Long-Term Bitcoin Holders Add to Their Holdings, Despite Price Retracement
After a week of bickering, cooler heads began to prevail in the Aragon Association's governance crisis. The market responded with gusto, with the ANT token rallying to its highest levels for May. Luis Cuende, co-founder of Aragon, proposed $30 million in ANT buybacks using a smart contract to buy all tokens trading higher than the 30-day moving average. He also called for Aragon's $200 million treasury to gradually transfer to the Aragon DAO over a period of five years. The proposal extended a banner rally for the ANT token, which climbed from its Wednesday low of $2.75 to $2.98 immediately prior to his post and shot up to $3.25 and higher afterwards. The proposal seemed to cool a volatile situation that exploded with the Aragon Association's decision to throw its DAO into lockdown to protect against a “51% attack.” The barbarians at its gates were the so-called RFV Raiders, a loose collective of activist crypto traders including the crypto hedge fund Arca who had called for buybacks of the ANT token to bring its value in line with the treasury. The Aragon Association reversed a community-approved plan to move its $200 million treasury to ANT holders’ control, out of fear that the RFV Raiders would plunder it. One member of the activist collective told CoinDesk that between all of them they have enough voting power to win any vote over the team’s objections, including the ability to block grant allocations. There was no guarantee that Cuende’s proposal would be implemented, and the Aragon Association did not immediately respond to CoinDesk. However, there were signs Wednesday that after days of bickering, banning, conspiratorial allegations, open letters, and accusations of “decentralization theater,” cooler heads were prevailing. Three activist investors that CoinDesk spoke to said the proposal was a good start.Trader Joe, a decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) on the Arbitrum network, has seen a surge in trader and depositor activity in the past week, with total value locked (TVL) rising by over 300% to reach $30 million on Wednesday. The jump in activity comes as the price of Trader Joe's governance token, JOE, booms, with a 11% increase in the past 24 hours and a 58% increase over the past week. The recent success on Arbitrum has nearly eclipsed Trader Joe's trading volume on Avalanche, its original home. The increase in activity is attributed to a liquidity incentives program launched by Trader Joe to boost deposits of popular tokens, particularly Arbitrum's newly airdropped ARB. Users who loaned ARB, ETH, and USDC to Trader Joe's pools received a share of 300,000 JOE tokens. The incentives program ends on April 6. The article also mentions that Bitcoin supply inactive for a year has dropped to an 18-month low, according to Glassnode, and that VanEck CEO does not think the SEC will approve Ether ETFs in May. Additionally, Eisenberg's $110M fraud trial has opened, and FSI is calling for consistency in stablecoin regulation. The article concludes by asking if Bitcoin momentum will continue after the halving.Arbitrum-based asset management protocol FactorDAO has released its much-awaited staking service, days after ending a token sale on the decentralized exchange Camelot. The move comes as the project faces rumors on Crypto Twitter alleging that part of its code was 'copied' from other crypto projects. nnFactorDAO's pseudonymous founder Kurapika has hit back on the claims, telling CoinDesk that the allegations were started by an anonymous Crypto Twitter user referring to minor documentation mistakes accidentally left in Factor's technical documents. The project's code is brand-new, and the team is not sure what 'copied code' means in an open-source environment. nnDespite the tremors, Factor has focused on releasing its staking and vaults services for users in the past week. Staking refers to locking up one's tokens to participate and help maintain the security of that network's blockchain in turn for rewards. Factor will take a percentage of the deposit, withdrawal, transaction, vault management, and performance fees and redistributes 50% to FCTR stakers, and 50% to its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). nnFCTR stakers will, therefore, earn yields on staking their tokens as liquidity to the platform while the platform will use the increased liquidity to offer even more products to potential users. Users who lock tokens for up to four years will receive the highest yields, the highest percentage of governance rights, and a higher amount of vested factor (veFCTR) – a token issued to users who lock their FCTR on the staking platform. nnFCTR sees volatile trading last week, with the token launch on Camelot prompting several Arbitrum users to criticize the initial high market capitalization and overall issuance mechanism. Factor ended up raising $7.5 million from 4,000 unique wallets, but the final pool of money raised was equally distributed with the total number of issued tokens to determine the initial price of FCTR in the open market. However, these tokens were almost immediately dumped on the open market on Sunday, falling to as low as 44 cents, DEXTools data shows. Buying pressure after the initial dump saw tokens regain the pre-sale price of 75 cents on Monday morning, but have since seen a gradual sell-off to just over 58 cents at writing time on Tuesday. nnUPDATE (Feb.28, 12:11 UTC): Adds comments from Factor founder and clarifies the rumors.