GMX & 1Inch Merge — But On Solana, Key Breakpoint Takeaways & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:

• Swissborg combines FX, CEXs & DEXs for better liquidity.

• Cube presents highlights incl. free MPC wallets & spoofing mitigations.

• Jupiter rolls out GMX-styled perps & announces airdrop.

In the past, the public perception about Solana often hinged on partnership announcements from large enterprises, such as the ones from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud last week.

Those times are long gone. 

Now, the public perception about Solana is growing organically — picking up steam along the way.

In this context, Breakpoint played a part as well, which is why we’ll distil the most pivotal announcements from the conference in this week’s edition — buckle up!

Click on any underlined heading / hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Kingmaker

Earlier today I spent some time going through Coinbase’s weekly market commentary catalogue.

Basically, I was trying to gauge Coinbase’s general stance on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. 

Regarding Bitcoin, I already knew the answer. Coinbase was founded, in part, due to Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam's bullish view on Bitcoin. This ethos permeates through everything the exchange does, until today.

Apart from that, it seems as if Coinbase is a strong proponent of all things EVM as well — best illustrated by the launch of its own Ethereum L2, “Base”. 

Therefore, we know Brian and Coinbase are Satoshi-pilled and advocates of smart contract blockchains. 

So they’ll surely be lending support to the Solana ecosystem as well — right?

Wrong. 

Don't believe me?

Then riddle me this: Why has OKX — a significantly smaller exchange — recently added support for both USDT-SPL and USDC-SPL, and Coinbase hasn't?

Or just compare Coinbase's latest market commentary on Breakpoint vs. its market commentary on EthCC.

1. Headings

• Breakpoint market commentary: “Breakpoint Bias” (negative sentiment)

• EthCC market commentary: “EthCC Takeaways” (positive sentiment)

2. Content

• Breakpoint market commentary: Fleeting mentions of Firedancer, Syndica’s Sig, Tinydancer, and the AWS and Google Cloud announcements.

• EthCC market commentary: Listing of key speakers and the topics they discussed, as well as an extensive exploration of noteworthy announcements from ecosystem teams.

3. Market & Price

• Breakpoint market commentary: Extensive discussion on the correlation of SOL’s price action in the context of Breakpoint, with an explicit note that current news and developments might be “priced in”, and that SOL, thus, might be overbought.

• EthCC market commentary: No discussion on the correlation of the ETH price and EthCC, and naturally no mention of what is and what isn't “priced in”, or whether or not ETH is overbought.

Going further, in its Breakpoint market commentary Coinbase also explicitly mentions that CoinShares highlights that the capital inflow into SOL is only outpaced by that of BTC. According to Kaiko, Coinbase in particular has benefited from this, as it allowed the exchange to rake in more fee revenues. 

Simply put: SOL continues to pad the bottom line of Coinbase as one of the exchange’s most traded cryptocurrencies.

Despite this, this is how Coinbase has communicated its “Crypto & Traditional Overview” for months:

As far as I can tell, the NYSE, Nasdaq, or S&P 500 don’t publish weekly market commentary in the way Coinbase does.

Imagine a world in which the NYSE fuds Microsoft Azure, just because it leverages AWS in some parts of its business. That would spark wide-ranging outrage and possibly investigations by some of our favourite 3-letter agencies. 

As outlined above, Coinbase seems to take a less neutral stance, though.

While regularly lobbying for better crypto regulation, underpinned by large offline and online campaigns, Brian and Coinbase have repeatedly portrayed themselves as some of the few serious crypto advocates — clear eyes, full hearts. 

Yet, I can't shake the feeling that the exchange and its CEO are partisan, acting as the kingmaker that chooses who should and who shouldn't win in crypto.

I love Coinbase, both the brand and the product. 

Also, we can't be grateful enough for Coinbase’s relentless and heroic opposition to the SEC and “Operation Bamboozlement”. 

Having said that, I hope that Coinbase can gradually level the playing field for all of crypto and give everyone in the ecosystem a fair shake — just as the NYSE, Nasdaq, or S&P 500 do. 

The bigger a company grows, the more systemically relevant it gets. Unfortunately, this also brings with it a lot of responsibility. As such, Coinbase doesn't just have the responsibility for both the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems, but for crypto as a whole. 

Granted, Coinbase can do whatever is in the best interest of its stakeholders. If that is casting Solana in an unfavourable light, that's the exchange’s prerogative. 

Should Coinbase continue to do so, its lobbying efforts, however, will increasingly ring hollow and get less effective over time — which would be a loss for us all. 

Togetherness. That’s what we need. Now more than ever. 

Number Of The Week

News Bites

Silky Smooth: Auto-Confirm is now live on the Phantom mobile app for 7 trusted protocols, allowing users to sign transactions and messages swiftly. 

Smart Engine: At Breakpoint, Swissborg illustrated how it fuses off-chain and on-chain liquidity by combining FX, CEXs, and DEXs in a simple and intuitive interface. 

Zippy Exchange: The Cube team also gave more insights into their exchange at Breakpoint. Here are the things I’m most excited about:

• Free MPC wallets

• Fast execution, in particular, for high-frequency traders

• Gas-free assets swaps, natively — not wrapped

• Spoofing visualisations i.e. mitigations

Circle Motions: At Breakpoint, Circle demoed its cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP). Once on Mainnet, users on Solana will be able to send and receive USDC stablecoins between Ethereum, Cosmos, AVAX, and other Layer 2 networks that support EVM — all within seconds and almost zero fees. Moreover, Circle also has announced its Euro Stable, EURC, for Solana. 

GMX & 1Inch Merging: Jupiter, the 1Inch of Solana, has rolled out GMX-styled perpetual futures with up to 100x leverage. Additionally, the team confirmed an airdrop of its own token in the upcoming months. 

Mexican Bonding: Etherfuse announced stablebonds, a tokenised bond offering aimed at retail investors in Mexico. Why Mexico? Well, it's the second-largest bond market in Latin America, after Brazil.

Nextgen Venmo: Sling has been around for a while. At Breakpoint, however, the message was driven home that the app has one simple mission: To become the next iteration of Venmo. 

Live Fuzzing: Neodyme introduced Riverguard, a live transaction fuzzer that takes real transactions, modifies them like an attacker, and tests them in a simulation.

On-Chain Gaming: Apart from Axie Infinity, no other blockchain game has reached significant scale. With the introduction of BOLT, a scalable and composable SVM framework for on-chain games, things might be about to change. 

Hyperdrive Winners: The latest Solana hackathon attracted 907 projects, submitted by 7,000 registrants from over 120 countries. We mentioned many of the projects that won prizes, including the grand champion: Fluxbot. Alexandria and Surfer were successful as well.

Caught In 4K

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

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Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens / equity.}