🐳 Daily Edition: BTC, ETH Recover as DeFi Protocol Raises $200M

Crypto markets have begun to mount a recovery from the lows of last week, with Bitcoin and Ethereum both posting 5% rallies since Friday. Worries over headlines of insider trading investigations into 200 Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) companies last week haven’t slowed Tom Lee’s $BMNR ( ▲ 5.39% ) from accumulating more ETH, as company disclosures earlier today show their holdings have reached $11.6B in Ethereum. This amount represents over 2% of the total ETH supply, an amount many have been quick to note is more than the Ethereum Foundation itself currently holds. This is true and actually has been for a while, but it’s important to understand that this doesn’t affect the way the EF develops the Ethereum client, nor how the decentralization of the network.

To add fuel to the flame of new token launches, today saw two major protocol raises announced, both headed up by storied names in the DeFi community: Flying Tulip and Yield Basis. Flying Tulip is an “all-encompassing” onchain exchange built by Andre Cronje, known predominantly for his participation in the Fantom (now Sonic) ecosystem. While they report they raised $200M at a $1B valuation, the details are a bit more nuanced than that. All investors in both this private round as well as the future $800M public round receive an onchain redemption right to redeem up to their initial principal at any time, effectively acting as a “perpetual put.” The team will then deploy the raised capital into low-risk onchain DeFi strategies, earning about 4% in annual yield to fund company operations. We’ve seen similar raise strategies recently yet none so far at this scale, and I’m interested to see how well it ends up working.

Yield Basis has chosen to complete their raise on Legion in partnership with Kraken, with the presale having gone live earlier today. Within an hour the presale had already become oversubscribed, which isn’t a surprise given its founder Michael Egorov previously founded DeFi giant Curve DAO. His exit from CRV was not quite graceful (he was liquidated for his entire stack of CRV tokens), however given his impact on DeFi and the broader crypto community he’s still a reputable name in the industry. It’s clear Egorov is looking to redeem himself after that fiasco with the launch of Yield Basis, and he won’t want this to fail.

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The Majors

• BlackRock’s IBIT surpasses Deribit as top Bitcoin options venue

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Aster climbs to first spot for daily fees among perpetual DEXs

New Launches

• Andre Cronje’s Flying Tulip raises $200 million at $1 billion token valutaion

• Curve Finance Founder Michael Egorov launches Bitcoin yield protocol

Miscellaneous

• SWIFT to develop blockchain-based ledger for 24/7 cross-border payments