Despite this months’ price action, Ethereum’s fundamentals keep on getting stronger. Firstly, staking on ETH is going from strength to strength as the Staking Ratio on the network recently surpassed 20% for the first time. When the Shappella upgrade went live back in April 2023 this total was at 14% representing an additional $7B worth of Staked ETH and more importantly, $4.8B of this is in the form of ETH LSTs!
Secondly, the surge in ETH staking has pushed the total addressable market for LSTs up to new heights. At the time of writing the Total Market Cap of all LSTs on Ethereum is worth $19B. In comparison the total market cap of structured products in LSTfi is only $800M, which is around 4% of the market cap of LST. This represents a huge amount of untapped collateral available, and gives a lot of headway for LSTfi protocols to continue growing and maturing.
With the Dencun upgrade already in the works, bringing decreased fees for L2s, improved blockspace with cheaper on-chain data storage and beacon chain roots in the EVM, Ethereum keeps on gearing up for a more composable and scalable decentralised world!
Total Crypto Market Cap: $1.153T (+5.87%)
DeFi TVL: $39.89B (+2.68%)
Stablecoins: $123.88B (-0.15%)
The allure of public blockchains lies in their transparency - designed to be open ledgers, it allows anyone to validate transactions (depending on the consensus mechanisms and requirements), reducing the need for centralised intermediaries. This democratisation of transaction validation offers a neutral foundation for a myriad of applications, from finance to self-sovereign identities. However, this transparency is a double-edged sword - every transaction, every interaction with a smart contract, remains forever etched on the blockchain, visible to all.
<aside> 🚨 Imagine Alice paying for her dinner at a restaurant using her Ethereum wallet. Not only does the restaurant get a peek into Alice's full transaction history, but Alice can also delve into the restaurant's revenue or even discern the wallet addresses of other patrons!
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