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🔥 Crypto's new trend 👀

🔥 Crypto's new trend 👀

PLUS: Blackrock CEO calls bitcoin digital gold

Alex M.
July 06, 2023

GM everyone. This is 2036, the crypto newsletter that pays you.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: every once in a while, new trends emerge in crypto. They produce 10X, 100X - sometimes 1,000X returns. Here’s the latest one that matters.

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

Get smarter on crypto in 2 minutes

Aite - we’re gonna keep today super duper simple.

Yesterday, we talked about staking Ether - the #1 opportunity in crypto to earn income on your ETH.

There’s currently $46 BILLION of ETH being staked - 32% of which is staked through a protocol called Lido.

And the amount of ETH staked keeps rising by the day…

the kind of chart we love

As we said yesterday, this is very bullish for Ethereum.

It makes ETH the first institutional-grade crypto bond. And it’s picking up steam.

Now - there’s the plain vanilla way to stake ETH with Lido. You earn 4% annually, but at least you know what you’re getting.

But remember, this is crypto. There are also alternatives that allow degen investors to turbocharge their staking income.

Degens when they make 80% yield on ETH instead of 4%

Like Pendle.

Pendle is a protocol that allows users to buy crypto at a discount, earn high yields on ETH (20-25%), and speculate on future yields.

In the last 6 months, the total value locked in Pendle has gone vertical - from under $10 million to nearly $150 million:

In the process, the token has gone up over 20X.

From $0.045 to nearly $1.

But Pendle isn’t alone.

Lybra Finance is a protocol that allows you to deposit ETH and receive a stablecoin in return that earns yield (around 8%). It’s up 30X in usage in the last few months alone.

Now - none of this is financial advice.

But it’s pretty clear that the market is thirsty for good staking solutions.

The value of both the staking projects and their tokens (called liquid staking deratives - LSDs) is skyrocketing.

I know this may sound complex.

But what you need to know is that:

After the Ethereum Shapella upgrade in May, staking has been massively de-risked for both retail (people like you and me) and institutions, making it 10X more attractive.
An increasing number of investors want to stake their ETH.
There will always be a market for degenerate levels of yield with varying degrees of risk.

That’s why protocols like Lido, Pendle, Lybra, or Frax have done so well in the last couple of months (they all have their own tokens too 👀).

And we believe Ethereum staking is just getting started.

Only 20% of all ETH is currently staked, an increase from 15% when we first wrote about it.

Compare this with the % of staking on other blockchains: