What's Driving Token Prices? July 24, 2024

DYDX (-6%) - The decentralized perpetual futures exchange, dYdX, is reportedly in talks to sell its v3 exchange software. Last year, dYdX upgraded its software to v4, which included the creation of dydxchain. As in all things in crypto, the original exchange, dubbed v3 and lives on the Layer-2 Starknet, remained in existence due to the immutability of smart contracts. dYdX has long been criticized for profiting off its exchange at the expense of token holders as the team amassed $430M in revenue in the early days of the exchange’s existence. The team has agreed to revert some of the revenue back to token holders amid pressure from the community. However, the team has delayed doing so until the DEX transitioned to v4. Now the community watches as the dYdx team sells off part of its business in a transaction from which token holders will likely see no benefit which has caused the token price to drop. Following the reports of the sale, the front end of dYdX’s exchange was also hacked, plummeting the token price further.
SOL (+14.5%) - Yesterday, billion-dollar asset manager, Hamilton Lane, announced it would launch a private credit fund on the Solana blockchain. Investors can now access the Senior Credit Opportunities Fund (SCOPE) via the Layer-1 blockchain. The announcement furthers Solana’s real-world asset (RWA) aspirations as this is the first product that will only be launched on Solana. Other RWA products generally launch first on Ethereum (such as Ondo’s UDSY and Blackrock’s BUIDL) and expand to Solana over time. Solana is also surpassing Ethereum on a metrics front with its 30d DEX volumes reaching over $40B.
AVAIL (+39%) - Infrastructure project Avail launched its mainnet yesterday, which commenced trading of the AVAIL token. Avail, which was started by a team spun out of the Layer-2 project, Polygon, is building a “unification layer for web3”. The project will create tools to connect various parts of blockchain infrastructure encompassing data availability, aggregation of L2 rollups, and security. Avail can be thought of as a hybrid of Ethereum (Layer-1), Celestia (data availability app) and Optimism (Layer-2). With the mainnet now launched, users can stake their AVAIL on the network leading with a liquid staking option for AVAIL through deqfi. Avail however has bucked the trend of poor performance for new issues and is up 39% since launch.

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