🐸 How to go full degen with your staked ETH 🤑

Welcome fren,

State of the Market

Europe chills, Bitcoin heats up, whales cash out.

The European Central Bank, the Fed´s little cousin, decided to play it safe on Thursday, keeping interest rates the same - nice and steady pals. This was good news for Bitcoin, which got a little boost from the decision. Meanwhile, Europe and Wall Street stocks took a breather, with a bit of a market pullback.

Remember how Bitcoin hit that glorious all-time high in March? What a party that was! Suddenly we all were quitting our boring jobs. Shortly after came the inevitable hangover: a nice dip down to $60,800, a reminder of the brutality of the crypto market. Turns out those whales cashed out $8 billion in profits at the top. 

Chart of the day

Bitcoin's mining difficulty went up 4% yesterday, hitting a crazy high of 86.39 trillion hashes. We are getting closer to the Bitcoin Halving, so this is just a taste of what is coming…

-Most important news of the day 

That upcoming Bitcoin Halving could get people excited about related projects like STX, RUNE, and ORDI. 

Ondo Finance's token popped after they let folks instantly swap Blackrock's tokenized fund for USDC. Fancy!

Solana's Marginfi lending protocol hit some snags with their user incentives and stuff, causing a bit of a panic.  

How to go dull degen with your staked ETH 🤑

EigenLayer or the art of putting your staked ETH to work.

Okay, let's talk about EigenLayer like explaining it to your TradFi uncle. It's basically a way to get even more out of your staked ETH, obviously without unstaking it. Think of it like you have a restaurant that opens from 9 am to 5 pm (that would be your staked ETH), and you rent it to other people from 6 pm to 2 am to generate a few extra bucks: bling, bling! It's all about earning double the rewards.

But wait, there's a catch...

With EigenLayer, you have to agree to some extra rules and potential penalties. Basically, you're handing over a bit more control of your staked ETH in exchange for those extra rewards.

Why bother with all this?

More money, honey! You're squeezing every last drop of yield out of that staked ETH. Restaking can help out smaller projects: It can mean more validators for those new, exciting (or sometimes kind of sketchy) projects built on Ethereum.

https://defillama.com/protocol/eigenlayer#information

Currently, the staking protocol, which is already live on Ethereum, has a TVL of $13.6 billion!!! That's crazier than Polkadot's whole market cap. 🤯

But here's the hilarious part: EigenLayer still doesn't have a token. It's like they're running a massive hotel chain without room keys.  So yeah, let's get this straight: EigenLayer is a (still) tokenless staking, dormant sleeping giant.

Until next time,

Sgt Pep