The new year is already off to a strong start and things are finally starting to look up for web3.
📰 Here’s the TL;DR of what went down last week:
ETF news is one day away: The SEC’s deadline to respond to at least one of the Bitcoin ETF applicants is on Jan 10
A new batching approach for OP Stack chains that could reduce L1/DA fees by 97%
Arbitrum volume on Uniswap crosses $1B on Jan 4th, the first L2 to reach this milestone
🥩 Staking/restaking
Rocketpool community proposes bounty for code to integrate 3k Rocketpool nodes into Eigenlayer’s current set of 100 nodes
Stride submits a governance proposal to the Celestia community to create a liquid staking version of TIA
Ion Protocol to integrate stETH borrowing/lending in partnership with Lido (testnet v2 goes live today)
Veno announces first liquid staking service for ETH on zkSync
Liquid restaking platform Rio announces funding in mid-December
🔴 Optimism
TestinProd proposes new batching approach for OP Stack chains that could reduce L1/DA fees by 97% before 4844’s additional reductions
Viem announces v2.0, integrating OP Stack actions (with AA wallet infra company Pimlico signaling alignment)
DeFi options platform Lyra Finance migrating to become OP Stack L2, powered by Celestia and Conduit
Mint, built on OP Stack, announces plans to integrate into Superchain
💙 Arbitrum
Arbitrum volume on Uniswap crosses $1B on Jan 4th, the first L2 to reach this milestone (with the combined TVL of Ethereum L2s exceeding that of all other L1s)
Arbitrum Orbit chains now supporting custom ERC-20 gas tokens
Arbitrum launches second Foundation grant round for early-stage projects built using Stylus across multiple verticals: Gaming, DePIN, NFT, Social, DAO, and DeFi
Telegram-based trading bot Unibot expanding to incorporate Arbitrum
🔗 zk chains
Starknet launches governance/delegation, with first vote on core protocol upgrade
PancakeSwap prediction markets launching on zkSync, leveraging Gelato
zkSYNC-based SyncSwap incorporates paymaster function for gas fees for trades on zkSync mainnet
Polygon zkEVM incorporates new effectiveGasPrice method
🏦 Institutions
Visa partners with SmartMedia Technologies to offer branded loyalty programs to web2 companies
Bitcoin ETF sponsor Van Eck commits $10k in upfront funding and 5% of ETF profits to Brink to fund Bitcoin core devs
It’s ETF week, with the SEC’s deadline to respond to at least one of the Bitcoin ETF applicants in two days on Jan 10th