Everyone has seen by now that the dYdX token unlock will be moved from February to December of this year, but what does it mean for investors?

@swmartin19 gives you the scoop 🧵👇 1/ dYdX has achieved incredible product market fit since launching as an app-specific StarkEx rollup secured by Ethereum, having eclipsed the $800B mark for total trading volume at the beginning of January.

@HopProtocol enters the cross-chain messaging war.

What does their future look like? What are Hop bridge tokens? Which cross-chain bridge wins in capital efficiency?

@purplepill3m explains Hop and their place in a contested space. 1/ They are a rollup-to-rollup general token bridge that facilitates rapid transferring between L1 and L2s.

The bridge is currently live on Arbitrum, Optimism, Gnosis, and Polygon.

What if I told you Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake was just the start of the Merge, and that there's much more coming?

@WestieCapital takes you through what you need to know about what's next for Ethereum 🧵 1/ Today, researchers have bucketed @ethereum's roadmap into five major upgrades, each individually prioritizing one facet of the chain's mechanics to ensure future-proof sustainability.

The Merge is focused on a completely robust and decentralized Proof of Stake implementation.

The next wave of DeFi innovation and improved UX will come from the 14M+ Javascript developers in the world.

At least, that's what the @agoric team is building towards.

What is Agoric and what makes it different?

@EffortCapital explains below...🧵 1/ Agoric is a PoS generalized smart contract platform built with the Cosmos SDK that utilizes a modified version of Javascript.

The team is led by Mark Miller and Dean Tribble, who wrote some of the first foundational research papers to explore smart contracts in the late 80s.

The next step in AMMs' evolution.

@traderjoe_xyz promises to shake things up in the AMMs' world with its Liquidity Book 💧📖.

@purplepill3m explains how. 1/ Uniswap V3 launched in May 2021 to much fanfare as a key innovation for AMMs.

It allowed liquidity providers to concentrate their liquidity in a range and thus greatly increase the virtual reserves/liquidity within a pool. This resulted in much better swap rates for traders.

ETH staking withdrawals are coming.

Is ETH going up or down?

Let's analyze 🧵 1/ Our ETH asset profile tracks the ETH price when each staker deposited into the contract.

At current prices, only 22% of stakers are in the money, meaning that they could sell their staked position for a profit.

Governance tokens for liquid staking derivatives have been outperforming over the past few days:

- SWISE (+80%)
- LDO (+31%)
- FXS (+13%)
- RPL (+9%)

Why? 🧵 by @0xpibblez 1/ Ethereum's Shanghai hard fork is tentatively scheduled for March, which will open the queue for ETH staking withdrawals.

This will allow liquid staking protocols to finally accrue their respective fees as revenue.

Liquid staking protocols are poised for growth in 2023, but how does increased liquidity impact DEXs?

🧵 @smyyguy breaks it down 1/

ETH liquid staking protocols allow users to participate in ETH staking without having 32 ETH and running a solo validator.

These protocols accept ETH deposits and distribute liquid staking derivative tokens (LSDs) to depositors.

2022 was a rough year for crypto asset prices, but builders continued to build.

The second part of our Year End Review takes a look at which teams are innovating at the dApp layer.

It's available for FREE thanks to @MMInstitutional
blockworksresearch.com/research/2022-… 1/ FTX's collapse lent a lot of attention to the decentralized derivatives space.

GMX was the primary beneficiary in terms of token performance, and proved that redistributing protocol revenue to native token stakers and LPs is a powerful mechanism.

With Solana hitting single digits again and TVL down 97%, is the ecosystem dead?

A quick 🧵 by @0xpibblez on FTX contagion, the death of SRM, and the redemption of Solana DeFi with @openbookdex 1/ With SBF and Alameda being the biggest backers of SOL, the ecosystem has reached max turbulence.

The Solana Foundation announced substantial exposure to FTX:

- $1M cash
- 3.24M shares of FTX
- 3.43M FTT
- 134.54M SRM tokens stuck on FTX
- 50.5M SOL vesting with Alameda/FTX

We broke down 2022's most important network level innovations, launches, successes, and failures into a 20 minute read.

We cover:
- Ethereum
- L2s
- The Cosmos
- Alt L1s
- Network Infrastructure

Read for FREE thanks to @MMInstitutional
blockworksresearch.com/research/2022-… Ethereum

The ETH price has held stronger than its peers this year.

The spread between ETH and Alt L1s initially widened in the summer before meaningfully diverging following the successful Merge.

There are a lot of copypasta GMX forks in the wild.

But @GainsNetwork_io is not one of them.

@swmartin19 breaks down how Gains Network's gTrade is innovating in the margin trading space 🧵 1/ gTrade utilizes a DAI vault to provide liquidity for its synthetic asset trades, which enables capital efficiency and high leverage for traders.

The vault is similar to GMX's GLP in that liquidity providers are 'the house', so trader PnL directly affects them.

Data storage is a market expected to be worth $400B by 2029.

@MattFiebach covers one of the leading decentralized data storage providers.

Meet Arweave 🧵 1/ Permaweb

Arweave allows permanent data storage across a decentralized network of hardware for a one-time fee, and ensures its integrity and accessibility.

A potential alternative cloud storage with the advantages of immutability and centralized censorship resistance.

Donald Trump's 45k piece NFT collection, which minted for $99 per item, reached a peak floor price of over $1k on Saturday.

However, the collection has been accused of using stock images from the internet and the admin wallet minted 1k pieces for free prior to public mint. For more info on the admin wallet mints, we recommend this thread:

https://twitter.com/NFTherder/status/1604099659382784000

Vitalik believes account abstraction is one of the biggest unlocks for the crypto user experience

What is it and how will it improve self-custody?

@WestieCapital explains 🧵 1/ There's a difference between the capabilities of a smart contract and the capability of a wallet typically owned and operated by a user, also known as an Externally Owned Account (EOA).

Using wallet services like Metamask, Rainbow, or Coinbase wallet mean you operate an EOA.

.@GearboxProtocol has created a game-changing primitive that will shake up DeFi

A brief overview by @0xpibblez 🧵 1/ Gearbox is a composable leverage protocol that lets users execute DeFi strategies within credit accounts, which act as programmable wallets.

A user can deposit collateral, borrow funds, and interact with whitelisted smart contracts on Curve, Yearn, or Uniswap, among others.

What projects, sectors, and narratives do we think are going to gain momentum in 2023?

5 of our favorites:
1. Layer 2s
2. Decentralized Derivatives
3. Gaming
4. Liquid Staking
5. Real Yield

🧵⬇️ from @MattFiebach 1/ Layer 2s

As more dApps gain steam and people onboard, base layer congestion will once again make using Ethereum expensive.

L2s like @arbitrum, @optimismFND, @zksync, @StarkWareLtd, @Scroll_ZKP are the key to scaling the network and will continue to gain use and market share.

https://twitter.com/blockworksres/status/1577714285437820928

So, you've heard ConsenSys is storing your IP address, wallet address, and txn hashes?

It's time to learn how to keep your data private.

A step-by-step guide by @MattFiebach 🧵 1/

One could switch wallets to @CoinbaseWallet, @myetherwallet, @phantom (coming soon), or a bunch of other options... but that doesn't really solve the problem.

So, what's an RPC and how to connect to a new one?

Welcome to the world of single-sided yield.

Deposit native assets on @THORChain and earn in-kind yield from protocol revenue.

🧵 by @smyyguy 1/

As highlighted by the recent FTX collapse, unregulated centralized custodians pose a risk to crypto users and broader crypto markets.

The alternative is DeFi, which removes the need for trust with open-source smart contracts and block-to-block verification.

The elephant in the room...

Is MicroStrategy and Saylor's levered BTC bet in trouble?

@WClementeIII and @swmartin19 break it down 🧵👇 1/ MicroStrategy took on $2.37B of debt to purchase nearly 130k BTC at an average fill of roughly $30k per Bitcoin from 2020-2022.

The specific breakdown of the company's debt profile can be found in the following table:

A "highly profitable trading strategy"

Yesterday, a spike in liquidations on @AaveAave left the protocol with about $2 million in bad debt.

Here's what happened by @0xpibblez 1/ Mango exploiter Avi Eisenberg borrowed CRV on Aave using ~$63M USDC as collateral. He had a liquidation price somewhere around $0.61.

Liquidation enabled Avi to run off with the higher value CRV tokens and left Aave with minimal bad debt of ~$1.6M.