💣 Spot BTC ETF Fakeouts The Entire Market

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

Here’s what we have for you:

• Spot BTC ETF fakeout

• Parallel TCG expansion

• Canto <> Ambient Finance

• Sommelier turbo stETH vaults

• Cypher IDO

• Rabby desktop

Gm all. Obviously I have to address the elephant in the room, which is the fake spot BTC ETF approval. On Monday morning, a tweet from one of those Twitter (I refuse to call it X) news aggregators purported that a spot BTC ETF was approved. This was further supported by a tweet from CoinTelegraph, a reputable (or at least it used to be) news organisation. As a result of these tweets, the market gave us a god candle, with BTC pumping 7.5% in minutes. However, as confirmations that the news was false emerged, the entire pump retraced. It’s always fun to watch the market on days like these.

I think this indicates a few things. Firstly, it shows how much the market is offside for a spot BTC ETF announcement. If the market reacted like that to an unverified rumour, imagine the reaction when the real thing happens. Similarly, I would expect the market to position itself for a similar decision to be made for a spot ETH ETF.

In other news, Uniswap introduced an interface fee switch, so all those who trade a specific set of tokens through Uniswap’s frontends, including its webapp and wallet, will incur an additional 0.15% fee on top of any existing swap fees. 

Lastly, the Celestia airdrop claim has ended. A surprisingly small amount of eligible wallets, 32.77% to be exact, ended up claiming $TIA. I expected this for two reasons. The first is that the airdrop wasn’t a huge amount, at current expected valuations, it only works out to around $200 for each wallet address. Second of all, they made the airdrop really, really hard to claim for US-based wallet address. Even just flicking on a VPN wouldn’t do the trick.

-RektRadar

Parallel TCG

Alright, I know crypto games, especially Play-To-Earn ones get a bad rep. I don’t blame you after what happened to Axie Infinity. But Parallel TCG seems like a shining star in a cesspool of poorly funded games which are never going to achieve anything.

Echelon Prime is a gaming ecosystem, and Parallel TCG is one of the games. If you’re familiar with Hearthstone, Parallel TCG is a card trading game exactly like it. There’s also another game called Parallel Colony, a mining colony simulation game in development.

Parallel TCG cards are represented by NFTs, and to date, they’ve generated roughly 80K ETH or ~$130M in volume. Pretty impressive for some trading cards. Echelon Prime has a governance token, $PRIME, which can be earned by winning ranked games and spent on various in-game items. The token has actually held up relatively well since launch and currently holds steady at a ~$87M market cap.

If you don’t want to trade the tokens, you can trade the cards. Parallel TCG just announced its first expansion for the game, Planetfall. The announcement will be marked by a presale, where players can get the first chance to buy player packs, collector packs, and collector crates. Dive into the thriving ecosystem and perhaps you’ll find something there.

Canto <> Ambient Finance

• Canto is past its glory days. Could it be thrown into the spotlight once again with its RWA push? Perhaps. Now Ambient Finance, a DEX that features a singleton contract, has joined to help.

• As part of the partnership, there will be an incentivised liquidity pool for cNOTE/USDC. cNOTE is a tokenised deposit of $NOTE. It’s a unit of account backed by canto-native treasury bills. RWA narrative szn.

Sommelier brings turbo yields to stETH

• Do you liquid stake ETH? Happen to be holding some stETH? 3.5% yield on your stETH doesn’t cut it for you anymore? Well do I have some good news for you. Sommelier, one of the best yield aggregator protocols out there, has just launched turbo stETH.

• The vault uses leveraged staking, Uniswap V3 LPing, and stETH peg arbitrage strategies to deliver superior yields. And on top of that, they’ll provide 20 wstETH in rewards to vault depositors.

Cypher’s IDO

• Cypher is a DEX on Solana. We haven’t had a token generation event/IDO there for a while, however, activity has been picking up with some cool DeFi innovation. Cypher will be conducting its IDO on October 25th.
  

• The IDO will feature a liquidity bootstrapping curve, which enables dynamic price discovery, is anti-manipulatable and is customisable and predictable to provide a fair experience for all.

1. Vela is offering 25% off fess on all assets for the next two weeks

2. Scroll mainnet is live so get there and degen a little

3. Raft’s new WBTC vault is now live

4. Helix is introducing pre-launch futures for $TIA

5. Aevo (formerly Ribbon Finance) listed $PRIME perps. Have a take on gaming tokens? Express it on Aevo!

Secure your assets

By this point, if you haven’t migrated away from Metamask, I’m not sure what you are doing. No hate, but Metamask is probably the worst wallet experience there is out there. From a user experience perspective, having to switch between chains, not getting proper security notifications, and not being able to see a consolidated balance is just the worst.

Rabby is a pretty good wallet if you don’t want to deal with the three headaches that I just mentioned, and I want to say that they are one of the best wallet experiences out there today. The user experience is flawless, there are features that make your life easy, and the security features are top notch, especially considering how horrible your average DeFi degen is at operational security.

Rabby has just launched a new desktop wallet.

What’s the benefit of a desktop wallet?

For one, all the dApps you connect to are saved, acting as a controlled and secure environment. This means that you are no longer susceptible to Google ad scams or using a malicious front end. In addition, this also means that if your browser becomes vulnerable because of something like a zero-day exploit, your assets are not at risk.

With a desktop wallet, you also get heightened security, as you can access dApps securely through multiple methods. So, for example, if a front-end ever went down, you would have many alternatives available—no more censorship.

Unfortunately, you’ll need a hardware or mobile wallet to use Rabby Desktop. But honestly, at this point, you should have a hardware wallet regardless. The risk of losing all your assets due to one wrong approval or one wrong click is too high to justify not owning a hardware wallet.

Opsec guys, opsec.

Stars Arena is back live, trading soon

Pyth dives into its tokenomics, want some exposure to oracles?

Scroll mainnet is live, there’s a lot of DEXs live there

Tomo, which is a pretty cool content creator app on L inea

Runescape on Rollbit, relive your childhood memories

Multichain CEX/DEX aggregator, $ZAPEX, which sounds pretty cool

Mars protocol V2 is live. A powerful credit protocol worth trying.

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