Andy's Alpha #8 - EthCC Recap
Hot DeFi opportunities I heard of, builders alpha, timely releases coming soon, and overall reflections!
ETHCC was magical 🪄
This issue has tons of great info that I took notes of at the conference, I really hope you enjoy because it took a lot of effort to put this together in a way that is concise, highly valuable and actionable. Thank you for being here. Let’s dive right in!
Andy’s Alpha will remain a free newsletter . If you wanna contribute, you can send any ERC20 here: andysalpha.eth!
Today’s Inspiration
"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune." —Jim Rohn, entrepreneur.
Before We Get To Approved Alpha, How Bout Some LayerZero Alpha!?
Root Credit is launching their DeFi operating system comprised of many “sprouts” or partner projects building atop LayerZero tech.. I’m very bullish on omnichain and LayerZero and am happy to see projects gaining serious traction there.You can find more info on Root’s Twitter or website!
Approved Alpha
I’m sitting here on my train heading to a small town in France to enjoy a couple days of peace and quiet. The last eight days have been filled with magical energy and I wouldn’t want it any other way, but I’m exhausted and ready to get back to deep work.
I want to share with you the best information that I discovered from each day during this week in Paris.
What I’ll do is drop a photo with relevant info that you’d wanna know. Ready? Leggo👇
Big shoutout to the Pudgy fam representing at @ETHCC!
ETHCC day 1 was great, packed with alpha and amazing vibes. The first person I met in line was Fifi, a Pudgy Penguins Europe leader. The following night, Pudgy Penguins had a party where we discussed the absolute madness that is happening with the toys. Pudgy toys are selling out at a massive rate at retail stores in the USA and Project Overpass is coming soon.
Mantle went live with their mainnet on the big stage at ETHCC! 🙌🏼💥
Mantle is a high-value layer two built atop the Optimism stack that has some serious potential because of their backing. They also have deep ties in DeFi and in the centralized exchange world (Bybit). I expect a lot of native projects to launch, receive an influx of liquidity, then list on Bybit.
Tim Beiko dropped an awesome speech about the importance of community involvement in EIPs, especially with EIP4844 on the horizon.
Core devs have been playing a significant role in shaping Ethereum's governance and its time for the community to get as involved as they can. EIP-4844 is a very important proposal for higher throughput and is bullish for ARB, OP and any other L2 tokens. NFA.
Amazing interview with the legend, Jordi Baylina from Polygon.
Jordi talked about the recent developments in the zkEVM architecture, and without giving too much alpha, the interview was insane. You gotta watch. Its coming out today, Monday July 24th. Check my Twitter or The Rollup twitter/youtube/website.
Vitalik’s account abstraction talk was really great.
Vitalik went all the way back to 2017 to discuss why AA wasn’t entirely possible with the previous version of Ethereum and how the transition to PoS was bullish. Overall, pretty intense panel.
Liquity Protocol dropped v2 in Paris too.
Great convo with Robert and Michael. They are great. LUSD will likely survive a long time given the state of their setup as a team. They are OGs. I think there’s a strong chance for a drastic increase in the quality of stable tokens in the coming months. Stable Summit had tons of quality.
Top-notch speakers in the Layer 2 realm had a very very great conversation about scaling Ethereum.
Couple key highlights: 3 ZKR teams ganging up on the only OR guy (Harry, from Arbitrum). Also, Matt Finestone from Loopring is now leading Taiko, a new zkEVM-based Ethereum L2 zk-rollup with the alpha-4 testnet live now🧪 Will be rewards for the early adopters for sure.
Fireside panel on Credit Markets Growth through DeFi Primitives & RWA!
IPOR Labs, GearboxProtocol and of course the LiFi Protocol squad in the house! I’m working closely with 2/3 teams here and Darren from IPOR is a good fren. RWA is gonna grow exponentially in the short-mid term. Real world assets will be bridged onchain until there is no tomorrow for this decade. I’m pretty excited.
Ethereum events like EthCC are straight-up mind-blowing, linking geniuses & builders across the globe🌟🚀 This year's been an absolute blast—full of awe-inspiring moments!
Yeah this year was remarkable. Lots of work. Lots of people building. I think it was a good point between the bear and the bull, basically where you see the growth happening at a humble, yet focused way. Everyone is still vibing but knowing we have to get to work, at least that was my take.
Great conversation with Tony & David, and Raft/Nostra
Tony and David are great because they just ‘get it’. This is something that can’t be taught really. They are taking over in the LSDFi space right now with Raft.Fi. Zero to $60M TVL in less than two months. Definitely a project to watch.
Peter Haymond takin' the stage, moderating the 🔥 panel on DEXs at Arbitrum day
The alpha here is Iron Boots and Camelot are trying to get a massive proposal through the Arbitrum DAO. Will be interesting to watch. Also TraderJoe party was epic. Great marketing.
Pudgy Penguins waddling all the way to EthCC in Paris!
Yeah. This ones obvious again. Pudgies will probably overtake a lot of other NFT communities.
Finally linked up with Bob Baxley IRL after a fun podcast episode we dropped last year!
Maverick and Liquity are both solid teams that are using their resources together. Will be great to see the development of $LUSD on Maverick. Bullish.
Bumped into Hashstack & AltLayer crew.
These guys are legit, the AltLayer team is really cool. Rollups as a service will flourish for a few years, and then we’ll see the state of scaling Ethereum. I’m quite bullish next few months. Hashstack(undercollateralized lending) is deploying on StarkNet and are looking to build and raise. Both will be interesting to follow.
Linea is trying to scale Ethereum like a boss.
Linea mainnet went public July 18th and had $23m bridged, did a huge NFT livestream with Joe Lubin and it went great. They are pushing on 1m transactions now with 150+ dApps onboarded, and had some epic side events across the week in Paris. Really cool L2. Bullish.
Vitalik is very bullish on Account Abstraction.
Which probably means you should be too. Pay attention to the teams who are focusing on abstracting complexities away from users like Connext, and who are thinking of a chain agnostic world.
Cruisin’ the Seine with the Kyber Network crew.
Was good to see tons of Kyber Network team out in Paris. Again, another DeFi OG that will be around (they raised a lot in ICO days and also are smart) because the team can be patient and wait for “bull” or “better conditions”.
That’s all for the short recap. I have to rest and have tons of other work to do, I hope you enjoyed. Thx for the support fam.