🟣 And we’re off to the races once again

BTC forces its way back above $60k

Welcome back to 0xResearch – quick hitting alpha for the crypto degens. Here's what we got for you today:

  • Correction progress

  • EigenLayer’s mea cupla

  • Eclipse goes Neon

  • Who’s operating AVS?

Happy Kentucky Derby-eve everyone!

This has been a phenomenal week in crypto markets if you think the probabilities favor a continuation of the bull market.

While much of Crypto Twitter was falling apart at the seams, bitcoin has been playing out a typical correction that should surprise absolutely no one. Indeed, the only surprising thing about the 6-month-old rally is how few and shallow the pullbacks have been up to this point.

Yes, everything not called bitcoin has fared much worse, as Bitcoin Dominance made a short-lived surge through prior resistance in mid-April. But it has fallen back into range over the past two weeks.

All that’s to say, if there are crypto assets you’ve been waiting to accumulate, the valuations are now far more attractive across the board.

EigenLayer owns up

​​The EigenLayer team has been in damage control mode since unveiling the EIGEN token earlier this week. In the latest move, the project has pledged to distribute 100 more EIGEN tokens to all addresses that interacted with the protocol before April 29.

They also addressed some of the ambiguous early pronouncements regarding the team and investor lockup period and the delayed transferability.

That cliff will only start after the token is transferable, which is expected on or before the end of Q3.

"Decentralization and permissionless features enable transferring power to the community, which will have the power to vote and determine whether to enable transferability," the Eigen Foundation wrote.

Eclipsing the rollup narrative

It’s an EVM, no it’s an SVM, no it’s a Superrollup!

Eclipse, the Ethereum rollup using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), announced Thursday that it is implementing the Neon Stack. Neon implemented the EVM on Solana mainnet in July 2023. 

The combination aims to serve as a bridge between Ethereum and Solana networks.

The Neon Stack, comprising Neon EVM smart contracts and Neon Proxy, has enabled the deployment of various applications — including DeFi, gaming, and DEX platforms — originally developed for Ethereum using Solidity smart contracts.

The integration simplifies migration of dapps from EVM-based chains to Eclipse's SVM-based layer, combining Solana’s efficiency with Ethereum’s network effects.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

Stacks is the leading Bitcoin L2 that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as a secure base layer.

The Nakamoto release, happening in May 2024, will bring faster block times, as well as transactions that are as irreversible as Bitcoin’s once confirmed, setting the stage for a programmable Bitcoin asset called sBTC later in the year. ‍Stacks is poised to help unlock Bitcoin and its $1T in passive capital as a fully programmable, productive asset. The Stacks (STX) token, used as gas on the L2, was the first to undergo an SEC-qualified sale in the United States.

Eigen operators:

Over 3 million of the nearly 5 million ETH restaked via EigenLayer has been delegated to operators. 

These operators, in turn, support one or more AVSes. Of those operators, P2P.org is the largest with about 10.1% market share, according to eigenbeat.xyz.

It’s still early days, of course; new AVSes are entering the market for restaked ETH, and there’s plenty to go around.

A fragmented liquidity landscape across L2s has led to newfound appreciation for predominantly monolithic L1 architectures over the past year, especially when considering qualifying capabilities like high throughput and low latency. Despite Aptos being a relatively young blockchain when compared to other L1s, a combination of design choices, network adoption, partnerships, and dApp development proves that the network is primed for breakout momentum over the coming years.

The Jito Network is MEV-aware infrastructure that strengthens the performance, decentralization, and security of Solana. As the chain matures, Jito and all of its market-leading products are poised to play a vital role.

The crypto exchange’s ability to cross-sell its products is its "superpower," Bitwise’s Alyssa Choo says

We should be paying attention to the net positive Bitcoin can have for the future of humanity.

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.

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