AB updates are for informational purposes only. Do not construe any of the following as investment, financial, or other advice. You make your own decisions.
The AB Research Letter is a culmination of research & insights from the diverse capacity of the AB Team. Ultimately our focus & mission is financial freedom.
July 2025 Subjects:
Basic User Extractable Value (UEV): Data Sources
Wall Street: The Roadmap
Onchain Gaming: Illuvium Update Two
Ethereum’s Utility: Applications
AB Fund Portfolio: Holdings
Additional Alpha
Basic UEV: Data Sources
There is a lot of data on the internet. More is created everyday and it’s hard know which data sources to use. It is important to trust but verify, especially in crypto. Most people find out the hard way. In my day to day I use a few data sources pretty consistently, I have listed them below in no particular order:
Ultrasound.money : To see information about the Ethereum network.
Onepagecrypto.com: An aggregator of crypto focused news sites
Defillama.com: Anything defi, TVL, or yield related
Tradingview: Best place for charts on majors
Bungee.exchange: An aggregator for bridging / swaping
L2BEAT.com: Real time state of Layer 2 ecosystems
Due to Ethereum’s open source nature, everything is built in public. This is great to see as you can see in real time as the market processes information. If I’m looking at a new project and its not on any of these website, there is a high chance that it is a scam. In addition I try to bookmark or save all the URLs so I know I’m going to a website that I have been to before. It’s important to take security seriously.
Podcasts are a way to recap weekly news. These are great episodes to hear different opinions about the important topics and make sure you didn’t miss any key events. I don’t listen to every episode but it is good to have a rotating cast. Best way to start a weekend morning is a walk outside and a podcast.
All In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks, & Friedberg
The Daily Gwei with Anthony Sassano
On The Brink with Nic Carter and Matt Walsh
Empire with Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos
Good Game with Imran Khan and Qiao Wang
Into The Ether with Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano
Consuming high quality resources and data like this puts you above 75% of the competition in crypto markets. Be an online weapon.
AB Researcher: @Whitetail
Wall Street: The Roadmap
Goldman Sachs, the $1.64T asset manager, plans to launch three tokenization projects in 2024. Tokenization is the issuance of digital equity in a real world asset (RWA) using a blockchain. It will be interesting to see what blockchain they use. Goldman, one of the world’s most reputable banks, will give further validation to the tokenization/RWA industry which has already been adopted by Blackrock, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and other major institutional asset managers. BlackRock’s Build fund recently crossed $500M in tokenized treasury bills. JP Morgan’s Onyx crossed $1T of notional value in May, does $2B in daily volume, and is open to third party applications. These assets can scale many magnitudes larger.
Stablecoin growth is one of the best metrics in our industry. Visa has built a great tool to track total stablecoin supply. Over the last 30 days theres been 1.2T in total volume across 330M transactions with 29M users. Institutional adoption is here and on Ethereum.
AB Researcher: @Alec Beckman
Onchain Gaming: Illuvium Update Two
Illuvium has announced July 25th as the official release date for its OPEN BETA. The release trailer reveals the game’s lore for the first time. The story features a female character named Arlin, who has broken away from her faction of rangers to explore and defend the planet of Illuvium. The team asserts that the game’s lore is of exceptional quality, aiming to evoke genuine passion and engagement from players. Furthermore, there are hints of a potential Netflix series in the future, which would explore the Illuvium universe in greater depth.
On July 25th, the game will transition from Ethereum’s testnet to the mainnet, enabling real monetary value transactions. This means that players will have the ability to sell super rare characters they catch in the game for thousands of dollars. The beta recently surpassed 20,000 onchain players. Online dozens of players are streaming gameplay as they traverse the overworld in search of characters to catch for the airdrop program.
Players are currently incentivized to catch the rarest Illuvials, with the best players being rewarded with ILV tokens. The team has allocated 250,000 ILV for the airdrop campaign. Illuvium presents a compelling opportunity as a potential mainstream gaming app with crypto integrations.
AB Researcher: @Duke
Ethereum Utility: Applications
With the Ethereum ETF on most people’s minds, it would be easy to write about topics such as when approval, inflows compared to outflows, or even how long until a staked ETH ETF hits the market but there is significantly more to Ethereum and Ether. I want to help educate people about onchain utility within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (“EVM”).
Recently I was having a conversation with someone who not only owns Bitcoin but has also been in crypto since 2013. He said something that took me by surprise along the lines of “it’s too bad that Ethereum applications haven’t really caught on or get much use”. Now if you’re not totally privy to all the applications and popular smart contracts on EVM chains or if you were to compare usage to popular mobile apps then I guess it makes sense why someone would say something like that. One who is even cognizant of Ethereum’s gas price as of late could even try to make the argument there must not be much going on. I’m here to say that is not the case.
To lay the foundation, after EIP-4844, Ethereum rollups (layer 2 blockchains) have not had to compete in the same way for blockspace as before. Now there is a separate “blob market” where all rollups (optimistic and zero knowledge) exist and submit their proofs/data to Ethereum mainnet. This has drastically reduced gas prices overall for Ethereum.
This Dune dashboard by @0xRob goes into much greater detail on all kinds of blob data. As for other Ethereum applications and use cases, one needs to separate them into a couple different categories. Gasless applications like Sign-In-With-Ethereum (SIWE) is essentially the same as signing in with your Google or Meta account on Web2 profiles. Instead of a username and password, a user signs in with their Ethereum wallet by using a signature function which doesn’t cost gas but rather proves the user owns the wallet. You can test this on Dune.com by signing in with your Metamask wallet. This alone is a great application for a blockchain wallet, I can’t tell you how many times I have forgotten usernames/passwords and dreaded needing to update them. Ethereum Attestation Service can be used to prove something through a gasless signature in your wallet. Gitcoin Passport utilizes this for quadratic funding and proving a user is a unique individual.
AB Researcher: @L2explorer
Our Portfolio
Disclaimer: Our buys/watchlist should not be takin as financial advice/investment suggestion. We share this information in the nature of education & transparency. We value the ability for our network to be aware of new projects & ecosystems we’re actively researching, participating & investing in. Always invest responsibly. And remember… Fundamentals > Pumpamentals !!
We strive to continue helping as many people as possible understand more about the blockchain ecosystem. A large part of this, is investing. Against traditional norms of gatekeeping trading strategy or portfolio positions, Advantage Blockchain seeks to help the world understand our approach to investing granted our intensive research / interactive background. In the name of transparency, we share AB Fund’s current portfolio each AB Research Letter update. This is not investment advice, but a look into our strategy for educational purposes only.
Recent Buys
Solana ($SOL) @ $140
Degen ($DEGEN) @ $0.018
Aerodrome ($AERO) @ $1.07
Velodrome ($VELO) @ $0.14
Additional Alpha
Throughout the month, the AB Research team gathers and curates a list of high quality resources for readers to continue learning outside of the content we produce. Crypto is open source, the alpha is out there. We’re here to help you find it.
AB updates are for informational purposes only. Do not construe any of the following as investment, financial, or other advice. You make your own decisions.