Bitcoin Transactions Smash Records, Ethereum Burn Picks Up, and More

Highlights from the world of Digital Assets

May 08, 2023

The most interesting things I saw in crypto this week:

Bitcoin Transactions Break All-Time High
Arbitrum TVL Hits First All-Time High Since 2021
Ethereum Burn Picks Up
BRC-20 Resources
Bank Failures by Size
Cosmos Compared to OP Stack
Why the Next Bull Market Will be the Biggest Yet

Plus see this week’s crypto events at the end of this post.

Bitcoin Daily Transactions Break All Time High

An explosion of activities in BRC-20s, the new fungible token standard built using Ordinals, pushed Bitcoin daily transactions to their highest level ever this week.

Arbitrum TVL Hits All Time High

Much of the airdrop hype about Arbitrum has faded at this point, but liquidity has stuck on the chain. The launch of Chronos, a Solidly fork on Arbitrum, propelled Arbitrum TVL to its first all-time high since 2021.

Ethereum Burn Picks Up

Memecoin mania pushed Ethereum fees, and thus the ETH burn, higher. Over the past 7 days, ETH was burned at a 2.663% annual rate.

BRC-20 Resources

In last week’s newsletter, I covered the emergence of the BRC-20 token standard on Bitcoin.

Since then, BRC-20s have gained serious traction. Here are a few resources if you want to dive deeper:

Track BRC-20 market caps with https://brc-20.io/

Trade BRC-20s on https://unisat.io/market

Bank Failures by Size

The recent bank failures didn’t occur at small, no-name banks. By size, these have been some of the largest bank failures in history, rivaling those from 2008.

I saw this graphic on social media, but can’t find the original creator to credit.

The issue with these bank failure comparisons is that the US Dollar has inflated since 2008. Our friends at DefiLlama made a bank dashboard to show bank failures by inflation-adjusted assets.