The Battle for the First Block

There are fewer than 200 blocks before the Bitcoin Halving occurs - estimated at around midnight between Friday and Saturday.

The first block of the halving, 840,000, will contain etching transactions for the first Runes tokens on Bitcoin, as well as a single Epic Sat - likely leading to a heated fight over perhaps the most valuable 4MB of blockspace ever.

What does this mean?


Runes by @rodarmor are fungible tokens running on Bitcoin. The Runes protocol will launch at block 840,000 exactly.

That makes 840,000 the first block in which new Runes tokens can be “etched” (deployed) on Bitcoin.

On Thursday, GCR sent $1M of ETH to a new Binance deposit.

This revealed some previously unknown accounts using the same deposit address.

These accounts:
-Hold $4.3M of TRUMP and $830K of OX
-Farmed Eigenlayer with $12 Million of ETH
-Ran a sniper bot on Friendtech under the (former) name ‘azukipunk112’

Let’s dive in: This deposit is connected to the account that @GCRClassic used to purchase the Achi NFT - more commonly known as dogwifhat.

He bought it on March 18th for 1210.8 ETH ($4.33M).

He just deposited the remaining 310 ETH to a new Binance Deposit, 0x7CB.



Here’s some of the other accounts using this deposit.platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/addre…

Imagine selling $100M of $WIF for less than $10K.

You’ve probably seen traders booking 100x gains all over the timeline - but how many times have you seen them sell early or roundtrip?

Here’s the Top 5 fumbles of 2024 so far: $WIF Fumble: $156M

Solana User 9Vdm was an early trader of $WIF, buying 40.7M tokens within the first two weeks of its launch - then worth only $10,000.

Unfortunately, he fumbled - and sold it all for a $5000 loss 3 days later.

Today, his bag would have been worth $156M.

Address: 9VdmVsUimBqJLVAHkhNwtjMQYv1aKNqxSSEC6xvvDCVv

ALL 10 BTC ETFS NOW ON ARKHAM

On-chain addresses for the Invesco, Valkyrie, and ARK Spot BTC ETFs are now on Arkham.

We are the first to identify all 10 BTC Spot ETFs. For ANY BTC ETF, you can now:

-Access their current balances
-Review their past movements
-Set alerts for future transactions
-Visualize interactions with other wallets on-chain

225x on Solana: Trader Turns $6K into $1.35M

Solana low-cap season is back.

Here’s a trader who has been making the most of the mania, turning $6K of SOL into millions in realized profit. onchainclown.sol is a user who has traded dozens of meme coins over the past 2 months, some far weirder than others.

While everyone’s eyes were on the ETF, onchainclown was buying a coin called “Joel”, based on a meme of a spinning fish.

He’s made a 7x so far (around $20K).

AVAX is up 122% in the past 30 days - and has hosted its own mini alt-season amidst some incredible volatility on-chain.

Here are some of the best - and worst - performers on AVAX over the past week: COQINU ran from $4k market cap to $48.9M in under 5 days - kicking off a wave of memecoin speculation on AVAX.

Some early COQINU buyers like 0xB44 performed exceptionally well.

Aerodrome Finance launched just last week and is already dominating DeFi on Base - briefly reaching $200M TVL in its first 72 hours.

@AerodromeFi currently makes up almost 50% of global TVL on Base!

But what is Aerodrome? And who were the biggest farmers? Aerodrome is a fork of the largest DEX on Optimism, @velodromefi.

Velodrome uses Andre Cronje’s Solidly model to incentivise liquidity in its most active trading pools.

There is $160M in Velodrome’s trading pools on Optimism - Aerodrome surpassed its TVL in the first 24 hours.

BNB Chain recently began to liquidate the account that took $570M from their Bridge in October 2022.

The BNB Bridge Exploiter held one of the largest positions in DeFi for the past 10 months, after borrowing $147.5M from Venus Protocol against 900K stolen BNB.

Here's a recap:

https://twitter.com/VenusProtocol/status/1692421277762412586

Last year, the BNB Bridge Exploiter stole 2M BNB tokens from BNB Chain’s Token Hub after exploiting a bug in the BNB Bridge.

Instead of selling off their ill-gotten gains, the Exploiter deposited 900K BNB to Venus, to borrow almost $150M in stablecoins.

Michael Egorov is not only the Founder of Curve, but also a serious DeFi poweruser, regularly moving millions of dollars across DeFi.

This is to maintain his massive stablecoin borrow positions, which run deep into 8 figures!

Let's take a look at what he's been up to lately👇 On 13th June at 7pm UTC, Egorov unstaked and removed liquidity for his LDO-ETH position, receiving $2.28M in LDO tokens and $2.23M in ETH.

He went on to stake the ETH to sfrxETH (Staked FRAX Ether), and supply it to his position on FraxLend.

This morning, $200M worth of DAI was minted and burned by MakerDAO in the same block.

It was part of an arbitrage transaction with a net profit of... $3?

Why did this happen - and what does this mean?

Details below 👇 This transaction was performed by an arbitrage bot that used Flashloans in order to supply the capital for its transaction.

The reason that the DAI amount is so high is due to MakerDAO's 'DssFlash' contract, which allows zero-fee borrowing on any amount of DAI.

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This morning, $1 Billion USDT was minted to the Tether Treasury.

This was an inventory replenishment to support chain-swaps and customer deposits.

https://twitter.com/paoloardoino/status/1668165749926424580

The last time Tether minted on Ethereum was in late April 2023.

Note the large amount of mints in mid-March, with users moving over to USDT after USDC depegged!

Arkham's Dashboards V2 are now live!

Our team has made a sweeping UI update, as well as adding much more functionality for users to enjoy.

Let’s take a look at what’s changed 👇 If you’ve not used Dashboards before, the Dashboard page allows you to create a custom view of various on-chain metrics.

It provides you with tools & modules which you can arrange as you like, to show the behavior of different addresses and entities.

Celsius is making moves to stake all the ETH they currently hold, representing movements totalling almost $1B in on-chain flows.

Over the past 24 hours, they have staked over $600M of ETH, with their rate of deposits showing no sign of slowing. 👇 Celsius's address was the largest withdrawer by far when Lido opened withdrawals in mid-May, pulling out a total of over 400K ETH or $800M.

They held this ETH in the 'Unstaking' wallet for two weeks, declaring their intent to stake with institutional provider Figment instead.

gm

Token snipers and MEV Bots are usually faster and more profitable than human traders in every way.

Except when they break.

This MEV sniping bot malfunctioned around 5 hours ago, losing over $400,000 for the users that sent it funds. The bot was set up to snipe the launch of the token @poomemefi with 160ETH submitted by users together from a certain alpha group.

These users would also pay an 80+ ETH bribe in order to be included as the first transaction in the block.

The Beacon Chain has seen over $7.7B in inflows since staking withdrawals were enabled on April 12th.

Despite some commentors expecting a flood of outflows, withdrawals have actually been greatly outpaced by the inflow following the Shanghai Upgrade.

Let's dive into the detail: Withdrawals were enabled at around 10:30pm on April 12th.

Our closest snapshot of the Deposit Contract's balance is on April 13th at Midnight.

At that point there was 18.15M Ether in the contract, with millions of Ether deposited over the next month.

The US Government currently custodies over $6B in BTC on-chain.

Their holdings comprise BTC seized from 3 events:

2020 Seizure from Silk Road - 69.37K BTC
2022 Seizure from Bitfinex Hack - 94.64K BTC
2022 Seizure from James Zhong - 51.326K BTC

Track these wallets with Arkham👇 Silk Road BTC was seized in late 2020 from a hacker known as Individual X, who had stolen it from the Silk Road marketplace in from 2012 to 2013.

The BTC is currently held in custody by the FBI.

Source:

justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/u…

In 40 minutes, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will be meeting for the 3rd time this year.

With the FOMC being a major interest point for both short- and long-term traders, we took a look at activity on the Bitcoin blockchain in the run-up to the FOMC meeting 👇 The FOMC meets 8 times per year, and has resulted in raised interest rates 9 times since March 2022.

Both 2023 meetings raised the interest rate by one quarter of a percentage point.

Announcing the Private Labels Dashboard!

One of the features that sets Arkham apart, is the ability for users to simply and efficiently add custom labels to on-chain addresses.

We’ve now built on top of this ability with even more features

Details below 👇 Addresses on Arkham can be categorized in multiple different ways.

The first - Entities.

Arkham's platform allows users to create multiple different wallet groups, known as ‘entities’ - to which multiple addresses can be added.

Since $PEPE's run up over the past few weeks, Crypto Twitter has been alight with talk of memecoins and their various derivatives.

We took a look at some notable wallets trading $PEPE that managed to pull off some interesting trades 👀

Let's dive into the detail on-chain. One of the first transactions made by the $PEPE Deployer was to add and lock liquidity on Uniswap.

They paired almost 400T $PEPE (the entire supply is 420.69T) with 2 WETH - giving the token a market cap of 4.44K.

Currently, the token sits at ~440M Market Cap.

With a YTD average of over 3.5M tx per month and over 300K monthly active traders, @Uniswap is well-known in crypto for being the largest DEX on Ethereum mainnet.

We looked into Uniswap’s usage on alt-chains and L2’s to see if this network effect carried over to other chains. 👇 Launched in November 2018, Uniswap’s ascent to industrial importance began during DeFi Summer in 2020.

From hosting 20-30% of all volume at the beginning of June 2020, it ended August 2020 facilitating almost 70% of Ethereum’s total on-chain swap volume.

The USDC depeg sent a shockwave across the market.

Our first thread was published when USDC had depegged only slightly, to $0.995.

Let's take a look at the aftermath, and some of the resulting data from the past few days 👇 There were almost too many second-order effects to count - DeFi collateral, USDC-based price data and stablecoins backed by USDC were a few of the casualties across the spectrum.

Stablecoins that had USDC backing, such as DAI and FRAX, simultaneously depegged alongside USDC.