The Blockchain Bulletin Edition#4

Hey there, degens! Edition#4 does a roundup of the NFT market and the metas currently catching attention in Web3. The Blockchain Bulletin also takes a close look at projects and potential cooks to be excited about in the weeks and months to come. Read on for the alpha!

Zooming out with Wasabi 

NFT markets almost slowed to a halt in recent weeks, but coins have still been working out for traders. The catch? The space is currently filled with insider and celebrity coins taking off. Every D-list celebrity is launching a coin and extracting liquidity from their followers. You can’t blame them for doing it though it’s not great when they’re propagated by big names in the crypto space (I’m looking at you, Ansem).

Several communities on twitter/X have gone silent; the chop is causing mental pain for traders. Many will lose their 2024 gains during this period. Newbies have been getting rekt. Anyone who jumped into crypto after hearing about prices soaring in 2024 is supposedly down on their buys. But all is not lost, and let me give you some hope; BTC will chop through summer and start picking up steam again in September. We stay in this range and we’ll be teleporting to 100K per BTC before you can blink. We’ve seen this same exact playbook play out a couple times. History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes.

Do not lose your coins to the suits. HODL.

The policy roundup

SEC Chair Gary Gensler has indicated that the ETH spot ETFs will be given the green light in the summer, with Bloomberg analysts estimating early July as the month of their launch. Despite heavy spot BTC ETF inflows, many on twitter/X have seen the stagnant price action of BTC as hedge funds going heavy on their short positions in CME futures to benefit from lower prices on spot ETF positions. This has been indicated by experts as the cause of the flat price action we are currently observing. There’s also speculation that a bankrupt exchange is offloading their BTC through the ETF.

Zumbah’s market watch: Farms and airdrops

June looks to be the month of airdrops. We saw Pirate Nation’s token launch of $PIRATE draw initial criticism on the allocation, but the team sorted things out afterwards. The token is trading at .34$ with 92M market cap on multiple centralised exchanges such as Coinbase, Bybit, Gate.io and Bitget.

The rumours surrounding Zksync's impending airdrop turned out to be true as ZKNation, the foundation behind ZKsync, announced the checker for their upcoming token launch on June 17 with 17% of the 21 billion supply airdropped to users. The announcement was met with heavy criticism as the base allocation criteria for the token was heavily focused on liquidity on-chain and in pools rather than active user transactions, with many users deemed ineligible despite fulfilling the original expected criteria.

Photon bot, one of the most widely-used trading bots for Solana memecoins, has also announced an airdrop for its users on June 17, with most details about the drop not yet revealed.

Blast is also launching on June 26, after postponing the launch last month for their $Blast token. People are still actively participating in the airdrop farming campaign as many DAPPS still have big amounts of Blast Gold left to be distributed amongst their users before the token generation event (TGE). Blur has announced that its third season will end on June 26 as well, because it was powered by Blast. Initial estimates for price: 

1 blast gold = 5-7$
1 million points = 100$

LayerZero's token, $LZO is also launching this month on June 20, and the discussion around it is increasing as the protocol's founder, Bryan Pallegrino, is going through the process of filtering sybils and clarifying the airdrop criteria publicly on X. Despite initial criticism and disappointment around the self sybil and bounty hunting methods introduced by the protocol, users and observers are coming to positive conclusions about what is to come, as the protocol is transparent about the process behind the token launch and is taking real-time feedback from the community onboard.

Memecoin exhaustion and chasing metas 

On-chain volumes have dried up quite a bit over the past month. We’ve had a few metas play out but nothing significant. We had Chinese coins popping off on ETH and SOL with the likes of $Bazinga and $Peipei running to crazy highs. Along with these, we still have celebrity coins running, with the most recent being Ryan Garcia looking to launch his and joining the list with Iggy Azalea, Andrew Tate, Lil Pump and many others.

‘Onchain Summer’ coined by Jesse Pollak seems to be dead as on-chain volume on BASE is the lowest in the past six months. Hoping to see more on that from the coinbase team.

Ordinals are dead (for the 17th time?) by ShoaibHere

Last week Unisat airdropped their community 5-bytes BRC-20 $pizza based on the three-month activity on their wallets, which is currently trading at $5. Nice little stimmy for their users.

Rune#37, COOK•THE•MEMPOOL by @the_runedev minted out and became the most minted rune ever by 4.3m mint transactions.

All major Ordinal collections are currently in the downtrend following the Bitcoin price action and lack of on-chain attention.

Alpha: Lock In

Here’s some alpha for all you trench warriors looking for the next 100x memecoin. A coin that has been up only in a market of chop is $lockin. Why is it going up so much? Because it's a commonly used term that’s being adopted by terminally online people and others alike. Other similar coins are $aura or $giga along with $mog. These are culture coins more than memecoins and that's why they stand out.

Follow the trends before you’re forced to succumb to them.

Project in focus: Lucid

Here is another list of upcoming projects. Remember: Many bangers from the last list haven't minted yet. You might want to check out the previous newsletter again to make sure you are up to speed.

The markets seem slow and stagnant but there are still opportunities coming left and right. These are the times when something entirely new pops up and takes everyone by storm and forms a new meta. Keep your eyes peeled and enjoy your summers. Hold your coins and stay updated with Olympus! Tweet at us to send us projects you have your eyes on!