Adoption by Stripe and JPMorgan, Arca Buying $NXM, Big Macro Update & More

The Castle Chronicle: Volume 39

AuthorAuthorAuthorAuthor

unex, han solar, 0x_Vlad & Caroulemapoule
October 18, 2023

 👀 What’s to Come in Volume 39

🔑 Key News: Trader Joe Sued, JPMorgan Blockchain App, USDR Depeg, Blur Season 2 & more from CJ

⛓ On-Chain Sleuthing: On-Chain Fomo, Arca Buying $NXM feature along with Smart Money Moves from Cl

🔥 Hot Narratives Scroll Mainnet, Uniswap, Airdrops from unexployed

📈 Macro Outlook: Simplified Round-up and Implications from Hansolar

📉 HTF Price Action Scenarios from Vlad

⚔️ A Call to Arms

Think you have what it takes to enter the Castle and contribute to funding and advising projects across the space?

🔑 Key News

Major Headlines

  • Traderjoe sued by a grocery chain with the same name

  • JPMorgan's blockchain-based collateral settlement application goes live

  • WOO Network reached a settlement with Teneo to cancel 3AC's shares and burn tokens

  • Metamask integrates Stripe

  • SEC does not plan to appeal court decision on Grayscale spot Bitcoin ETF conversion

  • Ferrari begins accepting crypto payments for its cars

  • BOND Token Soars After BarnBridge Votes to ‘Comply’ With SEC

  • Tax Report Unveils Hundreds of South Korean Crypto Whales

Exploits/Updates that Happened this Week

  • 3Commas customers without 2FA experienced security breach

  • USDR depegged

  • Galxe announces $396,000 refund to affected users following DNS attack

  • PlatypusDefi exploited for $1M

  • Stars Arena recovered 90% of the lost funds

  • Belugadex exploited

  • Zachxbt informs that scammers have stolen Italian Government emails

  • TrueUSD third-party security breach revealed blockchain wallet addresses of clients

Useful Weekly DeFi Updates

  • Binance announces Neutron on their launchpool

  • Blur announces Season 2 starts on November 20

  • Apeswap announces new token migration

  • Instadapp introduces lending protocol Fluid in the testing phase, aiming for a January release

  • Scroll mainnet goes live

  • Proposal by Polygon co-founder for Apecoin to launch a zk-L2 using Polygon CDK

  • SSV Network founder drafted to the military

  • Popsicle Finance to deploy WAGMI on Kava

  • YearnFi tokenomics facelift

  • Ether Fi shares update and announces eETH within a month

  • Rabby introduces Rabby Desktop

Some Interesting Projects

  • Rio Network: Liquid restaking network

  • Thora Finance: Sonne fork by Mare team, launching on Polygon zkEVM

  • Vistara Labs: Hardware Availability Layer

  • Flooring Protocol: Protocol that fragments NFTs into liquid tokens for trading

  • Big Time: Free-to-play, multiplayer action RPG

  • MACI: E-voting platform that minimizes the risk of collusion and bribery

Courtesy of CJ - check out his telegram channel for daily news, projects updates and new releases

⛓ On-Chain Sleuthing

Fake BTC ETF Exposes Sidelinooorrs

The fake announcement of the BTC spot ETF on October, 16th, was followed by a huge pump of 10% in mere minutes and got retraced almost immediately. This event showed us that lots of capital are still sitting on the sideline.

A great example is the following address: 0×40…c5f6. Let’s refer to him as Fomo’or.

See, Mister Fomo’or couldn’t contain his excitement during the fake announcement and he immediately bought 613k USDC of wBTC once the news came out.

The poor guy quickly regretted his decision and after only 10 minutes he sold the entire position with a 50k USDC loss after he realized the announcement was fake.

The address is still holding over 1 million stables and offers a glimpse in the amount of stables on-chain, waiting to re-enter once the tides turn and the music starts playing again.

Arca Hedge Fund Buying Nexus Mutual

The famous crypto investment group, Arca, has been building a large position in Nexus Mutual. They are now holding over 550k USD worth of Nexus on-chain and the tokens have been bought off Binance.

What’s the play here? We know $NXM has gotten the interest of DCFGod and other RFV’oorss, but it has yet to come to fruition… Does Arca know something?

Arca Wallet [only for free subs]

Research and analysis by Cl

🔥 Hot Narratives

Scroll Mainnet Live

Today Scroll announced the launch of its Mainnet:

Already a bunch of coins are mooning as degens pile in to find the next $BALD. We highly advise you to stay away from many of these launches as it will likely result in a rugpull.

That being said, Scroll does not have a token, and you always want to have some activity on chains without a token. You can find a bridge here.

Some projects that we like:

$440k TVL in SkyDrome, so tangible opportunity there.

Uniswap Getting Slandered

The founder of Uniswap, Hayden Adams, recently announced a 0.15% swap fee on their interface. It was an insane decision for which he got a lot of slack from the entire DeFi community.

We had a good laugh at the 1inch Tweet:

The fee applies to swaps between two of the following assets: ETH, USDC, WETH, USDT, DAI, WBTC, agEUR, GUSD, LUSD, EUROC, XSGD.

Also, only applied on Ethereum Mainnet.

Therefore be vigilant when making swaps on Uniswap as they may expand the token list in the future. We want to reiterate that the swap fee is only applied on their website, on their interface. Aggregators are not affected as they use the backend of Uniswap.

As an alternative use the llamaswap by DeFiLlama. Great product, a great team, fully aligned with the ethics and principles of crypto.

Airdrop Opportunity Corner

First of all, a reminder to all our fellow on-chain degens to check your Celestia eligibility. If you have used L2s over the past few months, there is a big chance you have an airdrop of ~80 $TIA (OTC now $2). Check for yourself on their claim page.

That being said, only 30% of eligible wallets have claimed their airdrop and all unclaimed may be redistributed to them:

As Scroll has launched and poses yet again another big airdrop opportunity, we thought it would be good to list a few of our favorite airdrop opportunities.

The following three are extremely viable and do not require much action, just LP and make some swaps/trades here and there:

  • HyperLiquidX (Arbitrum

    • Provide liquidity and take some trades.

  • Ambient DEX (ETH & Canto)

    • Provide liquidity and make some swaps

  • EigenLayer (ETH)

    • Wait till someone unstakes and withdraws and LP to the platform.

And of course all the major chains: LayerZero, zkSync, Linea, Base, and StarkNet.

Courtesy of unexployed

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💹 Macro Outlook

Please note that if certain technical jargon or concepts mentioned in this text are unclear, you can refer to investopedia.com for detailed explanations and definitions. Additionally, for a comprehensive overview of macroeconomic events, you can explore the event calendar on investing.com/economic-calendar/.

Upcoming Events

  • Tues, Oct 17th : US Retail Sales

  • Wed, Oct 18th: US Building Permits, TSLA/NFLX earnings

  • Thurs, Oct 19th: US Jobless Claims, Existing Home Sales

  • Fri, Oct 20th : Powell Speech

BTC, ETH, and Macro

  • Plenty of positive news this week for Bitcoin;

    • The SEC not appealing its case against Grayscale by the deadline last Friday has led to a bullish start to the week.

    • Continued updates from Ark and Invesco Galaxy on their ETF applications mean the SEC is moving their applications forward.

    • According to analyst James Wang, who pointed out how mispriced bonds since the end of 2022, he now believes bond yields are too bearish. He believes rate hikes are now mostly done and will fall sooner than the market anticipates.

    • As mentioned in the previous week, growing conflict in the Middle East has inevitably led to the ‘flight-to-quality’ trade as we can see in Gold’s rapid move up. During the past cycle Bitcoin has followed Gold rallies. It is not unreasonable that this pattern returns.

  • Contrasting to BTC, ETH price action and sentiment have been muted. With higher rates really digging into the pockets of market participants, it feels unlikely ETH will act as a beta asset to BTC until financial conditions loosen.

Option Markets

  • BTC IV and Skews: IVs shot up 10% points with the misreported ETF news and are currently staying elevated as dealers seem to start to hedge positions past 28k. Skews became more bullish with the push upwards.

  • Considering BTC gamma charts, dealers are positively positioned around 29k and negative beyond this barrier. If we push past 29k, it could be a swift move up towards 31k.

  • ETH IV and Skews: ETH IVs made almost no move despite the 10% spike in BTC IVs. This is indicative of the bearish vol regime the dealers are anticipating for ETH for the next couple of months.

Courtesy of Hansolar - check out his telegram chat for all things options, crypto and DeFi

📈 HTF Price Action Scenarios

Gm frens!

The range shenanigans continue. I am still waiting for a proper bullish push to jump on, but it is nowhere to be seen. For the record, I won’t even look at a long order until ETH breaks the at least 1800 and even then I’ll want to see very specific things. We’re far from that.

  • Range high liquidated

  • Daily demand tapped

  • Re-accumulation playing out

  • Waiting for bullishness to prove itself

Once again - outperform others by staying out. Once big money comes in, we’ll see it and we can get positioned. Until then…

Trade (or don’t trade) responsibly and I’ll see y’all next week!

Courtesy of Vlad - trend-based trader and MentFX student

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Virtually yours,

The Castle

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