🌶️ Hot take Friday

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Are you ready for Hot Take Friday?

The crypto markets are down in the past week. Maybe don’t look at your wallet if you bought the top?

I’m glad the weekend is almost here — it’s cozy szn.

Today we’re talking about Coinbase, ICM, Uniswap and more.

— Kate Irwin

• Coinbase releases embedded wallet offering

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 👍

  • Key context: Coinbase is making its B2B embedded wallet-as-a-service offering publicly available. It’s offering up to 3.85% interest rewards in USDC across developers’ embedded and server wallets. The pricing is pay-as-you-go with no tiers or minimums. There’s also a free tier to try it out. 

  • My hot take: This will be in competition with other wallet-as-a-service products out there, mainly Stripe’s Privy. Privy has over 1,000 crypto clients, including big players like Pumpfun, OpenSea and Hyperliquid.

  • There’s money to be made if Coinbase can disrupt Privy’s dominance. This is good for crypto because Coinbase and Privy both have some of the best UX in the business, and it’s likely the competition will encourage both parties to keep improving and not rest on their laurels. 

• Base enables any ERC-20 for gas, lets Base app users launch Zora creator coins

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 👍

  • My hot take: The gas announcement is a really key quality-of-life improvement for users, especially for those newer to crypto or with smaller portfolios or many wallets. It reduces friction and makes crypto make more sense from a user standpoint. Overall, Base is doing a very good job of being consumer-friendly, and they get flowers for that.

  • The Zora creator coins news is less exciting, but means that Base is deepening its ties with Zora. As I mentioned this week, I’m not the biggest fan of how Zora currently has its “content coins” set up because of how it disincentivizes smaller creators, and therefore mass adoption. I made a long post about my thoughts on Zora here, and Zora’s co-founder Jacob responded with some good context (that ultimately doesn’t resolve the issue I have with it). 

  • Right now, Zora’s making a lot of assumptions about future social media users that I’m not sure will come true. I think there needs to be more baked-in utility and room for customization that takes some of the burden off creators and also makes it harder for creators to rug anyone. 

  • I do think there’s something to the “creator coin” concept more broadly, though, as a new metric beyond just staring at someone’s follower count and monthly impressions. 

• Crypto startup-focused platform Star.Fun adds STAR staking

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 👍

  • Key context: I wrote about Star back in June, detailing how it’s letting crypto entrepreneurs crowdfund investments to build their dream projects. Now, it’s letting stakers of their STAR token get exposure to all projects funnelled through their platform. Projects have to allocate 2% of their token supplies to STAR stakers.

  • My hot take: This is an interesting take on ICM. It’s also cool that Star is trying to democratize access to funding and help small crypto projects get a leg up without needing VC access. I’m just hoping no one gets burned here.

• Uniswap adds Solana support

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 👍

  • Key context: Uniswap’s lead engineer for trading explained the decision to expand to Solana is simply because there are lots of tokens there that users want to trade. It’s using Jupiter for routing. 

  • My hot take: This is great for crypto. It shows devs and app execs are finally realizing that the future of crypto will be multichain, not exclusive to just one blockchain’s ecosystem. Crypto’s tribalism has long been its weak spot, and while it’s perhaps unrealistic (for now) to suggest that every crypto app will support every blockchain, supporting EVM + SVM is an important foundation. Give people what they want! 

  • As I mentioned this week, siloing yourself to just one blockchain, even if it’s an Ethereum L2, makes you vulnerable to external chain decisions or price action out of your control that could one day cripple your product. I personally don’t think many “only-build-on-our-chain” grants are worth that potential risk down the line. Put your app’s users first. 

  • Also cute: SNS’s head of growth said they’ve reserved uniswap.sol for the team. I’d consider that a warm welcome.

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Katana was built by answering a core question: What if a chain contributed revenue back into the ecosystem to drive growth and yield?

We direct revenue back to DeFi participants for consistently higher yields.

Katana is pioneering concepts like Productive TVL (the portion of assets are actually doing work), Chain Owned Liquidity (permanent liquidity owned by Katana to maintain stability), and VaultBridge (putting bridged assets to work generating extra yield for active participants).

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