Crypto News Recap: Week of 12/11 - 12/18

Dec 18, 2023

This past week there were some high highs and some low lows.

The Solana ecosystem saw a huge demand all around for its DEXs, NFT platforms, and mobile phone product.

While at the same time, major NFT hacks took users by surprise.

This is an issue of Last Week in Crypto that you are going to want to read 5x over.

📰 Here’s the TL;DR of what went down last week:

Major NFT wallet hacks on LedgerConnect, and on NFT wallets via old NFTTrader contracts
Solana total DEX volume topped Ethereum over the weekend + Jupiter 24hr volume of $498M #2 highest across chains at EOD Sunday
German fund manager DWS (Deutsche Bank), Galaxy Digital and Flow Crypto seeking EU regulatory approval for euro stablecoin

⚙️System stresses

Inscriptions (and inscription-inspired tokens) rotating across chains last week (Dune dashboard) led to high congestion, tx fees
High-profile points launches affect infrastructure and chain economics (e.g. Rainbow, Parcl)
Major hacks on LedgerConnect, and on NFT wallets via old NFTTrader contracts (as well as a smaller on on OKX)

⛓️Modular/RaaS/L(n) advances

Astria EVM goes live as EVM layer with shared sequencer for Celestia
Polygon CDK adds Celestia as 3rd DA integration partner (joining EigenDA and Avail), and AltLayer as an implementation provider
Base open sources versions of popular OS toolkits - viem and wagmi - customized for OP Superchains
2 new DA layer integrations for OP Superchains: Conduit/Celestia and EigenDA
Eigenlayer launches Ethos, a restaking platform enabling Cosmos appchains to launch as validated services drawing on Ethereum’s network; expanding its LST pools on Tuesday
Cronos L1 converting to L2 on zkSync, becoming first hyperchain on zkStack
Uniswap v3 now deployed on Rootstock (Bitcoin)
Eclipse (Ethereum settlement, Solana VM, Celestia DA, Risc0 proving) now moving into testnet, allowing bridging of Sepolia ETH
Chainlink announces 14 new integrations, including zkSync and Polygon zkEVM
SEAM token for Seamless Protocol on Base now listed on Coinbase

⛅ The rise and rise of Solana

Total DEX volume topped Ethereum over the weekend (back to #2 Sunday evening, by a small margin)
Jupiter 24hr volume of $498M #2 highest across chains at EOD Sunday vs. Uniswap of $1.43B
NFT volume: Tensor $6.8M (#2) vs. Blur $13.8M (#1) as of Sunday evening (source: Tiexo)

🗳️ Governance and decentralization

Ethereum’s new rollup governance track continues to expand as devs move EIP-7212 (r1 curve precompile) to RIP-7212
zkSync joins Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism to become the 4th rollup to propose building the new ApeChain
Arbitrum now vying to power Celo’s transition to EVM L2
Starknet ecosystem will reinvest 10% of network fees earned up to Nov 30th to a combination of ecosystem developers and core dev team
ENS core devs move control of ENS root to the DAO
ENS DAO votes to establish $3.1M in DAO-controlled service provider revenue streams
Proposal by StableLab to decentralize Uniswap voting power executed

⚖️ Regulated finance

Coinbase Asset Management launching Project Diamond for tokenization by non-US institutions on Base, integrating Coinbase Prime Custody and Coinbase Wallet
German fund manager DWS (Deutsche Bank), Galaxy Digital and Flow Crypto seeking EU regulatory approval for euro stablecoin on Ethereum, Solana
Flow-funded Rulematch launches Swiss regulated trading platform for banks to trade BTC/USD and ETH/USD
Fnality successfully trials interbank payments with Banco Santander, UBS and Lloyds of London using Bank of Englands settlement system

Supercharged