A weekly recap of the most insightful news, analysis, and capital flows in the wild west we call crypto.

Hello and welcome back to the Web3 Rewind! Per usual in this industry, lots has happened this past week. Here's what we have in store for you:

• Is the bear market over?

• Robinhood. Is retail back?

• Helium unlimited mobile plan

• Jito airdrop

• Blackrock amends S-1 filing

• Circle’s recoverable wrapper token standard

The Latest

So the bear market’s kaput?

Bull run dept.

Is retail back?

Earlier this week, Robinhood released its investor presentation for the month of November. The key highlight? That crypto trading volume has surged 75%. Not including the quarter where the entirety of America was trading DOGE, Robinhood is a mere 200% increase in volume away from reaching a new crypto volume ATHs. That seems very doable, considering the crypto markets are only just starting to heat up. Does that mean retail is back? Judging by the metric of how many friends you haven’t talked to in years who reach out asking about crypto, it seems we are barely getting started. Retail is not here yet.

The higher prices go without retail entering the fun, the more fuel that adds for a larger and more explosive bull market. The best case scenario would be if BTC breaks past ATHs at $68K, and then, and only then, do your cousins start asking you about some random token listed on Binance.

So that brings us to today. If retail isn’t here yet, then what’s driving this never-ending rally? The obvious candidate here is the spot BTC ETF. The approval window is January 5-10, so we aren’t far from a potential approval. Recent amendments to various S-1 filings have further fueled speculation that the BTC ETF is almost all but guaranteed at this point. But you know what they say: don’t count your chickens before they hatch. It’s a little silly, but if everyone thinks that an ETF approval is imminent, you want to frontrun that decision. But frontrunning that decision means that prices go up. And as prices go up, people think the likelihood of a BTC ETF becomes higher. See the reflexivity?

What else? Bitcoin halvings have typically been a pretty reliable signal of a bull market, with crypto following the four-year cycles of booms and busts. The next Bitcoin halving is set for April 2024, and Bitcoin activity is rapidly picking up due to various things such as ordinals and inscriptions.

There are a few other reasons that would explain the recent rally. I hope I’m not jinxing it, but there really isn’t any overhang left in crypto. Binance has settled with the DoJ, Coinbase’s ongoing lawsuit has significantly quietened down and I suspect everyone has forgotten it was ever a thing, and the FTX estate has been slowly liquidating various assets without much impact on the market. What is left?

— Joseph Cooper, Decential Media

Quick Bits

Helium’s unlimited mobile plan

• On Tuesday, Helium released an unlimited $20/month phone plan. If you’ve been pulling your hair out trying to save money on T-mobile’s $35/month family plan, boy, is this a good deal.

• Even better? Crypto finally has something useful to show to the world. We’re no longer for speculation only! DePIN will likely be one of the clearer crypto use cases to emerge this cycle, and I, for one, am very excited to see Helium gain more traction over the coming years. To cheap mobile data.

Jito airdrop

• Last week, Jito announced its token, JTO. Jito is a MEV optimized liquid staking protocol on Solana. Put simply, it’s the Lido + Flashbots (two of the most important protocols in Ethereum) of Solana,

• Instead of linearly rewarding users, Jito chose to use a tiered system, which means that the largest airdrop recipients only receive 21.13x of the smallest recipients. On one hand, it decreases large whale wallets from receiving a disproportionate amount of the supply. On the other hand, it means that if you contributed hugely to the protocol’s growth, you aren’t exactly getting rewarded for it.

Blackrock files an amended S1 form

• In the past week, Blackrock has made 21 amendments to its S-1 filing for the spot BTC ETF. The main theme of the amendments is security and custody, for example, shifting private keys to cold storage and clarifying relationships with entities such as prime brokers.

• Considering the level of detail, many are convinced that this is the final push over the finish line. We are unsure if Blackrock is in active conversations with the SEC and are making these amendments based on their recommendations. But if they are, then it looks like it’s all engines go.

And last but not least

Circle’s recoverable wrapper tokens

On Monday, Circle launched two new papers through its research arm, Circle Research. The first is a recoverable wrapper token standard to protect any ERC20 token from thefts, hacks, and accidental transactions. The second is a decentralized insurance and liquidity pool for these recoverable tokens. In 2022, $3.8B was lost in crypto hacks, and this token standard could be the solution. A recoverable wrapped token works by wrapping an ERC-20 asset in a wrapper token contract. In return, a user receives an equal number of wrapper tokens back. From there, the recoverable wrapper tokens can be recovered back to the sender within a certain time window post-transaction, e.g. 24 hours. As a result, each wallet address will have two distinct token balances: a settled non-recoverable balance, and an unsettled recoverable balance. Who gets to decide whether tokens can be recovered? Developers could allow that to happen by designating a smart contract address or wallet that has reversible functionality, for example. Or the wallet that initiated the transaction could have an "undo" button that allows for recovery. Or there could be a multi-sig agreement with a mutual third party to fix mistakes.

Similar to how most individuals would likely not use a credit card without a chargeback mechanism, perhaps that same case should apply to crypto payments. Realistically, users like you and I will not use this token standard directly. It will more likely be large financial institutions, such as Venmo and Visa if they choose to adopt USDC, which will have their own USDC wrapper contracts. Realistically, we won’t get the option to unsend transactions as individual users. That would be hell on earth, considering the whole point of blockchains was the near-instant settlement and finalized state that cannot be tampered with. However, as decentralization maxis, censorship and centralization will always be at the back of our mind given a central party’s ability to reverse transactions. But truth be told, if you’re using USDC today, you already trust a centralized party not to rug you, Circle. Theoretically, Circle could pause redemptions any time they want, freeze any amount of USDC, and blacklist any wallet address from interacting with USDC. So is this recoverable wrapper token that much more? — JC

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.