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$3BLN ETF Day, Amber Exposed, Aptos Airdrop Guide & More

The Castle Chronicle: Volume 58

Castle Labs6 min read
$3BLN ETF Day, Amber Exposed, Aptos Airdrop Guide & More

👀 What’s to Come in Volume 58

🔑 Key News: Headlines, Exploits, Continued Adoption, DeFi Updates, New Projects & more from CJ

⛓ On-Chain Sleuthing: Investigation on Amber Group feature along with Smart Money Moves from Cl

🔥 Hot Narratives: Bitcoin Season & Aptos Airdrop? from unexployed

📉 HTF Price Action Scenarios from Vlad

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🔑 Key News

Major Headlines

  • UK plans to label crypto as property

  • Nigeria bans crypto firms

  • 21Shares launches Celestia Staking ETP

  • Reddit adds BTC ETH MATIC to balance sheet

  • FTX to sell shares in AI startup Anthropic

  • Satoshi's email history revealed

  • Microstrategy buys more Bitcoin

Project Updates

  • Michael Kong updates on Multichain issue

  • Gauntlet to stop working with Aave citing inconsistency

  • Blueberry FDN exploited

  • Jihoz_Axie (co-founder of Ronin & Axie) hacked

  • Risk On Blast rugs for 420ETH

  • Suspicious stuff going on on Bitforex

  • Aleo Hq users private KYC info leaked

  • Binance adds $PORTAL to their launchpool

  • Wormhole to use AMD chips for scaling 'light client' proofs on interoperability platform

  • a16z invested $100M into Eigen Layer while Binance Labs invests in Renzo

  • Avail Project announces $27M raise and 3 types on infrastrucutre

  • Euler Finance relaunching Euler v2 while Dopex rebrands to Stryke

  • Starkware revising tokenomics after uproar

  • GMX building GMX Chain

  • Coinbase Ventures acquired $AERO

  • Uniswap governance proposal to turn on fee switch

  • Blast BigBang winners announced and going live on the 29th of Feb

  • Friendtech hints airdrop soon while Fjord teases token

  • Parcl announces airdrop

Interesting Projects

  • MEVSwap: MEV-free DEX built by Moneta Labs

  • zkTensor: Building zk on Bittensor

  • Quilibrium: Decentralized MPC platform as a service

  • Hive Network: Decentralized AI Agent Network built by Tuvana Labs

  • Puff: Mantle memecoin backed by Jordi

Courtesy of CJ - check out his telegram channel for daily news, projects updates and new releases


⛓ On-Chain Sleuthing

Amber Group Reducing $GMX Exposure

Back in the summer of 2023, we uncovered that Amber Group had become the biggest $GMX holders.

However, we recently noticed that this is not the case anymore. 2 addresses owned by the VC firm were selling off $GMX significantly.

The first address had been sending more than $3 million worth of $GMX to Binance during February.

Amber Wallet #1 [only visible for free subs]

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Meanwhile sent close to $2.5 million worth of $GMX to Binance in the same month.

Amber Wallet #2 [only visible for free subs]

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The group now is not even in the top 10 holders anymore. Combined the addresses hold around $1.9 million worth of $GMX still.

Amber Group Bidding $MOG and $BTRST

Now what has Amber been buying instead?

Well, this answer may surprise you, but this VC firm has been buying memecoins!

We found that they have been building a position in the memecoin $MOG. We assume that they are bidding for a customer and not necessarily for themselves.

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The swaps have been made one after another and no f&@s were given about gas fees. Its not their money, so why would they care?

They now own $300k worth of the memecoin.

$MOG Amber Wallet [only visible for free subs]

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After doing some digging in the Amber addresses, we had found another interesting nugget of information.

A different address had been buying $BTRST on CEXs Gate and Coinbase, moved them on-chain and staked them.

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The project is about creating the world’s first and largest user-owned job marketplace.

See their website: https://www.usebraintrust.com/about

Research and analysis by Cl


🔥 Hot Narratives

Bitcoin Season in Full Force

We are officially in a bull market as the bid on Bitcoin seems unstoppable and for the second day in a row the BTC ETFs experienced $3 billion inflow.

$3 billion. A. Day. For two days now. Insane stuff and only possible because the burgers opened the gates for investors by allowing the ETF.

And we are not even post-halving yet. Usually, this type of price action happens post-halving, but as was said earlier the ETFs fueled this rally massively.

Alts have enjoying some upside too, especially the AI coins and some of the larger caps. While it is always alt season somewhere, the small marketcap coins have been lagging a bit.

Do not forget that the big VC institutions are planning to launch an ETH ETF this year as well. If history repeats itself, we will see upside for ETH too. Perhaps not the $3 billion a day, but still.

Aptos Airdrop Opportunity

One chain that has been overlooked by many is Aptos. It is founded by an ex-Blackrock employee (the firm that has been bidding BTC with billions through the ETF) and like SEI it has a parallel execution engine.

But, I hear you ask, the token is already out?

Yes, hear me out:

  • 51% of the supply has been reserved for the community and the team has hinted at ‘retrospective’ airdrops similar as to what Optimism did.

  • The chain is extremely cheap and fast, so you do not need to worry about gas fees.

  • You can bridge in with USDC or WETH through a LayerZero bridge increasing your chances for both.

The potential airdrop is a great incentive to go on the chain and make some transactions. From my experience, it has been a great chain so far! The more I use the chain, the more I like it.

Here is how you get started:

  1. Get a wallet. My preferred option is Pontem, because the team works on many projects and is building their own L2 (Ethereum Rollup w/ Move VM). You can get their wallet here.

  2. Time to bridge some assets! You can connect both your Metamask and Aptos wallet on the official bridge page and choose which asset you want to bridge. If you bridge for the first time, you get some gas! (https://theaptosbridge.com/bridge). Of course you can also transfer APT from a CEX directly to the chain, but I recommend using the official bridge portal.

  3. Wallet is loaded up. Time to do some transactions, here is what I did:

    1. Stake some APT (min. 10-11): through Liquidswap or the Aptos Explorer.

    2. Get an Aptos name.

    3. Bid and buy some NFTs on Mercato or Topaz.

    4. Do some DeFi’ing: LiquidSwap, Thala, Amnis, and check out DeFiLlama for more projects: https://defillama.com/chain/Aptos

This one is flying under the radar massively, while the Aptos team is capable and already built a high quality product. Other teams, like Pontem, also seem very capable and working on DeFi stuff and even an L2.

As more adoption comes, this is in the perfect position to flourish.

Please let me know if you find a good memecoin on this chain. There is only doodoo from what I found and that thing is already at >$30 million marketcap.

Courtesy of unexployed


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📈 HTF Price Action Scenarios

Gm frens!

Last week I was waiting for re-accumulation before looking for entries. Price has re-accumulated one more time which can be seen nicely on 4h and lower (some lows were liquidated).

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  • Clear uptrend with multiple re-accumulations

  • Fairly overextended

  • Waiting for bigger re-acc on HTF

While it’s nice to see that price is moving higher we must take into consideration overextension. I won’t be looking for any new entries until the daily chart re-accumulates. Jumping on longs here is imho low R:R. This is where we manage profits (partials, trails). There’s a chance that price will continue in this fashion for a bit longer and I’ll miss out. But that’s completely fine. Over a big enough statistical sample of trades, this is the right decision to make (NFA).

Trade responsibly and I’ll see y’all next time!

Courtesy of Vlad - trend-based trader and MentFX student

Originally published in the Castle Labs newsletter. Subscribe at research.castlelabs.io.