Hi,

Welcome to the very first Ethereum Navigator newsletter! Hopefully, this becomes your go-to source for everything ETH.

Right now, Crypto Twitter is still bearish on ETH. But personally, I’ve never been more excited about the Ethereum ecosystem.

There's a noticeable vibe shift in ETH community. There's a heavy push towards scaling ETH L1. L2 teams like Optimism and Arbitrum expressed support for based & native rollups. Even some fun, ponzi-esque experiments like Ethstrategy and Flaunch are popping up.

The ticker is ETH.

Here's what I cover this week:

• 2077 research. Deep dive on interest rates on crypto-backed stables.

• Project highlight: Flaunch. An improved version of Pump.fun on Base chain.

• Ecosystem updates. Major updates from across the Ethereum L1 & L2 ecosystem.

• Nerd corner. Some research posts from last week that I found really interesting.

📖 2077 Research

Defining Interest Rates for Stablecoins

Stablecoins are the crypto product with the best PMF, hands down. (Okay, sovereign money is a close second, but let’s stay on topic.)

Stablecoins comes with lending and borrowing interest rates. And these rates drive their market behavior.

This research explores how on-chain stablecoins set these rates and how they shape market dynamics.

🔥 Project Highlight

Flaunch: A Better Pump.fun on Base

Ethereans have a shiny new toy: Flaunch.

What is it? A memecoin launchpad — think Pump.fun, the application that drove Solana's success this cycle.

If you're an ivory tower eth maxi (no shame, really) and doesn't know about Pump.fun, here's the 80/20: it allows even grandmas to launch memecoins. At launch, the token sale will be on a bonding curve. Once it hits a market cap threshold, funds are added to a Raydium liquidity pool.

Pump.fun was successful cuz it gave users the hope of very fast 10x or 100x. And everyone was gambling on it.

Now Base is getting an application that can attract this degen crowd.

Flaunch isn't just another copy pasta. They've built a custom DEX layer on top of Uniswap V4 to enable several features.

It genuinely innovates on the Pump.fun model.

• No protocol fee. 100% of the trading fee goes to the dev & coins. Dev can choose the fee split.

• Tokenized memestream. The "dev trading fees" is tokenized as an NFT. The NFT holder will get the "dev fees". It enables many possibilities.

• Automated buybacks. Trading fees are used to buyback tokens automatically. Good for pumping price.

• Fixed price fair launch. After a token is live, there'll be a 30 minutes period where price is fixed for everyone. This gives everyone equal access at low prices, not just the memecoin cabal.

These mechanisms are a significant improvement over Pump.fun. But tbh, that isn't enough. The culture is an important factor. And right now, Solana culture is much more degen-friendly.

Personally, I won't be sitting in front of it 24x7 chasing 100xes. But it has a real chance to attract that crowd to Ethereum.

🌍️ Ecosystem Updates

Ethproofs.org went live. It tracks the proving performance of various zkVM vendors and provers. Goals is to accelerate the Ethereum SNARKification.

Etherealize came out of stealth. It'll be a business development arm of Ethereum that'll focus on onboarding institutions to Ethereum.

Uniswap launched their v4. It allows developers to customize how pools, swaps, fees, and LP positions interact. I'm expecting many innovations in DEXes.

Abstract, the L2 associated with Pudgy Penguin community, launched. They're building an ecosystem for normie consumers.

Farcaster enables developers to their web application into a frame very easily. This boosts its utility, allowing users to do more from a single interface.

Ethos Network, the credibility protocol on Base, introduced Ethos Markets. It creates a market for people's reputation.

Ethstrategy created a protocol that imitates (and even improves) Microstrategy's BTC strategy using DeFi primitives. There are two similar products

Liquity shipped v2 on Ethereum mainnet. It allows users to set their own interest rates, and borrow at the highest LTVs with ETH & LSTs.

UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, completed a proof-of-concept of its UBS "Key4 Gold" offering on ZkSync.

🧪 Nerd Corner

Justin Drake introduced native rollups. They're rollups that'll use 'EXECUTE' precompile on the L1 to to verify state transitions. It'll help rollups security councils and simplifies synchronous composability.

Based rollups promises to bring synchronous composability and value accrual to Ethereum L1. Fabric to Accelerate Based Rollup Infrastructure & Connectivity (FABRIC) is a coordination platform accelerate and standardize based rollups.

One big challenge of rollup is the high blob costs. Blob Aggregation proposal expands the block-building process with “blob building” to make more efficient blobs. This will reduce costs for (especially new) rollups.

Ethereum has been unbundling the role of validator over the years. proposes defines divides stakers into three roles with different responsibilities and rewards.

Ethereum doesn't have defined hardware and bandwidth requirements for validators and full nodes. It will add clarity to Ethereum L1 optimization research. A new is proposing recommended requirements.

Issuance curve, aka staking rewards, is an important aspect of Ethereum's monetary policy. This research shows how changes to staking reward will impact different types of validators.

The future of Ethereum is in ZK proving the blocks. This proposal is a unified data format for the input that ZK-EVM prover engines should accept to prove an Execution Layer (or EVM) block.

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