The Celeb Drama
Last weekend, several crypto-related accounts were hacked on X. GCR, and American rapper ‘Rich The Kid’ were among the ones targeted. Initially, even American celebrity Caitlyn Jenner was presumed to be a part of the equation, when she announced the launch of her own coin JENNER and posted videos vouching for it. Bottom line, her account wasn’t hacked, but socially engineered by developer Sahil Arora.
Stablecoin Landscape Expands
Japanese investment banking giant Nomura has tied up with GMO and Laser Digital to explore Japanese yen and US dollar stablecoin issuance in Japan. Via this partnership, the issuance, redemption, and circulation mechanisms of a JPY/USD stablecoin business in Japan will be evaluated. Nomura and Laser Digital will chip in more towards crypto trading, asset management, and venture investment. GMO, on the other hand, intends to gravitate towards the technology side.
Solana Validators
SIMD-0096, a proposal to allocate full priority fees to validators, got a go-ahead nod this week. Over 77.7% of the validators - including Solend, Jito, Helius, Bonk, Stakehaus, and Everstake - advocated the proposal. Triton, Step Finance, and Solana Compass were among the remaining ones who objected. With validators set to pocket the entire priority fee going forward, it should be noted that the 50% base fee burn mechanism will still be in play. SIMD-0096 will not go live on the mainnet right off the bat. Implementation is expected to take a few months.
LayerZero Rides the Solana Wave
The Solana ecosystem is now home to a new protocol - LayerZero. The crypto bridging solution is now live in its ‘mainnet beta’ phase on Solana. At the moment, asset bridging has been enabled across eight chains: Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, Avalanche, and Polygon. Once the audits are done and dusted, the beta phase will conclude and over 70 chains will be connected on Solana.
RWA Triumphs in May
Among all sectors, bridging and DA tokens performed the worst in May. CEX, AI, SoV tokens registered single-digit returns, while file storage, gaming, NFT applications, social apps, and DePIN-related tokens were a step ahead and bestowed users up to 20%. Utility tokens, i.e. tokens related to staking, DeFi, and oracles capped their ROI under 30%, while meme coins made it to the other side of the line by cumulatively rising 30.4%. RWAs triumphed over them all and posed a 60% figure.
