Cobo Argus Strategy Weekly: Eigenlayer will launch a new round of LST staking on the 29th—how to secure quota ahead of others?
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Cobo Argus Strategy Weekly: Eigenlayer will launch a new round of LST staking on the 29th—how to secure quota ahead of others?
Farcaster welcomes its first community memecoin—$DEGEN.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: COBO ARGUS
Welcome to Cobo Argus Weekly Digest #8. This issue covers the following topics:
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Beyond basic interactions everyone is doing, what other opportunities should we watch in Berachain?
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Blast TVL surpasses $1.4 billion, attracting 43 Dapps into its ecosystem
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Farcaster welcomes its first community memecoin—$DEGEN
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Eigenlayer will launch a new round of LST staking on the 29th—how to secure allocation ahead of others?
Highlights This Week
1. Beyond basic interactions everyone is doing, what other opportunities should we watch in Berachain?
There's a broad consensus in the crypto industry that 2024 will see a surge of project token airdrops, potentially distributing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens and incentivizing massive on-chain activity as users shift from off-chain to on-chain engagement.
The recent launch of the Berachain testnet exemplifies this trend. Fueled by airdrop expectations, a flood of users rushed to perform testnet tasks, overwhelming the faucet system at one point due to high demand for test tokens.
In our previous weekly report, we published a guide to interacting with the Berachain testnet, covering official foundational activities such as BEX (Berachain’s native decentralized exchange), the stablecoin Honey, the lending market BEND, the derivatives market BERPS, and the governance platform BGT Station.
But beyond these widely pursued actions, what other opportunities exist?
Celestia awarded developers five-figure TIA airdrop rewards. A similar strategy could be applied on Berachain—developers can deploy contracts using tools like thirdweb, following step-by-step tutorials such as the one by Xremlin on deploying contracts on the Berachain testnet. The process takes just five minutes, costs nothing, and is beginner-friendly.
Inspired by Olympus DAO, Berachain has cultivated a strong grassroots community spirit from day one. Its bottom-up nature increases the likelihood of hidden gems emerging organically within the ecosystem. To date, Berachain hosts 71 projects spanning gaming, NFTs, and DeFi. Beyond the official "Big Five," most are Bera-native (Bera Native) projects, though some non-native ones like Sudoswap and Caviar have also joined. Notably, the majority of native projects haven’t launched tokens yet. This means selecting high-potential, non-tokenized projects from this list allows users to potentially earn dual airdrops from a single interaction.
An interesting development: The Honey Jar, a community project and also a Berachain genesis node, launched an NFT minting campaign offering OOGA BOOGA Ticket NFT discount vouchers for 6.9 $BERA or 4.2 HONEY. These NFTs will grant a 25% discount once the mainnet launches. Given the difficulty of acquiring testnet BERA—users can only claim 0.025 BERA every 8 hours—it’s expected that most will swap their BERA into HONEY to mint these NFTs (since 0.006 $BERA ≈ 4.2 $HONEY). This clever mechanism effectively incentivizes on-chain participation through discounted rewards.
Finally, validators play a critical role in Berachain’s three-token economic model. They create blocks, secure the network, and govern the redistribution of staking rewards (BGT)—such as deciding which liquidity pools receive BGT “emissions.” Validator governance power depends on how much BGT they’ve received in delegation. In return, delegators earn a share of gas fees and native dApp revenues based on their BGT stake. Therefore, choosing the right validator is crucial for ordinary users—not only for asset security but also because the influence of the chosen validator directly impacts staking returns. DeSpreadTeam, one of Berachain’s genesis nodes, offers a validator dashboard to monitor the real-time performance of genesis validators.
2. Blast TVL Surpasses $1.4 Billion—“Blast BIG BANG” Developer Campaign Now Live
Blast, the Layer 2 network launched by Blur founder Pacman, has officially launched its testnet and initiated the “Blast BIG BANG” campaign targeting developers to attract Dapp integrations. So far, 43 applications have joined the ecosystem.
Since its launch last November, Blast—created by Blur founder Pacman—has surpassed $1.4 billion in TVL and attracted over 100,000 users. Blast’s transparent airdrop program primarily targets developers, motivating 166 developers to build on Blast and bring 43 applications across categories including NFTs/gaming, infrastructure, smart contracts, social, lending protocols, GAMBLEFI, and DEXs. Notable projects include the domain system Blast Domains, the on-chain betting app RiskOnBlast, the airdrop-mining DeFi protocol Bitconnect, the Blast-native memecoin Blastoise, and the contract trading platform TraderDAO. For full details, check out the Blast Ecosystem Landscape.
3. Farcaster Welcomes Its First Community Memecoin—$DEGEN
After four failed attempts, the Farcaster community has finally seen its first modestly successful memecoin—$DEGEN.
$DEGEN is a truly community-driven meme project, characterized by fair launch principles, grassroots energy, and organic, bottom-up growth. It operates via loose, unofficial DAO-like structures and open collaboration. This community-originated DNA gives it natural integration advantages, and within less than 20 days of launch, it has already developed multiple use cases.
1) Fair Launch Mechanism
- The genesis supply of $DEGEN is 37 billion tokens. No pre-mine. 15% of supply is reserved for ecosystem development with a vesting period exceeding 4 years. One-third of the team allocation (5% of total supply) has been locked in a 2-year vesting contract, unlocking in July 2026. The remainder is allocated to airdrops and liquidity incentives (initial LP tokens unlock in July 2024). After 4 years, a permanent 1% annual inflation rate will sustain ongoing participation and contributions. See full tokenomics here.
2) Originated in the Farcaster community, specifically the degen channel.
- 70% of the genesis supply is allocated to the Degen community (aka the Farcaster Degen channel), distributed across three airdrops.
Airdrop 1 has already started and is currently claimable. Distribution is based on Farcaster user engagement metrics—likes, reposts, followers—translated into Degen Points. Holding certain community-related NFTs grants bonus boost points. Each point equals one $DEGEN token.
3) Community-led and self-organized, organically expanding use cases.
Degen has become Farcaster’s most active channel. While technically open to general degen content, nearly all posts revolve around building and promoting the Degen project itself. In essence, the Degentlemen and Degentlewomen community drives Degen’s DAU. Data shows $Degen is the most active channel on Farcaster—even more so than all other topic channels combined.
As an experimental product, Farcaster often tests new features alongside its most active channel—the degen channel. For example, the degen(tlemen) channel now has a custom “top hat” reaction (when a post contains “degen,” the default ❤️ is replaced by a top hat), symbolizing “hats off” in tribute. Bountycaster has added support for posting bounties in $DEGEN.
Additionally, the community is discussing donation options, including allocating part of the $DEGEN supply to cover Farcaster storage fees—specifically, subsidizing the $12 registration cost for new users.
4) All these use cases and ideas emerge organically—some from Telegram chats, others from the trial-phase Farcaster channel Degentlemen, and still more from degendao—exhibiting a decentralized, loosely coordinated structure.
The $DEGEN-driven movement has not only boosted conversation and daily activity on Farcaster but has also made $DEGEN the top trending token on Dex Screener within the BASE ecosystem. Jesse Pollak, Head of Base, thanked $DEGEN and its creator @jacek for bringing new users to BASE. This praise is well-earned—in fact, many users accessed BASE for the first time solely to claim the first $DEGEN airdrop. In this sense, it’s BASE that needs $DEGEN—not the other way around.
Finally, let’s look at $DEGEN’s market performance.
Less than 20 days after launch, $DEGEN is currently at its all-time high (ATH) with no signs of slowing down. Like all small-cap tokens, $DEGEN has experienced sharp volatility due to selling pressure, but each dip seems to attract more buyers. Most holders continue to hold. As of now, $DEGEN has 1,218 holders, a market cap of $9 million, and 24-hour trading volume of $220,000.
$DEGEN has a bright future ahead.
🎈 Manta Network airdrop claims opened on January 18, allowing users to claim rewards from Manta New Paradigm, Into the Blue, and Squad Game.
🎈 RWA asset platform ONDO launched FluxDeFi, a stablecoin lending platform backed by U.S. Treasuries, and initiated a points rewards program. Users who held USDT or USDC before the launch of Ondo’s stablecoin OUSD in 2023 are eligible for points, which can be redeemed for potential future airdrops. Additional ways to earn points include holding $ONDO and $USDY, and lending stablecoins on FluxDeFi. Governance token ONDO is now listed on Coinbase.
🌽 Pendle has launched a new pool: aUSDC Pool, with underlying assets being Aave’s USDC, offering nearly 20% base APY plus additional ARB incentives. Cobo Argus has launched a new yield strategy—Pendle farming bot, automatically harvesting mining rewards to earn ~20% APY.
🌽 EigenLayer will add support for three new LST tokens on January 29 at 12 PM Pacific Time: Frax Ether (sfrxETH), Mantle Staked Ether (mETH), and Liquid Staked Ether (LsETH). EigenLayer will reopen re-staking with a cap of 200,000 ETH per LST. Due to EigenLayer’s popularity and hard caps on liquidity re-staking, new assets typically hit their TVL limits almost immediately. This upcoming launch is expected to follow the same pattern. Cobo Argus bots allow pre-configured抢settings, enabling ETH LST holders to secure EigenLayer re-staking allocations instantly when new pools go live.
➡️ Canto has proposed a community vote to reduce both liquidity mining incentives and security incentives by 10%.
➡️ The Aave community has voted to approve deployment of Aave V3 MVP on the Neon EVM mainnet.
➡️ Gary Tiu, Executive Director and Head of Regulatory Affairs at Hong Kong-compliant crypto exchange OSL, stated that Hong Kong may launch its first spot crypto ETF by mid-year 2024.
➡️ UMA Protocol has launched a new project called Oval, aimed at addressing MEV. By wrapping Chainlink data sources, Oval enables lending protocols to capture OEV (Oracle Extractable Value)—a new form of MEV. Additionally, Oval uses Flashbots’ MEV-Share to auction liquidation rights.
➡️ Frax Finance expects to launch its Layer 2 chain Fraxtal in February. Built as a rollup, Fraxtal will use frxETH, Frax’s liquid staking token, to pay gas fees. Curve has proposed deploying trading functionality on Fraxtal.
➡️ Decentralized stablecoin protocol DYAD has added wstETH as a collateral asset, with plans to support $apxETH (redactedcartel), $sfrxETH (fraxfinance), $st-yETH (yearnfi), and multiple LRTs—$eETH (@ether_fi), $ezETH (RenzoProtocol), $rsETH (@KelpDAO), $pufETH (puffer_finance), and $rswETH (Swellnetworkio).
New Projects
Magpie has launched Eigenpie, a SubDAO built on the EigenLayer framework, allowing users to deposit LSTs to receive a restaked token (LRT) and earn additional yield. Magpie employs isolated liquidity restaking to enhance security.
Others
➡️ PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD has become Curve’s third-largest liquidity pool. The FRAXPYUSD pool launched on December 27, reaching $135 million in TVL, making it Curve’s third-largest pool by size.
➡️ A newly created Twitter account @Xpayments sparked a 12% short-term rally in Dogecoin (DOGE) and Floki (FLOKI). DOGE is considered a likely candidate for adoption as a payment token under Musk-affiliated companies, while Floki is named after Musk’s dog.
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