The crypto industry continues to move at lightning speed, with significant developments reshaping the landscape. The past month, we saw some key milestones worth noting. First, Uniswap took a major leap forward by launching their own layer-2 rollup, Unichain, which aims to become the DeFi hub across multiple chains. Secondly, the inception of the HyperLiquid Foundation marks a new chapter for decentralized perpetual exchanges, promising enhancements in liquidity and accessibility. Finally, Stripe made headlines with the industry's largest M&A, acquiring stablecoin platform Bridge to expand its crypto payment capabilities. Each of these developments reflects the rapid evolution and ongoing innovation in the blockchain space.
Read on for more in-depth analysis of these key moments and other major shifts shaping the crypto world.
The month preceding the U.S. elections saw a lot of volatility and fundamental discussion in the crypto space. The main topic of discussion has been around the competition between Ethereum and Solana, which both had distinctly different years in terms of price action, sentiment, and traction. With a significant amount of on-chain activity having moved to Solana, as evidenced by the on-chain trading volumes that saw validator protocol Jito hit an all-time high of monthly validator tips, prominent voices within the Ethereum community called for technical and social changes to maintain its primacy.
Most notable critics within the Ethereum community questioned the value of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap. Some argue that Ethereum may relegate itself to being a data availability layer, which would see it compete with specialized data availability layers like Celestia. Celestia introduced its Mammoth Mini testnet, which can handle up to 1GB of data per block, significantly benefiting rollups by enhancing data availability and scalability. Celestia also introduced its Ginger update, expected to go live next month, which increases block time from twelve to six seconds, effectively doubling throughput and cutting time-to-finality in half.
Uniswap Labs introduced their Unichain layer-2 blockchain built on the OP stack. This appchain migration positions Unichain as the DeFi hub across multiple chains, with unique features including TEE’s and reduced latency and MEV. Importantly, this modularization of Ethereum fits well with the aforementioned rollup-centric roadmap, though in the short term, it is likely to decrease gas fees spent on Ethereum and increase liquidity fragmentation. Uniswap also partnered with Venmo, now enabling users to onramp into crypto with their Venmo balance via Moonpay.
This month also marked the inception of the HyperLiquid Foundation. HyperLiquid is a decentralized perpetual exchange that recently announced it is building its own native chain (the HyperEVM) designed to enhance liquidity, accessibility, and speed for DeFi applications. The HyperLiquid Foundation was established to support the development of the HyperLiquid ecosystem, with the network launch expected next month. Additionally, Base, the layer-2 blockchain by Coinbase, announced that it will start accepting USDC for gas fee payments. This highly anticipated change enables users to cover transaction costs with the USDC stablecoin instead of ETH, improving user experience by avoiding unwanted volatility.
Franklin Templeton is launching “Benji,” a proprietary blockchain-integrated recordkeeping system built on Base. This makes them the first asset manager to build a tokenized fund on the Base blockchain. Moreover, custodial platform Midas has received regulatory approval to make its on-chain investment tokens (mTBILL & mBASIS) available to retail investors across Europe. These products are backed by stablecoins and designed to enhance accessibility, marking an important step forward in European regulatory clarity for our industry. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Battle Born Investments’ claim to 69.370 Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road hacker, clearing the way for the government to sell the $4.4 billion in Bitcoin.
Payment network Swift is planning to conduct live trials of digital asset transactions in 2025, enabling banks globally to transact digital currencies through its network. This adoption aims to unify digital and traditional finance, addressing fragmentation by allowing seamless exchanges across currencies and asset types. Another payment company, Stripe, has completed crypto's largest acquisition to date, being valued at $1.1 billion. In a strategic acquisition, Stripe purchased stablecoin platform Bridge to integrate stablecoin solutions into its offerings and enhance crypto payment capabilities, marking a significant moment for the industry.
MetaMask has partnered with digital identity platform Space ID to streamline identity management in crypto. This collaboration enables easier and safer interactions for users within decentralized applications via simplified identity verification. Following in the footsteps of Coinbase, Kraken has now introduced its own layer-2 blockchain called Ink, built on Optimism’s superchain. Ink is designed to be an all-in-one DeFi ecosystem that abstracts away all crypto complexity for the user.
Portfolio company RiscZero announced their Steel1.0 prover upgrade focused on scaling off-chain smart contract execution while retaining security via zero-knowledge proofs. Steel1.0 enables EVM dApps to perform complex provable computations off-chain without needing to rewrite smart contracts or create custom zero-knowledge circuits, significantly reducing gas fees. Portfolio company Fuel officially launched its mainnet called Fuel Ignition, built on the FuelVM. This layer-2 leverages UTXO-based architecture and can handle over 21,000 transactions per second through its parallel execution, making it one of the fastest rollup solutions. With decentralization in mind, Fuel Ignition allows users to run nodes on consumer-grade hardware, ensuring a wider range of accessibility. In addition to this, portfolio company Astria also launched their mainnet this month, enabling dApps to deploy rollups integrated with the Astria shared sequencer, and consequently use Celestia as their data availability layer. Spire, a recent addition to our portfolio that develops a framework for based rollups, just announced their seed raise that we co-led. Similarly, Citrea, who are building a zk-rollup on Bitcoin, also announced their Series A fundraising round in which we participated.
