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Chain launches are great thermometers.

We’re all looking at the same charts right now, wondering if bitcoin ETFs and Saylor will really be enough to carry us into the next big leg up.

Luckily, we now get to check the temperature on the market’s appetite for new stuff, all at once. Expectation is the mother of all frustrations.

Meanwhile:

• BTC hit support at $96,440 earlier this morning but remains choppy. Current price: $98,330, down 6.5% in the past week.

• USDC’s supply dominance on Solana is now above 80%, a new record. Circle would need to mint an additional $1 billion USDC to reach all-time high supply.

• AI agent launchpad Virtuals is now generating ~$14,000 revenue daily, per Blockworks Research data, down from over half a million at the start of January.

🚂 Hype trains 

Today’s the day!

Berachain’s mainnet is finally launching. 

Back in August, we looked at how both Berachain and Monad were able to carve their own paths in a very crowded space, and David even referred to them as potential Solana killers just the other day.

So it’s fair to say the hype train left the station a long time ago. 

“Simply put, in a landscape where most blockchain apps and chains today survive or thrive irrespective of one another, Berachain is a philosophical challenge to the current chain-app model. We believe that the network’s novel Proof of Liquidity (PoL) consensus mechanism, which lets network validators direct block rewards to certain apps built on Berachain, could fundamentally reshape how the entire industry views the relationship between builders and blockchains,” Framework’s Michael Anderson explained. 

Prior to mainnet launch, Berachain raised a fair amount of capital. In its Series B alone — which was co-led by Framework — it raised $100 million, and that’s not counting the $42 million Series A round. 

“The Berachain community is also by far the most fanatical we’ve seen since our involvement in the early days of Chainlink, and we think that the combination of that raw enthusiasm with a real means to influence the direction of the network will be incredibly powerful,” Anderson continued. 

Projects that raise as much capital as Berachain are few and far between. But raising more than $140 million before even launching your mainnet is no small sum, so it’s understandable that some might question why crypto projects are looking to raise a ton of money. And why VCs are willing to back such a project. 

MV Global’s Tom Dunleavy doesn’t think that projects like Berachain should be raising as much capital. He’d prefer to see raises around $10 million, he wrote in a post on X. 

“The valuations associated with big capital intakes set the bar so high that they are priced for perfection for what their user and revenue metrics will be 10 years in the future,” he argued. 

But putting a cap on the amount raised isn’t a solution. Mason Nystrom, a junior partner at Pantera, said that there are a variety of reasons for projects to receive funding above $10 million. That includes competition, talent, volatility and opportunity.

Talent is expensive, and Pantera’s own comp survey from last year pegged the average salary at $176,000 for US employees. 

Competition and volatility go hand-in-hand. Obviously there’s a lot of competition in the space, especially as an L1. Then you add in the cyclical nature of crypto and, well, the money starts to add up. 

Finally, it’s all about opportunity: “The nature of success is power-lawed. The blockchain networks that succeed will be centi-billion to trillion dollar networks. The sheer size of the opportunity presented by blockchain networks (e.g. L1s) enables them to take on more capital to compete to be the power law winners,” Nystrom said. 

At this point, crypto funding isn’t out of control and big capital raises aren’t happening every day. If a project manages to close a multi-hundred million dollar round, I say let them cook. 

– Katherine

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Get ready — Unichain is launching soon!

Designed to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains, Unichain is an L2 that will launch with 95% lower transaction fees than Ethereum L1 — and will soon offer blazing-fast 250ms block times for near-instant transactions. As part of the Optimism Superchain, Unichain is built for interoperability and will support ERC-7683 for seamless cross-chain transactions beyond the Superchain.

Stay in the loop — visit Unichain.org and follow @Unichain on X for updates!

• M&A Wednesday doesn’t have the same ring to it, but that’s not stopping Textile and 3Box Labs from merging in an all-stock deal.

• Show me the receipts: Coinbase’s Conor Grogan said Satoshi Nakamoto might’ve still been active onchain in 2014, and Kraken might know their identity. 

• The FDIC released a trove of documents showing the government agency wasn’t chill when it came to letting banks pursue crypto or blockchain activities.

😑 Delete this

They say crypto rapidly ages you. Look no further for proof than the ETH chart.

More specifically, the ETH chart in comparison to Intel stock. Their trajectories share an uncanny resemblance.

The chart below plots the price of ETH in pink against Intel stock in blue but with caveats:

• INTC is set over the past 50 years (it went public in 1971) on weekly intervals.

• ETH is set over the past seven years on daily intervals.

• ETH is advanced by around two and a half years — so it starts in Jan 2018 rather than August 2015.

As you can see, ETH has done almost exactly what Intel stock has achieved, just seven times as quickly.

Comparing cryptocurrencies and stocks doesn’t make a lot of sense. Ethereum is not a business in the same way that Intel is. 

Ethereum is a decentralized network that sells blockspace to apps and other protocols that service users in some way — far from a chipmaker with factories, employees, board members and CEOs.

Still, I can’t help but draw similarities between Ethereum and Intel, at least in terms of narrative arcs. 

Top brain Vitalik Buterin and the non-profit Ethereum Foundation (EF) he leads are still under fire for supposedly misaligning themselves with the modern crypto community — prioritizing infrastructure over exciting new apps that properly accrue value to ETH.

That disconnect has contributed to massively increased market and mindshare for rival Solana and a ETH/BTC ratio at four-year lows.

Intel’s board meanwhile ousted its CEO Pat Gelsinger in December over concerns that he'd failed to capitalize on the AI boom and could no longer stage a comeback against Nvidia. 

Intel had long been the most valuable US chipmaker until Nvidia flipped its stock in mid-2020. Many tip SOL to potentially flip ETH somewhere down the line.

If the eerie correlation with Intel stock persists (and that’s a big if), perhaps it could happen sooner rather than later.

— David

From macroeconomic shifts to the evolving role of crypto in global markets, Mohamed El-Erian brings decades of financial expertise to the stage. Mike Novogratz, one of the earliest institutional investors in digital assets, unpacks what’s next for the space. And Anatoly Yakovenko, the mind behind Solana, breaks down how high-performance blockchains are shaping the future of finance.

DAS NYC is where the real conversations happen — no hype, just sharp insights from the people driving digital assets forward.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

On our minds: VC chains