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OVERVIEW

Cartel Watch: Who Is Really Decentralized? 🤔

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
Cartel Watch: Who Is Really, Actually, Decentralized? 🔍️ 

Last night, John Deaton posted this to his X:

I love and respect John Deaton. He’s arguably one the most important and unsung heroes of retail crypto hodlers everywhere - he’s probably 50% of the reason Ripple won against the SEC, just my opinion. 😐️ 

But in this case, I disagree with the great Mr. Deaton.

I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying I’m right.

Brushing off the “centralized” label because 75k holders signed an amicus brief skips some stubborn math:

• Ripple still controls roughly 40-ish billion XRP locked in an escrow that drip-feeds 1 billion coins a month

• The ledger’s default Unique Node List hangs on just 35 validators (Ripple still operates one of them) - meaning a handful of outages can stall everything, we already saw the risk when XRPL froze for 64 minutes earlier this year (Feb 4, 2025).

• While 120 validators exist globally, consensus lives and dies on that petite quorum, leaving the network balanced less on censorship-proof dispersion and more on Ripple’s continuing goodwill.

But it’s possible that, for an entity like Ripple/XRP, decentralization doesn’t really matter because it’s more of a business than a decentralized public enterprise and network. 🤷

But this got me to thinking: who really is decentralized in this space?

Looking At Who Is Decentralized 👀 

To look at who is decentralized and who isn’t, we’re going to use data from the University of Edinburgh’s Blockchain Technology Lab and their Edinburgh Decentralization Index (EDI) and three of their metrics:

• Nakamoto Coefficient - how many entities to pull a 51 % heist.

• 1-Conentration Ratio (CR₁) - the single biggest validator’s slice of the pie.

• Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) - monopoly score that makes antitrust lawyers sweat. 😥 

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ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
Consensus Nakamoto Coefficient - “How Many Goons to Hijack the Chain?” 🚚

This is a measure of how hard or easy it is for something to take over a network. The higher the better.

• BTC - 5-6
  Same five mining pools keep the oligarchy intact.

• ETH - 6
  PoW miners out, staking giants in—headcount barely budges.

• BCH - 3
  Hashrate shuffles among the usual suspects; diversity stalls.

• ADA - 80
  Higher k, pool splits, and a wave of new SPOs scatter power.

• LTC - 4
  Merged-mining adds a guest or two, but top pools still dominate.

• DOGE - 3
  Shares Litecoin’s mining crowd; trio of pools can still tip the scale.

• XTZ - 4
  Baker count inches up as inflation drops, yet concentration lingers.

• ZEC - 3
  Equihash miners shuffle chairs; effective diversity stays thin.

Call-out: Cardano needs a soccer stadium of colluders for a 51 % attack. BTC needs a pre-Caitlin Clark WNBA crowd, ETH can be taken over by a group of soccer moms in a Honda Odyssey, XTZ is vulnerable to you and your drinking buddy teaming up. 🏀 

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
1-Conentration Ratio (CR₁) - “What Slice Does the Biggest Validator Own?” 🍕

Lower number = no whale hogging the pizza.

• Bitcoin - 0.31
  Foundry and Antpool keep swapping crowns; each still mints about a quarter of blocks.

• Zcash - 0.27
  Equihash miners huddle inside three major pools.

• Cardano - 0.03
  k-parameter doubled (k is the number of pools that prevents megawhales), pools split, nobody breaches 5 %.

• Ethereum - 0.52
  Lido ballooned, Coinbase stacked, Kraken bowed out after an SEC love letter - one-ish whale now owns half the pie.

• Tezos - 0.25
  A few big bakers consolidate rolls as inflation drops.

Call out: Anything north of 0.50 trips the red alarm - Ethereum just lit it up. 🚨 

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) – “Is Your Chain Basically a Monopoly?” 🎩

HHI below 1,500 = unconcentrated. 1,50 - 2,500 = kinda concentrated. Above 2,500 = monopoly watchlist.

• BTC - 2,100
  Five pools call the tunes, still shy of full-blown cartel but trending up.

• BCH - 2,800
  Small pond, big fish. ViaBTC and friends keep squeezing the pie.

• ADA - 100
  Stake pools keep multiplying. Antitrust lawyers fall asleep.

• DOGE - 2,200
  Merged-mining blurs lines; LTC miners fatten DOGE’s top ranks.

• ETH - 4,000
  Lido, Coinbase, Binance. Monopoly lights flashing like a Vegas strip.

• LTC - 2,300
  F2Pool and friends still hog hash. Margins inch higher each halving.

• XTZ - 2,000
  A few mega-bakers scoop up rolls as inflation drops.

• ZEC - 2,050
  Three Equihash pools keep the crown. Decent but drifting.

Call Out: ETH is deep in monopoly territory, BTC and the rest hover in the yellow zone, and ADA stays practically antitrust-proof. ⚠️

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Crypto News 📰 

💨 ZKsync Airbender Proves Blocks in 35 s on One GPU

The open-source RISC-V zkVM clocks 4-6x faster than rivals and cuts transfer costs to $0.0001. Sub-second ZKsync chains and near real-time Ethereum proofs hint at laptop-level decentralization. Teams needing 160 GPUs just rage-quit their cloud console. Zksync.

🤖 Sei Waves $1 M at AI Builders in New Accelathon

Devs have until August 5 to ship on-chain agents, DeFi bots, or surprise tools across six prize tracks. Winners pitch VCs for a $75 k grand prize plus bragging rights. Think Shark Tank but the sharks are LLMs and the tank settles in 600 ms. Sei.

🌌 SunDAO Says Cosmos Needs Cash, Code, and Cooperation

In an X Space chat, leaders pushed a DAO model where $2.5k tickets buy audits, validator hookups, and aligned capital. The 60-member squad wants to fix Cosmos’s distribution gap while preaching modular appchains. Cosmos.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

🕵️‍♂️ ZK Godfather Spills Origin Story Near Stanford

Eli Ben-Sasson recalls a 2013 Bitcoin meet where zero-knowledge proofs wowed Greg Maxwell and kicked off a privacy arms race. His math jumped from shielding Zcash to powering StarkWare rollups and now eyes Bitcoin itself. Funny how years of cryptography trace back to one geek liking a slideshow. Starknet.

🔒 DuskEVM Hedger Hides Trades With ZK Plus Homomorphic Sauce

Yippy, Wall Street can finally front-run itself in private.The new engine encrypts balances while still letting auditors peek when regulators come knocking. Homomorphic ElGamal math mixes with zero-knowledge to keep order books invisible and compliant. DUSK Network.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

💼 Janus Henderson Drops $1B AAA CLO Directly On-Chain Via Centrifuge

The asset giant teamed with Grove to tokenize its flagship credit strategy and seeded it with a cool billion. Centrifuge rails slice out middlemen so yield hunters tap AAA debt without ETF wrappers. TradFi just discovered the smart contract save-as feature. Centrifuge.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

🐵 Oasis Liquefaction Turns BAYC 8180 Into a Time-Share Monkey

Trusted hardware locks the ape’s key so renters control perks for 15 minutes without stealing it. Smart contracts force the JPEG home, making 8180 the most traded primate on record. Airbnb for cartoons was inevitable. Oasis.

📡 Shelby Launches Hot Storage on Aptos So Data Finally Earns

Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto unveiled Shelby, a high-speed decentralized CDN that pays nodes for sub-second reads. The protocol turns files into revenue streams for AI, gaming, and content while claiming cloud-level costs. Aptos.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending Protocol News 🏦

📊 Rho Brings $700T TradFi Rate Swaps to Arbitrum

Ex-structured trader Alex Ryvkin built Rho so DeFi users can flip fixed-for-floating rates instead of chasing random APYs. The beta has moved $10 billion notional, letting hedgers lock staking yields or perp funding in one click. Trust crypto to repackage Wall Street’s dullest tool and call it innovation. Arbitrum.

🔗 VeChain Bridges to 42 Networks Through Wanchain’s Zero-Hack Rails

USDT, USDC, and 130-plus assets can now zip into VeChainThor, juicing liquidity and feeding the VTHO burn. Cross-chain flow lands just as MiCAR opens Europe, turning VeChain from niche supply chain chain into Web3 hub. Utility maxis finally get their highway. VeChain.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🌬️ Fartcoin won’t help you buy a house unless it’s on Coinbase

📱 Telegram users can now earn 'institutional-grade' financial rewards on staked TON

🚠 Galaxy Digital secures $175 million for first venture fund to back early-stage crypto startups

😨 Crypto tax audits incoming? IRS letters signal start of 1099-DA enforcement

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