Hi,

Crypto’s latest clown show? Argentina's president, Javier Milei, promoted a memecoin called $LIBRA. The memecoin had placed itself as the "token to strengthen the Argentine economy".

Guess what happened next? insiders dumped and extracted $107M.

In case you were living under a rock, $LIBRA isn't anything new. Here are similar tokens launched on Solana:

• Donald Trump had launched $TRUMP

• The US first lady had launched her own memecoin.

• Central African Republic president had launched $CAR memecoin.

But $LIBRA was the breaking point. It turned crypto twitter against the extraction culture of memecoins (and Solana more broadly). For context, here are the metrics for how much was extracted from users on Solana.

• Trading bots & apps: $1.09B

• Pumpfun: $492M

• MEV: $1.5-2B

• AMMs: $0-2bn

• Trump insiders: 0.5-1bn

• Other insiders: unknown

Hopefully, burning billions was enough for people to finally learn. And we can end this nonsense.

Now, let’s get to this week’s newsletter!

📖 2077 Research

Neverending Options: Trading Options To Infinity And Beyond

Love it or hate it, many crypto traders are in it for one thing—big returns. For some, derivatives like futures and options offer a way to chase these insane gains.

In this article, we break down options — how they differ from futures and the evolution of perpetual options on centralized and decentralized exchanges. We also examine flaws and challenges and speculate on what the future holds.

Project Highlight: Decent, a Solution to the User Fragmentation Problem

Ethereum’s biggest problem? Fragmentation.

Right now, if a user on Base wants to buy something on Arbitrum, they have to jump through hoops—multiple websites, endless clicks, and understanding bridge aggregators.

That’s fine for on-chain natives like us. But for the average user? It’s a nightmare.

People want a seamless experience. They’ll stick to platforms where they can do everything in one place with minimal friction. Ethereum ecosystem doesn’t provide that.

Enter Decent. It's a liquidity network that enables fast cross-chain swaps.

To be fair, it doesn't provide the full synchronous composability that devs will get within a single blockchain. But it removes the majority of user friction. And that’s what matters.

With Decent, swapping across L2s becomes effortless. Want to trade ETH on Arbitrum for an NFT on Optimism? One-click transaction. No headaches.

But for users to benefit, devs need to adopt it.

Decent provides the following services to application developers:

• Point of Sale. Lets users view all token balances and select any one of them to checkout.

• Swap component. Easily embed a swap feature into any website, with optional frontend fees.

• Onboarding component. Devs can create a seamless onboarding experience with embedded wallets or existing user wallets.

There’s more — like a Developer console for no-code configuration and bridge component for chains. If you're interested, you can check them out here.

Right now, Decent settles cross-chain swaps in 5 to 30 seconds, with fees ranging from $0.05 to $1.50 per transaction. Not quite as fast as a standard L2 transaction, but it’s solving Ethereum’s biggest issue: fragmentation.

It is already used by top projects like Zora and Doodles.

Within the next 2-3 months, I'm expecting a lot more intent-based solutions that solves fragmentation for users.

In the longer term, L2 interoperability group is working on solving fragmentation for developers as well.

🌍️ Ecosystem Updates

Ethereum Foundation research team will host a Reddit AMA on Feb 25 at 2 pm UTC. If you want to ask any questions, you can submit them here.

Arbitrum released Bounded Liquidity Delay (BoLD). It enables permissionless validation across Arbitrum chains.

Uniswap released the Unichain mainnet. It'll have a Unichain Validation Network that'll monitor and verify the actions of the sequencer. It adds utility for $UNI as well.

IdeaSoft released Hookrank.io. It aims to become the central platform for insights and metrics on Uniswap Hooks, which enhances DEX pool programmability.

Ether Alpha created a dashboard of all Ethereum Dashboards. If you want data regarding any aspect of Ethereum, it's probably indexed at Ethereumdashboards.com.

Ether Guild was revealed. It's a community-driven project that'll incentivize the adoption of ETH as money.

Built on Ethereum campaign has released a website tool that allows anyone to create a custom version of the "Built on Ethereum" logo.

Ethereum Foundation has deployed 45k $ETH onchain. This was in response to widespread criticism that it was out of touch with the application layer.

Succinct released their prover network testnet. It's a protocol on Ethereum that creates a decentralized, demand-driven infrastructure layer for zk proving.

InfoFi, aka using crypto to fix out information ecology, is a potential sector. A new Ethresear.ch post proposed a scoring system for social media articles. It is based on a combination of prediction markets and peer-prediction mechanisms.

🧪 Nerd Corner

A new Ethresear.ch post gives a practical roadmap for rollups currently operating a centralized sequencer to progressively transition into based rollups. They've outlined a gradual 3-phase approach.

RANDAO is used to generate randomness onchain. New research shows that 33% of validators can manipulate RANDAO and secure the slot they want with a 99.5% success rate.

Optimistic rollups depend on the challenge period for it to be secure. There's a new discussion to arrive at the minimum number of days this challenge period must have.

MEV is one of the major challenges for blockchains. Encrypted memepool is one of the solutions for this problem. Here's a roadmap toward Distributed Encrypted Memepool on Ethereum.

Lack of privacy is a big barrier for many users and institutions. Privax introduced a cross-chain privacy model. It proposes using zk-protocols with an architecture based on an internal ledger and an R-Bridge to achieve the goal.

A new post delves into how decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and proof systems can harmonize data processing and reduce fragmentation across modular blockchain networks.

🐦️ Top Tweets

That’s a wrap for this week!

Got any suggestions to make the newsletter better? Just hit reply — I’d love to hear them.

Cheers,
Yayya