Data & Insights Recap - A pump.fun resurgence and new spot BTC ETF leader

Celebri-meme

Source: DefiLlama

• The memecoin renaissance is back in full swing. 
  • Over the past month, we’ve seen a lot of meme-centric news. Roaring Kitty, the face of the 2021 meme stock rally, made his return to X. Pump.fun, the memecoin launchpad, was exploited for $1.9 million by a former employee. The face of dogecoin, the Shiba Inu Kabosu, passed away. 
  • In general, the crypto market has also been buoyed by excitement around the surprise approval of the spot Ethereum ETF 19b-4 approvals and some more optimistic inflation data coming out in the U.S. this month. 
  • But if we zoom in on just the past week, the meme energy remained quite strong. For one, the new subsector PolitFi (Political Finance), with memecoins linked to legislators (only by name, no official affiliation), has once again become a hotbed of trading activity in the wake of the guilty verdict of former president Donald Trump in his hush-money trial. 
  • What is maybe the most exciting is that celebrities seem to be back on the crypto bandwagon. Many A-list celebs seemed to have dabbled in crypto in 2021 and 2022, during the height of the bull market but then dropped the subject as the hype faded. Even though Justin Bieber still holds $450,000 worth of crypto, according to Arkham, he’s not posting about his BAYC on Instagram anymore.
  • But Caitlyn Jenner jumped in on the scene, launching her own token on pump.fun and promoting it on both her X and her Instagram. Many people thought the accounts were possibly hacked, but she posted a video seemingly verifying it was her behind the posting. Jenner later launched the token on Ethereum, as well, and is using fees collected from it to support Trump. Rapper Iggy Azalea also launched her token $MOTHER independently on Solana, seemingly to clap back at a promoter who was trying to launch an IGGY token. 
  • While unconfirmed, my favorite crypto re-entrant has to be Katy Perry, who simply posted “LFG” on X, a common phrase in the crypto lexicon, short for “let’s f*cking go.” This is not necessarily crypto-related, but many on crypto twitter engaged with the post. Perry was somewhat of a meme herself in the past bull market, most well known for her infamous photo with Three Arrows co-founder Su Zhu and her “crypto claws” nail art. 
• Even though only Jenner seems to have used pump.fun for her Solana memecoin, the meme energy was transcendent. Despite being exploited less than two weeks ago, pump.fun managed to rebound and post its highest day of revenue on May 30th, bringing in $1.48 million. 
  • Similar to the last time we saw a spike in the platform’s revenue, it is indicative of users launching a plethora of tokens, hoping to create the next memecoin that generates sizable returns. 

Black-rocking your world

Source: The Block

• As we now enter June, the spot bitcoin ETFs are approaching their 5-month anniversary. The ETFs, particularly the freshly launched ones, have had unprecedented levels of success, smashing records and commanding public attention. In particular, BlackRock’s IBIT has been the main focus, becoming a leader in inflows and volumes as it attracted investors by being attached to the world’s largest asset manager while also boasting a competitive 0.25% fee. 
  • But for a long time IBIT was not the largest spot bitcoin ETF by assets under management (AUM). Its main competition was Grayscale’s GBTC, which started with a huge leg up in terms of fund size relative to its competitors since it was a trust converted into a fund, unlike the other ETFs that were starting from scratch. 
  • Grayscale was holding about 619,220 BTC when the spot ETFs started trading, worth over $28.5 billion at the time. Meanwhile, IBIT started with a seed amount of $10 million and has been using inflows to grow its AUM. 
  • But unlike all the other funds, Grayscale was primarily facing heavy outflows upon launch, as investors in the fund were finally granted a redemption mechanism that eluded them before the conversion. 
• So, the general trend that has emerged is that the AUM of GBTC has been on the decline while the other ETFs have been growing, allowing them to put pressure on GBTC’s initial market dominance. 
  • And on May 29th, IBIT took that top spot, dethroning Grayscale as the spot bitcoin ETF with the most assets. 
  • The shift came amidst a strong period for the spot bitcoin ETFs overall, which have tracked net positive flows across the funds since May 13th as the crypto market has shown a bit of a rebound after dropping in the wake of the strong rally into March. Grayscale’s outflows have grown more tepid, allowing the inflows into the other funds to counterbalance them more often than not. 
• Many of the same issuers are tailoring their S-1s for their spot Ethereum ETFs after their 19b-4s got the green light last month. Once again, Grayscale will be starting with a sizable pot of ETH worth about $11 billion at current prices.  
  • It’s likely that a similar mechanic will play out in the ether space as the new competitors grow while early ETHE holders redeem. It’s also likely we will see BlackRock again be the issuer showing the most significant early-stage growth as long as its fees are in line with others. 
  • We now have a benchmark for how long it took Grayscale to fall from largest AUM on the bitcoin side, and now time will tell if it's longer or shorter ether. 

Blasting through blobs

Source: The Block

• One of the last major layer 2s made the conversion from calldata to blobs last week, Blast. 
  • Blast is a relatively new optimistic rollup but it gained a lot of traction initially for supporting native yield. While the mainnet launched in February of this year, early access started back in November 2023, which allowed users to deposit but not withdraw. But bridging over earned Blast Points, which naturally allowed the platform to amass over $1 billion in total value locked before actually launching. There were also some critiques of the invite rewards structure, which received a lot of “Ponzi scheme” allegations. 
  • But Blast is open to the public now, and while no airdrop yet, it's still a layer 2 that captures the public’s attention by being backed by Paradigm, created by the founder of NFT marketplace Blur, and of course offering a yield opportunity. 
  • It is also home to one of the most trendy crypto protocols, fantasy.top, which allows users to trade crypto influencer trading cards. Earlier this month, it was in the top 10 platforms by daily fees generated, although revenues have now slowed. 
• In terms of activity, Blast is still not as popular as Arbitrum, and it launched just as Base was getting its second wave of popularity so it has lagged behind the Coinbase-backed optimistic rollup, as well. Its daily transaction levels are typically in line with Optimism, around 500,000 per day, which is still impressive for a newer network. 
  • But regardless of usage, it was beneficial for all layer 2s to start using blobs over calldata to post transaction summaries, since it provides a much cheaper means of data storage. Fees on Blast were not that high to start with after the initial hype faded, with the median transaction fee on the rollup typically staying below $0.10 in the days leading up to the blob upgrade on May 27th. 
  • The daily median transaction fee has not exceeded $0.01 since the transition, making Blast one of the cheapest layer 2s out there right now. 
  • Blast is posting a sizable number of blobs per day, trending between 700 and 1,000 per day, putting it behind Aribtrum, Base, Optimism, Taiko, and Scroll but ahead of Linea and other ZK rollup networks. 
  • But Blast is the third most dominant network in terms of blob transactions posted to the Ethereum mainnet, since it is only posting one blob per transaction. You can see in this transaction that Blast only posted one blob, whereas Optimism posted six in this one. It is more cost-effective to post more blobs within one transaction to mitigate transaction fees and it is common to see some of the larger rollups using the six blob per transaction maximum. Freshly launched Taiko and Scroll seem to also be using one blob per transaction for now. 
  • It could be a temporary setup, as Blast adjusts to posting blob transactions before they start batching more blobs together, but it seems as though Blast is already passing on very cheap fees to users without the bundling. 

On your Ap-toes

Source: The Block

• The 7-day moving average of the number of user transactions on Aptos skyrocketed to 47 million at the end of May, showing very stark growth considering for the start of the month the moving average never exceeded 1 million. Un-averaged, the number of transactions reached 156 million.
  • For those that need a refresher on Aptos, it launched back in October 2022 with a lot of hype. It stemmed from Facebook’s Libra blockchain initiative, it had many big-name backers and was marketed as a new alternative to Solana for developers since it utilized the Move programming language and was supposed to be much easier to build on. 
  • Aptos is the 17th largest network by total value locked and is a well-known name within the crypto space, even though it is not always the most talked about.
  • Aptos does seem to have a penchant for drawing in big-name partners, collaborating with Microsoft, Brevan Howard, Universal Pictures, and Google Cloud on various initiatives and projects to improve the ecosystem and bring wider adoption. 
• The recent surge does not seem to be tied to any recent mass adoption of the Aptos blockchain but rather a new game called Tapos.
  • Tapos is a clicker game, with a transaction being executed with each click that increments a counter for the player. The game lets users tickle a cat with each click, and earn HEART tokens in return (although they still have to pay for the gas fee for the transactions, but it’s very low, around 0.000008 APT, worth less than one-hundredth of a cent). 
  • The amount of HEART earned is based on how many tickles a player did in a game period compared to how many tickles were done by all the players, so more clicks should translate to more tokens. 
  • So it’s not surprising that we’d see transactions surge like this, given the structure of the game. The 7-day moving average of active addresses on Aptos has also picked up, climbing from 61,000 in early May to over 150,000 by the end of the month, which could be partially tied to the game, which seems to have launched closer to the end of May. 
  • On May 26th, though, the Tapos account posted that their campaign had ended and that they would update with the next steps of the game. The project boasted over 323 million transactions and over 63,000 users over the course of a few days. Naturally, the end of Tapos meant the end of the high transaction count, and we’ve now started to see the moving average come down again. 
  • While short-lived, the success of Tapos does highlight areas where Aptos excels. A game with this much transaction demand would struggle on certain higher fee networks, and the counter mechanism also takes advantage of some native Aptos functionality. 

Get in Linea

Source: GrowThePie

• The competition in the ZK rollup space is heating up, with Linea now dominating zkSync Era in terms of both daily transactions and active addresses. 
  • Both networks are zkEVMs, meaning they are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and come from well known developers, with Linea coming from Consensys and zkSync Era from Matter Labs. 
  • For a while, zkSync Era seemed to have a tight grasp on the ZK rollup ecosystem, being the first zkEVM to launch a mainnet and also hinting at a future token when the network went live. From the end of March 2023 to March 2024, zkSync Era was the ZK rollup with the most activity and users. 
  • Linea had a spike in action at the end of March, around the end of the Linea Park promotion, allowing it to briefly surpass zkSync Era, but the surge proved to be unsustainable and zkSync took the top spot once again. 
  • Linea has once again gotten a boost of activity, this time caused by the start of Linea Surge, which is primarily meant to attract new participants and increase usage of the network by rewarding people with points which translate to LXP-L, a soulbound, non-transferable version of LXP. This is the first of 6 “Volts” of the program, with the Surge either stopping after the six are up or after the network reaches $3 billion in TVL.
  • While Linea did need to temporarily halt block production over the weekend in the wake of an exploit on the Velocore DEX, it seems that the incentives program is working. The 7-day moving average of transactions on Linea reached 1 million on May 31st, up from 330,000 on the first of the month, and active addresses climbed to almost 500,000 from 150,000 just a week earlier. 
• Despite Linea’s growth, action on ZK rollups still tends to lag behind optimistic rollups. However, optimistic rollups were able to launch earlier with EVM compatibility, allowing the early ORs to amass a large following and a lot of big-name protocols early on.
  • In other ZK news, the pot was stirred this week as leading companies and leaders in the zero-knowledge space asked for Matter Labs to withdraw their trademark for ZK, claiming that ZK is a public good. Matter Labs announced they had withdrawn their applications over the weekend following the community feedback that came pouring out after the initial post.