Binance's modular layout:
Celestia
India
MilkyWay
All three projects have received investment from YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs). Celestia $TIA is listed on Binance, while Initia’s mainnet has not yet been launched, and it is very likely to be listed on Binance in the future.
MilkyWay is:
① Modularized liquid staking and re-staking protocols, currently focusing on Celestia and Initia
② Investment support from Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam and Initia co-founder Stan
③ The $MILK token is expected to be launched in the first half of 2025
Unfortunately, MilkyWay is currently relatively small in the market and has a low profile, which does not match the quality of the project and the financing. However, there must be information gaps in any big deal, and this mismatch is a good opportunity for retail investors.
1/ MilkyWay - The largest liquid staking and re-staking protocol in the modular ecosystem
MilkyWay is the largest liquid staking and re-staking protocol in the current modular ecosystem.
So in the final analysis, what products and services does MilkyWay offer?
Currently, MilkyWay product lines and services include:
Modular Liquid Staking Products: MilkyWay provides liquid staking services for the modular ecosystem, currently only supporting Celestia ($TIA) staking. In the future, MilkyWay will also provide staking services for Initia ($INIT).
Modular re-pledge products: MilkyWay’s modular re-pledge service currently supports re-pledge of the following assets, including $TIA and TIA’s LSTs (such as milkTIA, stTIA, and dTIA), and USDC re-pledge (provided in cooperation with stablecoin company Noble). In the future, it will also support USDT, BTC, ETH, and other assets.
MilkyWay Liquid Staking Process
① Startup: When a user stakes TIA on MilkyWay, TIA is transferred from Celestia to Osmosis via IBC and then deposited into the CosmWasm staking contract.
② Minting: The contract calculates how much milkTIA should be minted based on the TIA exchange rate. After minting, milkTIA will be sent to the user's Osmosis account.
③ IBC transfer: The contract then transfers the user’s TIA from Osmosis to Celestia’s Staker multi-signature account.
④ Monitoring: The coordinator tracks the flow of funds (from Osmosis to Celestia) to ensure that the transaction is smooth.
⑤ Staking: The coordinator uses the trustee account to stake funds to the MilkyWay validator node on Celestia.
MilkyWay Liquid Re-staking Design Concept:
① Substitutability: AVS (Actively Validated Services) can choose to join, exit or switch at will based on their own judgment on the way assets are allocated and distributed and whether they are sufficiently decentralized.
② Scalability: The MilkyWay re-staking layer should be scalable to add and update features.
③ Neutrality: The MilkyWay re-staking layer is a completely free market. There are no restrictions on who can build on the MilkyWay re-staking layer and what to build.
④ Convenience: Allow AVS to focus more on application logic.
Currently, MilkyWay’s total TVL exceeds $200 million. I think MilkyWay is greatly underestimated by the market from the perspective of TVL alone. The reasons are:
① In April 2024, MilkyWay announced the completion of a $5 million seed round of financing, with investors including Polychain, Binance Labs, HackVC, Longhash Ventures and Crypto.com Capital. With such a luxurious lineup of investors, a TVL of $200 million is not high.
② EigenLayer, also a re-staking protocol, has a TVL of 11.8 billion US dollars, which is 100 times that of MilkyWay.
2/ $MILK Valuation and Airdrop
At present, the re-pledge agreements for issued coins are:
EigenLayer: fdv $3 billion, 1% of $ETH
Solayer: fdv $690 million, 0.6% of $SOL
Currently, $TIA fdv is $3.5 billion, while Initia has not yet tge. Considering that $TIA has fallen 90% from ATH and is at a stage low, while ETH and SOL prices are relatively stable, $MILK should be given a higher valuation range, and it is estimated that the fdv will fall in the range of more than $100 million.
Judging from the amount of financing, MilkyWay raised US$5 million in its seed round, and the valuation in this round should be higher than US$50 million.
Regarding airdrops, in May 2024, MilkyWay officially announced that it will airdrop 10% of tokens to points holders. The original tweet is here: https://x.com/milky_way_zone/status/1788256857649295860
The currently recommended method is to obtain mPoints by Restake USDC. Official tutorial: https://medium.com/milkyway-zone/how-to-restake-usdc-on-milkyway-08da04f382fd
3/ Conclusion
Finally, let me make a guess. As a project invested by the founder of Initia and deeply involved in Initia, MilkyWay has a good chance of getting the Initia airdrop.
If this is the case, then the cost-effectiveness of ambush airdrops is very high now.
Just a guess.