Dogecoin, Lido, Ethereum... 💥

🚩 In 10 bullet points:

👇 1) Dogecoin (DOGE) rallied +29% over the past seven days as Elon Musk changed the Twitter logo to the Shiba Inu dog, the face of Dogecoin. Musk has been a longtime supporter of Dogecoin, periodically tweeting about the token, accepting Dogecoin as payment for some Tesla merchandise, and hinting at the token’s integration into Twitter as a payment system. Days before the logo change, attorneys of Twitter and Musk asked a judge to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit from 2022 that accused Musk of Dogecoin price manipulation. Market cap $13.3bn.

👇 2) Lido DAO (LDO) rallied +13% over the past seven days as investors prepare for Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade next week. Currently, liquid staking protocols account for a third of the total staked ETH, with Lido leading the space with a 93.8% share. Recently, Lido released more information about the unstaking process, citing the use of NFTs to represent users’ requests for withdrawal of their stETH. The NFTs can then be used to claim ETH rewards, after which the NFTs are burned. The NFTs will be transferable to other addresses, giving the new address the right to claim the ETH rewards, while also giving users the option to sell their NFTs on secondary markets. Market cap $2.3bn.

👇 3) Frax Share (FXS) rallied +12% over the past seven days as the protocol has also been benefitting from the anticipation around the Shanghai upgrade. Frax Share is currently one of the leading liquid staking protocols, with its TVL growing to $213m from $55m at the beginning of the year despite only recently launching post-Merge. The popularity of the frxETH token has also been driven by its relatively high staking APY of 10-11% compared to Lido’s 5%. Market cap $1bn.

👇 4) Toncoin (TON) rallied +8% over the past seven days as Orb, a public blockchain infrastructure, announced the release of the single nominator smart contract for validators of the Telegram Open Network (TON). The single nominator provides validators a cold wallet for securing their validation process with the aim to improve validator independence (over the use of third-party nominators), enhance security and protect against gas-spending attacks on the network. Market cap $3.4bn.

👇 5) Aave (AAVE) rallied +8% over the past seven days as the community showed almost unanimous support in favour for the deployment of Aave’s latest version 3 onto the recently launched Polygon’s zkEVM and Binance’s BNB Chain. The latest proposal could also see Starknet added to the list of chains, with voting running until April 10. According to the proposal, Aave’s V3 deployment presents opportunities for Aave Governance to establish a strategic presence on new networks such as Polygon’s zkEVM early on. Market cap $1.1bn.

👇 6) Chiliz (CHZ) rallied +8% over the past seven days upon the announcement that Chiliz is set to launch a new blockchain, the ‘Chiliz Sports Blockchain’ on May 10, although no specific features have been disclosed. The Chiliz ecosystem also powers the entertainment platform Socios, which recently announced that they are accepting votes regarding who the community wants to see on the next fan tokens. This comes ahead of one of the biggest MMA shows, which will likely attract more attention on Socios and therefore drive demand for the Chiliz ecosystem. Market cap $668m.

👇 7) Fantom (FTM) rallied +7% over the past seven days as the network announced the integration of crypto security firm De.Fi’s Web3 Defense Suite into the ecosystem. The security tools aim to protect user transactions by alerting users to common vulnerabilities and ensuring they transact with trusted smart contracts. Tools integrated into Fantom include Scanner, which assesses and assigns a security score to smart contracts on Fantom, and Shield, which analyses users’ wallets and allows them to cancel risky approvals. Market cap $1.3bn.

👇 8) Synthetix (SNX) rallied +7% over the past seven days as the protocol launched its incentive campaign to attract more trading activity onto the platform. As part of the program, traders are rewarded based on criteria such as fees paid, volume generated and the amount of SNX staked. The incentive is scheduled to run for the next 20 weeks. 50k OP tokens will be distributed in the first week of April, 100k OP in weeks 2 and 3, and 200k OP per week for the rest of the programme. The distributed OP tokens come from the Synthetix treasury which received a grant of 9m OP from the Optimism Foundation last July. In the ramp-up to the first week of incentives, Synthetix saw more than $730k in trading fees generated, its highest daily level since last June. Market cap $847m.

👇 9) Ethereum (ETH) rallied +7% over the past seven days ahead of the much-anticipated Shanghai upgrade next week on April 12, marking the blockchain’s full transition from PoW to PoS. The upgrade will allow withdrawals for staked ETH at both the execution and consensus layer, giving users more confidence to stake and encouraging interested investors to start staking ETH. With currently more than 18m ETH staked in the network since the Beacon Chain went live in Dec 2020, there is concern that the unlocking of deposited ETH will lead to high selling pressure in the market. While all the ETH deposited cannot be unstaked immediately, 1.1m ETH from staking rewards can still be instantly withdrawn. Market cap $228bn.

👇 10) Uniswap (UNI) rallied +6% over the past seven days as developers forked Uniswap after its Business Source License expired on April 1. According to DeFiLlama, the fork has already attracted $123m in TVL with majority locked on the Binance Smart Chain. Uniswap’s v3 licence was released in 2021 for two years, which protected its code from commercial use. A new ‘General Public License’ now applies to the protocol, making Uniswap’s code open source and thus allowing developers to deploy their own DEX. Market cap $4.7bn.