as they “review the decision” which may indicate a potential appeal on the horizon.

But then again AI might be in his sights as he “warns of AI risk to financial stability” and “cautions companies in touting AI in corporate docs.”

One of the biggest debates to hit crypto Twitter was spurred on by Tangent Founder @0xWangarian who said: “You need >$10m to go out your own as a full-time individual investor in crypto.” Essentially saying that you need to farm stables, ape frog coins and continue larping on crypto Twitter.

Terrible advice for the majority of crypto investors with small bank roles as the mercenary farmers will always out-farm you. Let’s be honest now, if you made $10m from crypto it probably wasn’t through farming stables.

Plus, last week’s Arkham Intelligence scandal goes live today on Binance with Wintermute and GSR Markets serving as market makers. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt it’s that “questionable” tokens with big backers often pump.

🤓 In today’s email.

• Degen corner. Mantle LIVE on mainnet

• DeFi insights. Lybra V2 “alpha leak” & thread

• ICYMI. blocmates research sneak peek “A Tapioca DAO bull case” article

• Top tweets. HsakaTrades, which [insertanimal]Swap will UniSwap go for next?

• And finally. Earnings are coming, will AI pump again?

🔥 Degen corner

Mantle LIVE on mainnet

Mercenary capital at the ready!

The first 48-72 hours are some of the most important, and dangerous, for any Layer 1 or Layer 2 launch.

Why?

Because the pump ‘n’ dump devs and mercenaries enter with haste while legit projects get set up and ready to go. It’s the time when the first movers take advantage and the second movers wait to see what went wrong.

Everything in this mini tldr on Mantle is NFA, DYOR and remember… it’s a PVP world out there so “play from a position of strength” - RandomTask555, aka trading guru.

What is it?

Once BitDAO and now rebranded as “Mantle”, it’s the new, cool, hip kid on the block.

The latest in a new generation of modular roll-up layer 2s with the objective, as always, to further scale Ethereum with all of the usual good stuff… faster transactions, low gas fees and security inherited from Ethereum’s mainnet.

Modular roll-ups keep things very simple by splitting the core operations up to be performed on specialised layers aka being a master of one thing vs bang average at many.

The team has also partnered with Eigen Layer to use and build a separate data availability layer that will theoretically give Mantle a hyper-scaled throughput on heavy-duty apps and data scalability to allow a new breed of dapp to be built… in theory.

Some interesting stats posted by the team since testnet began…

What’s coming?

Greener pastures for devs and degenerates.

For the devs

The BitDAO treasury is coming. The MIP-24 proposal was passed bridging the $200,000,000 war chest of gold into the Mantle ecosystem to incentivise innovation to create the Future of France. If you’re a builder, check out the proposal to get involved.

The ecosystem fund looks to deploy 40 top-notch top-quality projects over the next 3 years. We’ve seen interest from Animoca Ventures, Bankless Ventures, and Dragonfly Capital as strategic risk partners.

For the degenerates

@CJCJCJCJ_ made a cheat sheet on the projects launching on Mantle with one of Arbitrum favourites Pendle Finance and solidly fork Magma Finance which takes the old ve(3,3) model, adds options and might be one to watch.

If you do participate in the Mantle sh*tcoin casino remember to ape smart, take profits and if you do become a community member bag holder… Hope for the best!

👀 DeFi insights.

The important bits.

• GND Protocol - gETH launches July 19th - Read

• Lens Protocol - Introduces V2 - Read

• Lybra Finance - V2 docs release this week, here’s a comparison to V1, including a spoiler alert “starting with Arbitrum” - Read 

• PepesGame - Lock over 5% PLS supply in V2 contract - Read

• Polkadot - Ditch the infamous parachain auction system - Read

• Polygon - MATIC to be rebranded as POL, a “third generation token” to be used across all Polygon chains - Read

• Popsicile Finance - Breakdown of the new WAGMI token ahead of the WAGMI platform release - Read

• Sparta DEX - Sold out in 48 seconds, listing GameSwift listing on July 21st 10am UTC - Read

• SNX - Goes head to head with dYdX and AEVO in the battle of the dexes in an announcement to release “Infinex” - Read

• Syndr - Building on Arbitrums Orbit, Beta test goes live - Read

• UniSwap - Launches a new open-sourced agreement “UniSwapX” which appears similar to CowSwap - Read

• Venus Protocol - V4 introduces isolated pools - Read

• YoloNolo - Migration from Solana to Ethereum in progress with bonus tokens for early migrators - Read 

DeFi news.

• Build on Base - Base mainnet is now open to builders ahead of general availability in August - Read

• Synapse - Vote to dump their ARB airdrop in favour of ETH to increase ETH liquidity - Read

• ZachXBT - Uncovers phishing scammer “Soup” who recently exploited discord servers including Orbiter Finance and Pika Protocol - Read

• zkSYNC - Launch Boojum for Era mainnet, a new type of proof - Read

🫠 ICYMI.

Why is Solana Pumping? with HXRO Labs founder Gunny

blocmates podcast.

Grant was joined by Gunny from Hxro Labs to discuss the recent movements on Solana. In this episode, you will learn how the Hxro Network works including value accrual for stakers. How other protocols can build on Hxro and what the benefits of that are including PepperDEX, FlowmaticXYZ, IconicMarkets and YoloNoloBot.

Tune in on Spotify | YouTube →

The Tapioca Bull Case.

Research.

Continuing with some teasers of what to expect on the blocmates Research (BR) section of the new website for LARP holders and BR subscribers.

Read more →

Spool: A Complete Guide

Research.

With Spool Version 2 coming soon, we dig into what upgrades the team has made. Spool V2 is a DeFi toolbox and this complete rewrite of V1 has built a faster and more efficient product that appeals to both DeFi degenerates and TradFi institutes too hesitant to enter degen DeFi.

Read more →

🐥 Top tweets.

@Arthur_0x, have we? Is it true? Has it really ended?!

@MetaLawMan, well that’s a bit awkward for SEC Chair Gary Gensler…

@HsakaTrades, UniSwap coming for [InsertAnimal]Swap next!

🦍 And finally…

Macro markets seem to finally be coming to terms that a recession might not happen, which might just end up being psyops to keep retail aping in as a number of key charts, including the S&P500, are tapping on strong levels of resistance since it back to rally began back in March.

Weekly volume on Bitcoin is still relatively sparse but with Larry Fink shilling his bags ahead of a potential spot BTC ETF being approved it does give a dose of hopium as we head into earnings season.

AI ran HARD during previous earnings and it wouldn’t be surprising if we see more tech companies make speculative AI announcements leading to another global-wide AI bull run bubble.

🤝 A final word.

A quick word from our super awesome sponsors who help us make this all possible...

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