• Between Feb. 26 and Mar. 3, Bitcoin made a notable rally towards its all-time high, moving from around $50,000 to over $69,000. During this ascent, meme coins like DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE also surged, with their values skyrocketing 100% or more in mere days. This period highlighted a dual trend: Bitcoin's significant push towards its peak value and a parallel, explosive run in memecoin prices, underscoring a heightened phase of speculative interest in the cryptocurrency market.

• Analyzing onchain swap activity for DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE reveals a significant surge in volume. Before the spike, collective daily swap amounts were around $6M daily. This figure dramatically rose to over $260M on Mar. 5, marking a 4000% increase in swap activity.

• During the memecoin surge, Coinbase, a leading app for U.S. retail crypto purchases, leaped from 430th to 50th in the Apple App Store and from 30th to 4th among financial apps. This remarkable rise indicates a significant increase in retail buyers, likely fueling the price spikes in DOGE and SHIB.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In a notable transaction, an individual exchanged the meme coin AI for another popular meme coin, SHIB, involving over $500K in a single swap. This transaction exemplifies the frothy activity characterizing the substantial price surge in meme tokens, where individuals traded one memecoin for another, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars per transaction. Such significant swaps highlight the intense speculation, unique market conditions, and investor enthusiasm surrounding memecoins.

• WIF recently overtook BONK by market capitalization. Since January WIF also dominates BONK in DEX Volume on Solana consistently up to a factor of three. Both had their most recent peak in trading volume this week with $430M for WIF on Mar. 5 and BONK with $140M on Mar. 4. Despite the WIF’s recent launch, the token also reached parity with BONK by cumulative DEX volume — BONK’s cumulative volume is $4.8B and WIF’s is $4.4B. Notably most of the volume for WIF occured past mid January this year.

• The accumulated DEX Fees for both BONK and WIF paint a similar picture. The accumulated fees start to take off at the end of February with WIF overtaking the previous BONK fees high of $3.5M on Feb. 29 only rally to a new accumulated high of $8.9M on Mar. 5.

• The Buy/Sell Ratio for BONK has consistently been around 60/40 since December with no days with net sales. WIF is closer to 50/50 with no net sales days only since mid February. WIF’s volume peak of +$430M earlier this week also trumps the previous +$360M volume high of BONK in mid December.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The largest transaction for WIF this week was a trade involving 7,858.94 SOL, worth $1.2M at the time of writing, through Jupiter, the DEX aggregator. The largest DEX trade for BONK was for 31B of the token, now worth over $1M.

• Ordinal Inscriptions represent digital assets inscribed on a satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin (BTC), and function as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain. The notable rise in the price of Bitcoin, combined with sustained demand for specific collections and a substantial number of active buyers, culminated in an impressive surge in sales volume, reaching close to $1.6 billion since December 2023.

• While OKX was the dominant marketplace, accounting for two-thirds of the total sales volume over the last three months, Magic Eden has begun to emerge as the default marketplace for Bitcoin Ordinals since early February.

• Over 16 million Ordinals were inscribed by 1.2 million unique addresses, which resulted in them paying 3,000 BTC in transaction fees. The substantial rise in BTC prices directly impacted the number of daily inscriptions, leading to a downward trajectory in the past three months.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: On March 4, 2024, NodeMonke #2769 closed a remarkable deal, exchanging hands for a whopping amount of 17 BTC - equivalent to approximately $1.2 million at the time. This sale underscores the appetite of players within the broader crypto industry for Bitcoin Ordinals.

• After two years of running a closed beta, the Lens Protocol went permissionless on Feb. 27. This means anyone can now create a Lens profile and own it, as well as their posts and other onchain interactions enabled by the Lens V2 open actions. Since the official announcement, users have minted more than 99K new profiles, bring the total profile count to 235K since the DeSocial protocol, built on Polygon, went live.

• In the last 10 days, Lens protocol made close to 620K $USD in revenue. The protocol’s revenue derives from profile mints and anyone can create a profile by paying in MATIC or the equivalent in USD with a credit card.

• Lens attracted close to 39K monthly active users in February, and early March numbers show ~26K MAU. The top apps by monthly active users were Hey (~58%), Phaver (~14%), and Orb (~12%).

• Friend.tech's hype, soaring from August to late October last year, saw record-breaking TVL, daily users, and trading volumes. However, its fortunes have reversed sharply. TVL peaked at around $52M (30.2K ETH) on October 2, 2023, but plummeted to $34.9M (9.19K ETH), marking a 32% (70%) drop. Trading volumes collapsed by 98%, from $20m to $380k daily. Similarly, the number of traders nosedived, with a peak of 73.8k on Oct. 15, 2023, now drastically reduced by 98.3%.

• Friend.tech's revenue model splits transaction fees evenly between the platform and creators whose Keys are traded. However, dwindling trader and creator numbers have caused a substantial drop in daily transaction fee volumes, falling from around $2 million on Sep. 14, 2023, to less than $40K.

• At launch, Friend.tech experienced rapid user growth, with almost 100,000 users joining in less than two weeks, reaching 800,000 users within three months. However, since late October 2023, the total user count has only increased by 5%, and the daily influx of new users is now less than 800 wallets.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Despite the sharp decline in activity on Friend.tech, certain creators' Keys continue to be traded at elevated prices, witnessing significant price surges within a single day. For instance, in this transaction, each share of Racer's account was purchased for 2.64 ETH, while its price stood at 1.94 ETH on the same day.

• The gaming sector emerged as the second-largest driver of new user acquisition on the NEAR blockchain. In 2024, the NEAR blockchain saw an impressive surge in new users, with a remarkable 3.95 million people joining the platform through the gaming sector alone. This substantial growth underscores the rising interest in Web3 gaming and showcases the effectiveness of NEAR's strategic focus on this subsector.

• NEAR blockchain witnessed a shift in new user share between PlayEmber and Sweat, two major gaming platforms. PlayEmber attracted 56% of users, while Sweat secured 44%. Early 2024 saw Sweat leading, but on January 15th, PlayEmber gained traction, overtaking Sweat and becoming the top player in NEAR's gaming sector.

• Despite PlayEmber's lead in new user onboarding in 2024, Sweat dominated gaming sector transactions 6x on average. This gap between user onboarding and transaction volume emphasizes the importance of user engagement and retention in Web3 gaming, showing that attracting users is only half the battle.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Sweat's higher transaction count can be attributed to its unique features and the excitement generated by its innovative Growth Jars mechanism. As users eagerly engage in growing their $SWEAT tokens, the platform experiences increased transaction activity.

• Since 2021, tens of thousands of contributors have joined Coordinape to participate in resource allocation for their orgs. This web3 ritual centers on assigning off-chain GIVE to teammates or community members, as support for compensation and token allocations. Users have distributed 41 million GIVE so far. Last week, GIVE rolled out to CoLinks, a network built around Coordinape, and hundreds of members there are beginning to use GIVE. GIVE in CoLinks supports colleague's skills and onchain CV, allowing members to find each other, gain meaningful reputation points and endorsements, and connect better. GIVE soon will be available in Farcaster.

• In both CoLinks and Coordinape, GIVE rolls up to a contributor's CoSoul, our reputation SoulBound Token on Optimism. Contributors can mint CoSoul to hold Public GIVE, a normalized version of GIVE. Public GIVE synchs automatically each month, and holders can use it to support their onchain rep, and plug into other ecosystem tools like Hats or Snapshot. Over 26K CoSouls have been minted by unique wallets over the last nine months.

• CoLinks, Coordinape's social network, aims to disrupt professional networks like LinkedIn by including advanced on-chain reputation endorsement. CoLinks maintains small scale networks through social-fi mechanics that provide a more personalized experience. CoLinks launched in December — 660 members have joined and bought 9,145 Links.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: A CoLinks user paid 0.165 ETH in late December for a Link to project founder Zakku, our highest value Link purchase so far. In the Link transaction, both the protocol and Link provider (Zakku) received a fee of 0.0077 ETH. The majority of Link transactions are much smaller with the protocoling aiming to collect at least $1 in ETH on all Link buys. This modeling is similar to Zora and other NFT platforms.

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