What's Driving Token Prices? June 20, 2024

ZK (-21%) - Early Monday, the long-anticipated token airdrop of Layer-2 zkSync finally arrived, only to disappoint users as the network suffered strain and degraded performance while trying to handle the load. zkSync, launched in 2020, has been at the forefront of zero-knowledge proof scaling solutions. Zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic proofs that communicate messages between parties without publicly sharing the contents, a feature that existing blockchain networks such as Ethereum have. Zero-knowledge proofs create privacy for users and speed up transaction processing. zkSync’s airdrop was designed to widely distribute tokens, with 17.5% of the supply allocated to the airdrop which went to over 695,000 wallets. However, ZK was not immune from the market malaise that most new token issues have suffered in the past few months. The token initially traded up to $0.30 but has since declined and now sits at $0.22.
PRISMA (-13%) -Algorithmic stablecoin project Prisma Finance announced this week it would acquire Moebius Finance, a liquid restaking protocol on Eigenlayer. The acquisition will cost $180K and will be funded through Prisma’s grants program. At one point, Prisma was a promising up-and-coming DeFi project, but it suffered a number of setbacks in recent months, including being victim to an exploit protocol and losing over $11M for the protocol.
DRIFT / ONDO (-6.6%/9.5%) - Perpetual future protocol, Drift, announced this week that it would accept Ondo’s USDY as collateral for trading. Ondo, which focuses on bringing real-world assets on-chain, has issued its U.S. Treasury stablecoin (USDY) across multiple chains, including Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. Drift’s addition of USDY as collateral provides more usability for the USDY stablecoin and could further its growth on the Solana blockchain. As of today, USDY has $156M of AUM.

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