⚡Will Crypto be the Currency of Machines?
Plus Bridge Hacks, Solana Summer 2.0, and More
The Dynamo DeFi newsletter covers the most interesting stats, trends, and tools in crypto each week.
In this issue:
🔢On-Chain Metrics
📈Trends & Narratives
🛠️Tool Spotlight
📅Key Events This Week
🔢On-Chain Metrics
Total DeFi TVL Drops
Total DeFi TVL (including liquid staking) dropped from $67.2B to $64.9B this week.
This drop was led by Ethereum mainnet. Solana was a bright stop of the week, growing its TVL by 6.3%.
4 of the 5 Largest Crypto Hacks were Bridges
This week saw yet two more bridges exploited: Multichain and PolyNetwork.
This underscores that bridges are one of the riskiest parts of crypto (and that’s saying something). In fact, 4 out of the 5 largest hacks of all time involved bridges:
This begs the question: do bridges have a significant role in the future of crypto or will the industry shift to cross-chain swaps of native assets?
NFT Mints Increase in June
In contrast to price action and prevailing sentiment, June actually wasn’t a bad month for NFT mints. Not only did mints increase by 48% from May, but more than half of them are in profit.
📈Trends and Narratives
Crypto is the Currency of AI
This newsletter has covered the synthesis of AI and crypto in the past. The narrative that machines will use BTC or another crypto to pay each other has begun to gain traction.
Here Documenting Bitcoin takes a look at ChatGPT’s Lightning Network capabilities:
Arthur Hayes, the Founder of BitMEX, penned an essay this week on why AI will use BTC. Highly recommend giving this a read to understand the role that BTC could play in AI:
Solana Summer 2.0
Many people wrote off Solana following the FTX collapse. Recently, it’s begun to find its footing again, with innovation in decentralized infrastructure, on-chain order books and AI. This thread goes through some of the narratives:
More info on Solana’s AI grants program:
Threads as New Crypto Hub
Meta’s sudden launch of Threads this week took the Internet by storm. Threads is a Twitter competitor that is linked to your Instagram account.
I’m keeping a close eye on how the crypto scene on Threads develops. Many people don’t know this, but I used to run a crypto meme account on Instagram (not memecoins, literal memes). I stopped posting in mid-2021 after my YouTube channel gained traction, but it taught me something important: in 2021, to people that only follow Crypto Twitter, Shiba Inu seemed to come out of nowhere. However, on Instagram, Shiba Inu had a massive community, with hundreds of active pages dedicated to the coin.
If Threads sticks around, I expect some memecoins and NFTs in the next cycle will originate on there.
And if you are active on Threads, be sure to follow me at dynamodefi:
🛠️Tool Spotlight
Summarize YouTube Videos with VoxScript
Another AI tool to accelerate your crypto research this week. VoxScript is a ChatGPT plugin that allows you to use ChatGPT to ask questions about YouTube transcripts.
Credit to Deebs DeFi for bringing this tool to my attention. Check out Deebs’ guide to it here:
📅Key Events This Week
That’s all for this week. For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.
Until next time,
Patrick Scott
Dynamo DeFi