Over 30 Ethereum Projects Join Forces To Launch Free MEV Blocker To Protect Users From MEV

06 Apr 2023, Thursday

3:27 AM

Over 30 Ethereum Projects Join Forces To Launch Free MEV Blocker To Protect Users From MEV

BTC

ETH

S&P Futures 500

$27,981.25

$1,896.50

$4,110.50

(-2.46%)

 (-0.92%)

(-0.52%)

Note: All percentages shown above are referenced to the previous business work day's 09:00 (GMT+8)

GM Treehouser 🌳

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March 2023 Market Recap

Our Daily View

What We Are Covering Today

  • Taiwanese President meets the US House speaker and a group of senators to discuss the island’s democracy (more in Macro & TradFi)
  • OpenSea launches Pro platform to regain market share; Newly launched MEV Blocker to redistribute 90% of MEV profits back to users (more in DeFi & CeFi)
  • The total number of validators and ETH staked continues to increase, indicating confidence in ETH price going into Shapella (more in On-Chain)
  • Calls dominate ETH going into the end-of-week (more in Crypto Derivatives)
  • BTC faces rejection once again at $28.8K, restricting ETH climb towards $2K (more in Crypto Technical Analysis)

Macro & TradFi

A group of bipartisan US senators met with Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen to express their support for Taiwan's democracy and discuss legislation that would impose severe sanctions on China if it were to invade Taiwan. The meeting occurred as the Taiwanese president met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a move that has been criticized by China, which has warned of potential retaliation. This marks the first time in history that a Taiwanese president has met with a US House speaker on American soil in more than four decades since the “One China” policy.

Meanwhile, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Loretta Mester, one of the more hawkish members of the committee, said that she sees “somewhat higher” interest rates ahead. She also said that she expects inflation to remain elevated for a while but to eventually come down. As such, she expects the federal funds rate to move above 5% with the real interest rate remaining above zero for some time in order for inflation to finally react and come down.

Lastly, during the last trading session, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ were down by 0.25% and 1.07% respectively. However, the DJIA was up by 0.24%, largely due to rising energy stocks that counteracted the bearish market sentiment. On the treasury notes, 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields dropped, with the former currently at 0.3787% and the latter at 1.3307%.

DeFi & CeFi

  • MicroStrategy adds another 1,045 $BTC, holds more BTC than Mt. Gox’s balance
  • OPNX records only $13.64 first-day volume, twitter account suspended
  • Top Ethereum teams collaborate on MEV Blocker RPC launch to return MEV profits to users
  • Opensea launches no-fee Pro version for NFT traders and plans for NFT-based trading rewards
  • Binance launches its Argentina fiat on-ramps as inflation runs rampant
  • Cosmos Hub to provide grants for research on revamped tokenomics on $ATOM token
  • BNB Chain to undergo Planck hard fork for enhance cross-chain security
  • Optimism freezes code for Bedrock upgrade and will announce a mainnet launch date after the code is stable for 2 weeks

A consortium of more than 30 Ethereum projects have launched MEV Blocker to combat the negative externalities of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). MEV Blocker aims to protect Ethereum users from on-chain arbitrage techniques such as transaction front-running, sandwiching, and reordering, which siphon profits from users' trades. The software redistributes 90% of the profits generated from MEV capture back to ordinary Ethereum users, while the remaining 10% goes to network participants known as searchers. The searchers monitor Ethereum's mempool for profitable MEV opportunities and run bots to execute them, but with MEV Blocker, they must share profits with Ethereum users. MEV Blocker offers a free remote procedure call (RPC) endpoint that pays users to protect themselves from MEV across various use cases in DeFi, NFTs, and dApps. MEV Blocker was developed by CoW Swap in partnership with Agnostic Relay and Beaver Build, along with other launch partners, including Balancer, Gnosis, 1inch, and Shapeshift.

OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace by active users, has launched OpenSea Pro, a rebrand of its aggregator Gem v2, targeting active traders by consolidating sale listings from 170 other NFT marketplaces onto one platform. The launch of OpenSea Pro follows the dominance of rival marketplace Blur in the NFT trading space. Blur's incentive program led to inorganic trading, distorting price discovery. OpenSea Pro offers advanced features, including zero fees for Pro users, advanced floor sweeping capabilities, inventory management, optimization of gas fees for efficient trades, and more. OpenSea Pro is an upgraded version of Gem, which OpenSea acquired in April last year. Trading fees on OpenSea’s regular marketplace, which the company had previously dropped to zero in February, will return to 2.5% with the launch of Pro. OpenSea has hinted at a community rewards program for users of the Pro platform, which will feature NFTs instead of a fungible token.

On-Chain

According to @CryptoQuant, Ethereum's upcoming hard fork, "Shapella," will allow stakers to withdraw their initial 32 ETH node collateral and staking rewards. This move could lead to more selling pressure than usual once withdrawals become available on April 12, 2023.

Despite the upcoming withdrawals, the number of validators and total staked ETH has continued to increase as the Shapella upgrade approaches. Over the last 30 days, the number of validators has grown by 1.51%, and the total amount of staked ETH has increased by 2.82%. This suggests that investors remain confident in the successful implementation of the upgrade and in Ethereum's trading performance post-withdrawal.

Since the ETH 2.0 Proof-of-Stake (POS) merge, Ethereum's validator count has steadily risen, and the total value locked in the deposit contract has reached an all-time high of 17,979,848 ETH.

More than half of the staked ETH (9.7 million out of 17.9 million) is currently at a loss based on current ETH prices. As a result, the actual selling pressure post-unlock may be less than expected (@CryptoQuant).

Crypto Derivatives

  • BTC and ETH funding rates remain positive
  • 30-day ATM IVs for BTC and ETH decrease to 54.55% and 60.22% respectively
  • 30-day 25 delta call skew for BTC and ETH decrease to 2.53% and 1.57% respectively

Top 3 CEX USDT perp funding rate arbitrage based on last 24-hour lookback:

Net Annualized APR

Perp (USDT pair)

Long on

Short On

18.80%

ETH

OKX

BINANCE

18.70%

SOL

OKX

DYDX

14.53%

DOGE

BYBIT

DYDX

Source: @CexyArbBot Telegram

1) Pairs observed include BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP, LTC, DOGE vs USDT perps 

2) CEX observed include Binance, Bybit, OKX & DYDX

@CexyArbBot allows you to customize CEX, 100+ pairs & lookback periods combo

The futures market recorded $99.21M in liquidations over the past 24 hours, with similar amounts from both shorts and longs.

In the options market, IV on the front-end of the curve decreased for both BTC and ETH, while the ETH term structure flattened. The 7-day IV fell to 53.27% for BTC and 62.1% for ETH, while the realized volatility (RV) remains around 45% for both. With both IV and RV falling, the market appears to have moved on from the banking contagion.

On the flow side, ETH volume is primarily dominated by calls across all maturities as the put-call volume ratio trends lower and currently sits at 0.32. Traders appeared to be bullish on the non-farm payroll at the end of the week as the 7 Apr option is dominated by calls. For BTC, the $31K call strike price has the highest open interest of 4.38K contracts. As for the puts, traders appear to be using them as a hedge, with open interest evenly spread throughout the strikes.

Traders continue to trade the upside on ETH with 10.5K contracts of 14 Apr 2.1K calls being bought. As for BTC, a significant trade is the front-end downside buying of 590 contracts of 28 Apr 26K/25K put spread (@tradeparadigm).

Finally, the VIX rose to 19.08.

Crypto Technical Analysis

On the TA front, BTC has faced rejection at the $28.8K resistance level five times in the past month, failing to bounce back from lower resistance and approaching the historical trendline. Consequently, the $28.0K level now acts as the key support zone. A failure to hold at this level could drop the price to the next support zone, roughly at $27.0K, indicating a 4% downside. Recent price movements could also be summarized as a rising triangle, with the long-term trendline and the middle point of the two local resistance zones acting as the lower and upper bound, respectively. This may indicate a significant potential price swing in the near future.

Turning to ETH, yesterday's bull rally was restricted by BTC's resistance as the market leader. While ETH gained 9.6% from the beginning of the pump to the local high, it was unable to reach the next resistance level at $2K. Currently, the price is at an equilibrium level, with BTC being traded at a close range as well. If bullish momentum is regained, the next resistance level remains at $2K. Alternatively, a pullback to the $1.83 resistance level as a correction to the previous pump before moving further to the new local high is also possible.

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