Rollup launch turns heads

Dymension's native DYM token launched yesterday with fanfare, hiccups and some controversy.

For starters, the much-hyped rollup platform brought DYM to life by way of an airdrop to certain users of Ethereum, Celestia and Solana – which spent a good chunk of Tuesday morning blacked out.

DYM, as of 7:50 a.m. (EST), boasted a market capitalization of $840 million, per CoinGecko. DYM got as high as $6 before falling below $4; it was roughly $5.75 as of last glance. DYM is now the 83rd-largest digital asset in terms of the size of its market capitalization, one spot behind DYDX, native token of the dYdX Chain, an Ethereum-based layer-2 project (and which, despite size and symbol similarities, should never be confused with DYM).

If the full supply of 1 billion DYM were circulating today, it'd enjoy a theoretical market cap of $5.7 billion, or one spot above CoinGecko's No. 19 coin, Shiba Inu. But, alas, there are actually only 150 million DYMs in circulation right now. That more than one-third of them belong to a single validator, "Big Brain Staking," has drawn intense scrutiny.

Overall, the launch experienced such a rough start (debilitating node problems causing delays) in the early goings that, initially, phrases such as "botched" and "failed" were being freely bandied about (CoinDesk).

Dymension has been described as a “modular settlement layer” that lets developers create fast, layer-2 “roll apps.”

This airdrop was touted by the Dymension team as a “rolldrop.”

CoinDesk called it “less than ideal.”

Hovering at $95, Solana remains down 4% on the week. But at least the network itself is back up and running.

Early yesterday morning, Solana, amidst a spike in user activity, halted the chain to fix a bug that was disrupting the block making process. Engineers quickly pushed out a patch needed to reboot. By 10 a.m. (EST), a cadre of influential validators (reportedly controlling four-fifths of staked SOL) had updated to a new version of Solana’s source code, at which point the network started humming again.

Meanwhile, decentralized-AI-resource-marketplace-facilitator Bittensor has seen its native TAO token pull back somewhat after hitting an all-time-high yesterday of $516.27, according to CoinGecko. TAO is the 29th-largest coin with a market cap just shy of $3 billion. Its valuation has soared by a staggering 1,400% in the past nine months.

TAO has declined 3% since yesterday.

Dymension's mainnet launch involved $390 million worth of DYM getting airdropped to more than one million unique wallets across various chains and communities. These included Solana, Celestia and a slew of Ethereum-scaling networks, including Arbitrum and Optimism.

However, DYM wasn't the only token falling from the sky on Tuesday. Heroes of Mavia, a mobile strategy game, launched its MAVIA token via an airdrop to 100,000 players, as well as to holders of some 10,000 Ethereum-based NFTs (plots of real estate) featured in the game, according to Decrypt. MAVIA shot from under $2 right out of the gate to as high as $4 as of a few hours ago. MAVIA's market cap is roughly $119 million, making it the 329th-largest coin.

Last week at this time, Jupiter's airdrop enthralled the market for a spell. JUP hit the ground running at roughly 75 cents last Wednesday. It fell to about fifty cents within a few days.

Peeking around corners, crypto enthusiasts are anticipating a buzzy token launch from Eigenlayer, emblematic of a growing trend of "shared security" protocols putting staked ETH to work securing other chains, Decrypt explained.

Eigenlayer doesn't have a token yet; but it's expected to launch one, and it is penciled in among "potential airdrops" listed on airdrops.io.

According to DeFiLlama, Eigenlayer's total value locked (TVL) just in the past day jumped from $2.16 billion to $3.84 billion after the protocol removed constraints on certain types of tokens. Eigenlayer introduced the caps last year as a way to prevent any single token from dominating the network, Decrypt said. The sudden surge in TVL was fueled by stETH, Lido’s liquid staking token, and which accounted for more than half of the new deposits.

The Eigenlayer team says it will reimpose a temporary cap on Friday while exploring ways to find "a reasonable balance between the dual priorities of neutrality and decentralization."