💣 Blur's Fee Switch Goes Brrrr

A weekly recap of the largest crypto events and narratives, with an extra dose of insight.

Here’s what we have for you:

• Uniswap wallet android release

• Metamask gets kicked, and then re-added to app store

• Lido dominance

• Unibot ecosystem fund

• Blur fee switch

Good morning frens. It would seem that big tech still doesn’t like crypto, yet. On Saturday, it was announced that Metamask was removed from the app store. However, it seems like 3 hours later, it got added back. Was it an innocent mistake, or did something actually happen behind the scenes? If I had to guess, it was probably just a genuine accident. Uniswap, on the other hand, successfully launched its wallet beta on Android, paving the way for more mobile native wallet solutions, because, let’s face it, mobile wallets still suck today.

We all know payments have always been a big use case of crypto, and Metamask isn’t letting the temporary app store removal get in their way. Last week, Metamask announced that US users will now be able to onramp to crypto using Stripe. For those unfamiliar, Stripe is a huge technology company that helps millions upon millions of companies process payments. Anything that helps users onramp without having to make a CEX account is good, in my opinion.

The hacks keep on going, and Google does absolutely nothing to prevent scam google ads. That’s why @0xngmi, founder of DeFiLlama, chose to make a chrome browser extension that allows someone to do a custom search while prioritising safe domains. No more pesky Google ads with fake URLs that look way too similar to the real thing.

-RektRadar

Lido centralisation hurr durr. Ethereum maxis are crying out on Twitter because they think Lido is getting too big. But are they?

Today, Lido holds 31.8% of all ETH that is staked. If you combine that with Coinbase, these two entities together hold 46% of ETH staked. On paper, that seems like a big scary number, but I’m arguing that it isn’t.

Lido currently has 31 node operators, each of which hold around 1% of all ETH staked. That is fairly decentralised. Realistically, we won’t get thousands upon thousands of individual ETH stakers. Most people, myself included, can’t be bothered to run a full Ethereum validator and set up the execution and consensus clients at home.

One interesting new piece of technology that may help to address this is DVT. DVT (Distributed Validator Technology) is something that splits a validator’s keys to multiple shards, and shares that across various node operators. It will allow Lido to add many new node operators with a more diverse profile of solo and community stakers. Furthermore, it increases node operator resilience, distribution and security.

So any time someone comes to you crying about Lido’s centralisation, tell them, don’t worry, DVT is coming.

Unibot ecosystem fund

• An ecosystem fund, if used well, can be a great way for a protocol to help bootstrap various ecosystem projects, and eventually grow them into a thriving ecosystem. Introducing the Unibot ecosystem fund!

• The 1% currently going to LPs will be used to bootstrap an ecosystem fund by buying back $UNIBOT from the market.

Yearn tokenomics upgrade

• veYFI is here. Users can now stake vault tokens for YFI rewards and also lock YFI tokens to receive veYFI. This enables them to boost vault rewards and vote on the allocation of bought-back YFI.

• This means that staking your vault tokens not only gives you extra yield but can also boost the rewards to your vault. Seems very synergistic to me.

GMX wins big

• Finally, the Arbitrum STIP process is over. I cannot tell you how much drama there was, and how ridiculous it is that ARB holders had to vote on over a hundred proposals.

• GMX is by far the biggest winner of this proposal, walking away with 12M ARB. Other winners include Camelot, who received the most votes. Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol by a wide margin missed out and didn’t get the community’s vote.

Blur fee switch?

We love fee switches. Yes, I know that we are still waiting indefinitely for Uniswap’s fee switch, which to be honest, feels like it’s never going to happen.

While we’re waiting for Uniswap’s fee switch, we’re getting a governance push for another protocol’s fee switch. Blur. Since launching, Blur has managed to gain and maintain its market share in the NFT exchange sector. Some token holders think that it’s time to turn on the fee switch.

Sasha Fleshman from Arca, a big crypto hedge fund has led the charge on this initiative. The proposal would add a 1% base trading fee for the Blur marketplace. And, of course, in true fashion, the trading fee has been proposed to be used to buyback and burn BLUR.

In addition, a platform discount fee is being discussed to reward current BLUR holders with something.

There are a few opinions to consider here. On one hand, I think us degens light up whenever we see the word fee switch. However, Blur isn’t exactly making a humongous amount of fees, and we are currently in the middle of a bear market. In fact, in the past 30 days, Blur has only made $741K in fees while BLUR is a $163M marketcap asset. So yea, let’s hold off on that fee switch.

Uniswap, KYC, and more

Hopefully you’ve heard about Uni V4. It introduces hooks, which are fancy programmatic actions that developers can build around. For example, you can have hooks execute before a swap, after adding liquidity, before donating to liquidity providers, and more.

Twitter always sucks at interpreting new things. This time is no different. This time, half of CT thinks that Uniswap will implement KYC. Someone did indeed build a hook that allows KYC to be performed on users before they trade in a pool. However, it’s a hook. This means that there will be many other versions of the same liquidity pool without a KYC requirement. So relax, Uniswap is still a permissionless DEX platform that anyone can build upon.

However, as a fun thought exercise, let’s think through what would happen if suddenly Uniswap implemented a KYC requirement. Firstly, I think the token would dump. Uniswap is only as successful as it is today because it enabled permissionless liquidity and trading on all crypto assets, both blue chip and long tail shit coins. If it loses that, then trading volume and liquidity definitely migrates to non-KYC DEXs.

Let’s go through another thought experiment. USDC and USDT both implement KYC requirements as part of interacting with the token, either through a transfer or a swap. Does crypto just go to zero overnight? Yea, I kinda think so. Or at least it dies out for a few years before people accept the fact that you have to be KYC’d. Or on the other hand, it’s possible that would be the key catalyst for decentralised stables to take off and never look back.

If you love our newsletter, then your friends will love it too.

Refer a friend today by clicking on the button below.