Mediaboss Marketing

Four years ago, Solana made its ambitious debut in the volatile world of cryptocurrency, boldly labeling itself as an Ethereum killer. Back then, only the more seasoned players treated this declaration with any seriousness. After all, was it not just the audacious proclamation of a newcomer who not even ranked amongst the top twenty crypto coins? But in a surprising twist of fate, Solana now sits proudly as the second-largest layer 1 solution.

A fascinating analysis by researcher Dan Smith of Blockworks posits that Solanas growth shows no sign of slowing down. His detailed modelling suggests that it will soon overtake Ethereum in terms of crypto transaction fees, a development that bodes well for fresh ERC-20 coins like Raboo that are built on the Ethereum network.

Ethereum still holds vast sway, lodged firmly in the number two position amongst leading cryptocurrencies. Devised by the visionary Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum reimagined the potential of Bitcoin with the creation of the game-changer, a smart contract. Within less than a decade, Ethereum has accrued a market capitalization of $360 billion, an undeniable proof of its commanding presence. But toppling it from its position is a monumental undertaking, akin to moving a mountain.

Nonetheless, Ethereum reveals a critical chink in its impressive armor. Its costly and sluggish. With staggering transaction fees, Ethereum undoubtedly holds value, but its practical application as a transaction token remains dubious. While its smart contract platform stands as a gold standard, utilizing Ethereum for trading becomes a sullen, costly chore, a severe deterrent for potential investors.

In contrast, Solana, with its confident promise to eclipse Ethereum, exploded onto the scene in 2020. Bolstered by fierce competition from formidable tokens such as Monero and Cardano, it entered the big leagues, swiftly scaling to the enviable top 20 position within a year. Powered by its nimble and efficient smart contract platform, Solana outperformed Ethereum in terms of speed, but more critically, its crypto transaction fees were dirt-cheap. In under three years, Solana rose to prominence as a top 5 coin, a juggernaut only surpassed by Ethereum.

The tides are swiftly turning in Solanas favor; it stands on the brink of overtaking Ethereum in terms of transaction fees, buttressing its claim even further as the Ethereum Killer. With growth that significantly outpaces Ethereum, the question on everyones lips is: can it rightfully claim the number two spot before this decade concludes?

The rise of Raboo, a fresh meme-fi crypto coin, to a hypothetical top 20 position has drawn much interest. But Raboo isnt just another meme coin hoping for easy stardom. It boasts a comprehensive crypto product offering that promises to disrupt the financial landscape. With inbuilt staking and rewards mechanisms, Raboo places itself firmly within the DeFi camp. It also harbors an ambitious plan to delve into the lucrative NFT market, targeting inroad into the buzzing gaming industry.

Tailoring its secret weapon the ability to leverage AI for forward propulsion, Raboo amassed beyond $1 million in liquidity in the early stages of presale. The path it has set for itself to become a top 20 crypto before the advent of 2030 cultivates an enticing investment spotlight.

The brewing rivalry between Ethereum and Solana paints a riveting yet lucrative tableau. Yet, for those looking for exponential growth, Raboo, currently in presale with Raboo (RABT) tokens at $0.0042, awaits on the cusp of a predicted 100x surge once it traverses into the open markets. The stakes have never been higher, and the race never more electrifying. Indeed, the next decade in the world of cryptocurrency promises intriguing jolts and seismic shifts.

Excerpt from:

Solana Surges Towards Unseating Ethereum Amid Crypto Rivalry - West Island Blog

DeFi on Ethereum is often clunky and unintuitive, with few safeguards for new entrants.

One highly anticipated improvement is Account Abstraction a new way for Ethereum wallets to handle transactions.

Still, theres a hitch.

Account Abstraction is incompatible with existing wallets, which is slowing its adoption.

A recent proposal from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin may change that. Called EIP-7702, the proposal creates a route for existing wallets to use Account Abstraction which was previously difficult to achieve.

Its still a very early proposal, so we need to evaluate all the rough edges, Ethereum core developer Marius van der Wijden told DL News.

EIP-7702 adds a new transaction type that allows existing wallets to emulate the functions of Account Abstraction wallets, Van der Wijden said.

If successful, the proposal will unlock new transaction types, prevent users from losing access to their funds through email recovery, and even facilitate new use cases for the top smart contract network.

Join the community to get our latest stories and updates

Van der Wijden said EIP-7702 will probably be included in Ethereums next major upgrade dubbed Pectra scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2024.

Account Abstraction has been around for a while.

In March 2023, a previous update introduced an Ethereum feature called ERC-4337, which allowed developers to start building Account Abstraction wallets.

A lack of support for Account Abstraction, coupled with no easy way for users to switch over to the new wallet type, has slowed adoption.

At the same time, another proposal, called EIP-3074, introduced a change that would allow those with non-Account Abstraction wallets to delegate their control to smart contracts, allowing users to access Account Abstraction features.

While EIP-3074 could aid Account Abstraction adoption, many developers criticised it because it puts users funds at increased risk.

The answer may be Buterins EIP-7702 proposal.

EIP-7702 aligns the two previous routes to Account Abstraction EIP-3074 and ERC-4337 into one unified Account Abstraction roadmap, Alex Jupiter, a senior product manager at MetaMask, told DL News.

The result is a streamlined way for existing wallets to use all the features of Account Abstraction without the risks of EIP-3074.

On the surface, Account Abstraction wallets function the same as existing wallets. But under the hood, they have the ability to use smart contracts to manage funds, allowing for a host of new features that could help increase DeFi adoption.

The most obvious improvement is the ability to program transactions, allowing blockchains to replicate services banks and other money-transmitting services offer, such as scheduling payments.

Payments provider Visa has previously highlighted the potential of Account Abstraction for automatic payments.

The ability to sponsor transactions is another appealing feature that Account Abstraction unlocks. Sponsoring transactions means allowing another party such as a wallet provider, DeFi protocol, or blockchain to pay for a users transaction fees.

Programming transactions can also help make using DeFi on Ethereum more intuitive.

Currently, when users want to swap tokens on a decentralised exchange, or send tokens to a different blockchain via a crypto bridge, they must sign multiple transactions at different stages of the process.

With Account Abstraction, everything can be bundled into a single transaction, allowing for a smoother experience.

Account Abstraction should also make using DeFi safer.

When a user creates an Ethereum wallet they receive a private key, usually abstracted to a sequence of words called a recovery phrase.

This key is the only way a user can access their funds. If the key is lost, stolen, or if a users wallet is accidentally uninstalled or the wallet account is deleted, the funds it controls could be lost forever.

With Account Abstraction, it is possible to implement a recovery process in which a user can designate multiple trusted individuals as recovery agents. This can consist of an email address or other forms of identification, such as Google Authenticator for two-factor authentication.

The process is similar to creating and securing an account in the web2 world, but it is executed through a decentralised network.

Tim Craig is a DeFi Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tim@dlnews.com.

Here is the original post:

Vitalik Buterin has a new proposal to make Ethereum wallets easier to use but obstacles remain - DLNews

Grayscale Investments will focus on converting its Ethereum trust the worlds largest to spot exchange-traded products, CEO Michael Sonnenshein said on Wednesday.

At Grayscale we decided to focus our energy on our spot products. Thats really core to our DNA, he said during an event in London that was hosted by the Financial Times.

On Tuesday, media reported that the crypto-native asset manager had withdrawn its application to the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide an Ether futures ETF.

It had filed the application in October.

Sonnenshein said the asset manager was withdrawing the application because a number of futures products are already available for investors.

As DL News has reported, VanEcks EFUT and ProShares EETH dominate the brutally competitive Ethereum ETF field, accounting for over 90% of total trading volume at launch.

Sometimes we will file for a product. That doesnt necessarily mean its going to come to market, Sonnenshein said

Grayscale paved the way for the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs by winning a legal case against the SEC that allowed it to convert its Bitcoin Trust to an ETF.

Join the community to get our latest stories and updates

The SEC granted Grayscales application plus 10 others from various asset managers, including BlackRock and Fidelity Investments in January

Since the wild success of these funds, which have seen almost $12 billion in net inflows, attention has turned to the approval of spot Ethereum products.

Grayscale, along with BlackRock, VanEck, ARK Invest, Fidelity, Invesco, and Hashdex, has applied to convert its Ethereum trust to a spot ETF.

The industry will know what the SEC is thinking when the regulator makes a decision on the first application, VanEcks, on May 23.

Grayscale has also filed to provide a mini trust a smaller fund seeded with assets from the larger trust.

Craig Salm, chief legal officer at Grayscale, has said the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust aims to complement the rest of the firms Ethereum-based line of products to support a range of investors.

The mini trust would launch as a lower-fee alternative spot Ethereum ETF and is designed for investors interested in optimising their Ethereum ETF investment for a buy-and-hold strategy in their brokerage or retirement account, for example, Salm said.

Analysts arent bullish on the chances of the SEC approving any of the applications for spot Ether products.

For one, Ethereums regulatory status isnt clearly defined. SEC chair Gary Gensler has been evasive about whether Ethereum is a security.

Plus, Gensler suffered political blowback from anti-crypto politicians in the Biden administration after the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs though, arguably, the agency had no choice after it lost in court to Grayscale.

On Wednesday, Sonnenshein said while it was difficult to know what the SEC is thinking on Ethereum, Grayscale is optimistic that the SEC will do the right thing by investors.

He added that Grayscale Ethereum Trust is already an SEC reporting company. We file 10-Ks and 10-Qs [disclosures to the SEC], and weve always been a business that pushes our regulators to allow crypto to be brought further and further into the regulatory perimeter.

Reach out to the author at joanna@dlnews.com.

See the original post here:

Grayscale will focus energies on spot Ethereum products, CEO says - DLNews

Solanas validators are a bit like baristas flipping around an iPad theyre nicer to you when you include a tip. And as traders keep cramming into Solanas metaphorical coffee shop, the validator tip jar looks increasingly stuffed with money.

Validators are a group of 1,728 computers that run software to produce blocks on the Solana blockchain. Coinbase Cloud is a prominent Solana validator, as is Google Cloud. One revenue stream that validators earn is called maximal extractible value (MEV), which refers partly to tips paid by searchers to be included in Solana blocks.

This MEV revenue has been growing quickly since mid-March. Notably, Solana validators are earning more from MEV overall than Ethereum validators, according to Blockworks Research. Just a few months ago, Solanas MEV revenue was a rounding error compared to Ethereums.

Read more: MEV doesnt have to be a zero-sum game, research suggests

Broadly defined, MEV refers to the largest amount of value that validators can create by packing transactions into blockchain blocks. Blockworks Researchs dashboard suggests Solana validators raked in a hair under $7 million from MEV last week.

At the moment, Solana MEV is almost entirely the product of a protocol named Jito. Jito offers a fork of the Solana validator called Jito-Solana, and 78% of Solanas validators use this client, according to Jitos website. The client lets searchers, or traders, arrange transactions in bundles. Searchers can include a tip to try getting validators to send their particular bundle to the blockchain.

Whether all this is good for Solana is something of a matter of perspective. Some forms of MEV can be predatory. Jito recently suspended its mempool, a kind of waiting area for transactions, due to sandwich attacks that let opportunists create MEV by trading right before and after a transaction to manipulate the price and take profit from the trader.

Read more: Jito Labs ends mempool functionality citing impact on Solana users

In Jitos telling, the protocol is making Solana more efficient while also minimizing negative forms of MEV like sandwich attacking. If it can pull that off, Solana could see a lot of benefit.

Continued long-term growth in Solanas MEV would likely imply that less spam is being included in blocks, and Solana would have more available blockspace, Blockworks Research analyst Hayden Tsutsui said. In a best case scenario, more blockspace could free up room for more on-chain activity, which could also bring along more liquidity, Tsutsui said.

But it bears mentioning that as things currently stand, Solana is still staggering under a mountain of spam. More than 60% of non-vote transactions fail on Solana, according to Blockworks Research, largely due to bots taking advantage of Solanas cheap fees by inundating the network in hopes of getting transactions to land.

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

See the article here:

MEV collected by validators is now higher on Solana than on Ethereum - Blockworks

Crypto asset manager Grayscale is unlikely to go to war again for Ethereum.

Grayscale famously sued the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 in a fight to offer customers Bitcoin ETFs. The case went in its favour, and paved the way for the products to launch.

But now?

Theyre probably just like, To hell with it. Let somebody else step up this time, Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst Eric Balchunas told DL News.

The firm this week withdrew a filing that wouldve made it harder for the SEC to defend the denial of Ethereum spot ETFs in court.

Theyre just sort of taking their ball and going home, Balchunas said.

And part of me doesnt blame them. Its not just money its bandwidth, its attention.

The SEC spent years shooting down Bitcoin spot ETF applications before Grayscale filed a lawsuit against the regulator in protest in 2022.

Join the community to get our latest stories and updates

The courts agreed something was wrong.

In September, a judge found that the SEC had acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner by denying the applications.

So Grayscale was able to convert its Bitcoin trust into a spot ETF finally giving the option for investors to exit the fund if they chose to. And 10 other firms, including BlackRock and Fidelity, launched their own ETFs.

But the move backfired on Grayscale. Its ETF has hemorrhaged over $17 billion in Bitcoin since January, while BlackRock and Fidelitys funds have vacuumed more than $23 billion in assets.

Balchunas said Grayscale probably didnt expect outflows to be so violent.

Seventy-eight days of straight outflows. They broke all records, he said. They didnt realise how hardcore the US ETF market is.

At issue was Grayscales 1.5% management fee, which turned out to be multiples higher than their competitors 0.2% or 0.3% fees.

They probably thought everybody would be between 0.7% and 1%, so they wouldnt be too far away at 1.5%, Balchunas said.

Grayscales Ethereum trust has almost $9 billion in assets which would likely bleed away if the vehicle were converted into a proper ETF.

These funds are trapped, as the current structure doesnt permit redemptions. Grayscale makes a solid 2.5% fee on those assets.

The other issue is that demand for an Ethereum ETF simply isnt as strong as for the Bitcoin ETF.

Balchunas predicted that, if they do launch, Ethereum ETFs will only get about 10% to 15% of the assets that Bitcoin ETFs garnered.

Grayscale has less to lose by not fighting for the Ethereum ETFs, Balchunas said. Bitcoin ETFs are the headlining act.

Ethereum ETFs will never have the same fever pitch attention around their approval.

Tom Carreras is a markets correspondent at DL News. Got a tip about Grayscale and Ethereum ETFs? Reach out at tcarreras@dlnews.com

Continued here:

Grayscale fought hard for Bitcoin ETFs. Why it won't bother with Ethereum - DLNews