What's Driving Token Prices? February 14, 2024

PLA (-18%) - PlayDapp, a web3 gaming project, suffered an exploit this past week causing a loss of $290M worth of its PLA token. The exploiter gained access to PlayDapp’s minting contract and was able to create 200M PLA tokens. The PlayDapp team messaged the hacker, offering a bounty of $1M for the return of the tokens. Instead of responding, the hacker minted an additional 240M tokens (valued then at $1.59B) and began sending these tokens to crypto exchanges in order to liquidate the assets. For context, the circulating supply of PLA before the exploit was about 570M tokens, therefore liquidating such a large amount of tokens would be pretty impossible. Yesterday, the team announced it was pausing the PLA contract to facilitate a snapshot and token migration to strip the exploiter of their tokens.
SUSHI (+8.9%) - Yesterday, DeFi project, Sushi, announced its plan to release a decentralized derivatives exchange on Layer N called Susa. The fast processing speeds on Layer N, a Layer-2 rollup on Ethereum, enable a decentralized DEX to exist with an on-chain orderbook. Susa aims to offer the speed of a centralized exchange although this won’t be proven until Layer N and Susa launch.
RNDR (+12%) - Render, a DePIN project focused on offering decentralized GPUs, was up 12% last week after an improvement proposal passed via a governance vote to onboard Nosana, a Solana DePIN focused on streamlining building, deploying, and monetizing AI applications. While Render has historically been more focused on graphical rendering and other consumer use cases, the partnership should further Render's ability to service AI apps and services.
ETH (+13.6%) - Last week, Ethereum developers announced that its next hard fork upgrade, dubbed “Dencun” will occur on March 13. The Dencun upgrade introduces “protodanksharding” which will make transactions for Layer-2 protocols about five times cheaper. This should greatly help the value proposition for Layer-2s and assist in their ability to grow/scale. On Monday, asset manager Franklin Templeton filed an application for an Ethereum ETF which has garnered much excitement in the market as many believe an ETH Spot ETF will be the next product to be approved by the SEC.

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