Coin Everything?

1️⃣ Content Coin Commotion

Base landed itself in the crypto hot seat this week for promoting Zora’s recent pivot to fungible tokens with an official “Base is for everyone” content coin.

The token experienced tumultuous early trading activity, surging to a $17M market capitalization within hours post-launch, only to dump 95% in a matter of minutes before recouping the losses over the following days.

While critics saw little sense in crypto’s second-largest exchange shilling memecoins, content coin proponents proclaimed that the unified liquidity offered by these instruments makes them superior to existing non-fungible token (NFT) formats and suggest that the experiment could help creators unlock new revenue streams.

Jesse Pollak joined Bankless to discuss why he is bullish on content coins; Pollak has personally launched numerous content coins through Zora in recent days and pocketed fees from speculator activity. Three distinct wallets purchased “Base is for everyone” tokens prior to the official Base X announcement, each of which managed to walk away with sizable 100x profits and six-figure paydays.

2️⃣ Fire the Fed?

President Donald Trump is getting vocal about his disdain for high interest rates, indicating in a post to Truth Social that he believes the Fed is behind the curve when it comes to inflation and stating that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who ironically co-signed an impassioned letter pleading with Fed Chair Powell to cut interest rates by a whopping 75 basis points last September just prior to U.S. general elections, is now warning that markets will crash if central bank policy decisions cannot remain independent from politics.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Friday that the Trump Administration would “continue to study” whether Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell could be fired.

3️⃣ Synthetix Stymies Slide

After tumbling to record lows of $0.66 unseen since COVID, Synthetix’s stablecoin began repegging early Friday morning hours in advance of an announcement that sUSD holders who lock their tokens for one year will be eligible to share in 5M SNX of incentives. While still down for the week at the time of writing, sUSD had rebounded to $0.83.

When sUSD was trading at $0.93 on April 2, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick dismissed death spiral concerns and stated that he is “not worried about Synthetix for the first time in years.” Nonetheless, it remains worrisome to see a legacy DeFi perpetuals platform slipping towards insolvency as it forgives debt and abandons tried-and-tested staker liquidations as part of the “420 Pool” upgrade.

Find in-depth analysis on the Synthetix 420 Pool upgrade and view our recent SNX rating in the Bankless Token Hub.

4️⃣ Ethereum Gas Prices Plummet

Ethereum gas prices have hit the absolute floor in recent weeks, reaching their lowest levels in recorded history after falling to mere fractions of a “gwei” for base computation fees.

Priority fees are now a thing of the past, and while the few users transacting on the L1 lately may relish in the fact that onchain actions like swaps and bridging can be performed for mere pennies, it is clear to see that the L1 has become a certified ghost town.

Years of exorbitant gas fees and Ethereum’s focus on the rollup-centric roadmap no doubt pushed individual users towards L2s, but with everyone now gone, many are scratching their heads and pondering why they ever left in the first place for suboptimal security and cumbersome fragmentation.

5️⃣ EigenLayer Slashing Goes Live

On April 17, restaking protocol EigenLayer shipped slashing live to mainnet, a critical design feature that allows for infrastructure operators who are proven to be acting maliciously to have their delegated stakes slashed as a form of economic punishment. Slashing was released on a strictly opt-in basis for operators, but infrastructure providers who implement the feature could benefit from stronger user trust guarantees.

The introduction of slashing imposes novel risk considerations for restakers, leading many liquid restaking managers – including ether.fi and Renzo – to signal that they will carefully consider the associated risks before delegating any stake to any slashing-enabled pools.

While EigenLayer’s ETH-denominated TVL has remained largely unchanged since last April, the dollar value of those deposits has fallen sharply since December 2024 alongside crumbling ETH prices. The EIGEN token, which was down 77% year-to-date at the time of this analysis, rallied 4% on the deployment of slashing.