What's Driving Token Prices? September 25, 2024

MKR/SKY (+6.3%) - Sky, formerly known as MakerDao, officially began the migration process for users last week, allowing them to swap their DAI stablecoin to USDS and swap their MKR for SKY (at a ratio of 1:24000). So far about $400M of DAI has migrated to USDS (of a total $5.4B) and about 5% of the MKR supply has migrated to SKY. Sky’s founder, Rune Christensen, also made a surprise announcement at the Solana Breakpoint conference last week, revealing that Sky would deploy on Solana using the Wormhole bridge. Sky will also provide a “large liquidity incentive” to promote the usage of SKY and USDS on Solana.
SOL (+16%) - Last week, Solana held its annual Breakpoint conference, during which the project made a few headline announcements. The first is that “Frankendancer,” the validator client developed by Jump Trading, is live on its mainnet. Frankendancer is considered the test version of “Firedancer,” which is the full validator client and will be live later this year. Validator client diversity for Solana is an important step for the Layer-1 protocol to evolve and mature as it looks to compete with Ethereum in the long term. The second big announcement came from asset manager Franklin Templeton who announced it will launch a mutual fund on the Solana blockchain. Franklin Templeton already has an on-chain money market fund on Ethereum, so it will be interesting to see what assets this new mutual fund represents on Solana.
TIA (+19%) - Data availability project Celestia announced this week it had raised $100M in funding from Bain Capital Crypto, Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and others. The announcement comes as Celestia’s TIA token is about to see a large cliff unlock next month, increasing the supply by 148%. The project launched its mainnet and token just under a year ago and was the first project to outperform and lead the market in its uptrend in Q4 of last year. Most feel the project is already significantly overvalued at $7B, with about $41K in fees generated. However, the project has seen a significant uptick in projects using Celestia, and fees have been generated since the beginning of the summer.
JUP (+22%) - DEX aggregator and leading Solana Defi project Jupiter announced at the Breakpoint conference last week that it had acquired two crypto projects to grow its reach and expand its product offering. Jupiter acquired SolanaFM, a block explorer, and Coinhall, a DEX aggregator and trading terminal tool for Solana and Cosmos blockchains. The project also revealed plans to launch a mobile app, Jupiter Mobile, in the coming weeks with the help of crypto on-ramp Moonpay. Considering Solana’s push into mobile with its Saga phone and retail focus, a mobile application for Jupiter will ensure it retains its spot as the number 1 trading venue on Solana.

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