Market Overview
GM and welcome to this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop and to another green week in crypto! ☘ It appears like the markets have responded positively to the launch of this weekly recap, which we humbly won't take credit for 😉 Overall, crypto market cap ticked higher this week, and BTC dominance continued to tick lower, as all eyes are still on ETH. The summer months heat up crypto all across the board.
ETH once again led the marketwide rally gaining an impressive 19%+ this week and briefly touching back above 2k. This was fueled by the Merge narrative and the success of the Goerli testnet merge that we’ll cover in depth below. BTC performed admirably this week as it continued its slow and steady recovery to break 24k and saw a modest 7% gain.
Elsewhere across altcoin land, some of the best performing tokens included the base L1 EVM compatible chain NEAR (+33%), Solana following ETH’s lead as momentum trickled down to the next best L1 in SOL (+15%), everyone’s favorite Link Marine’s token LINK (+25%), ETH subnet scaling solution AVAX (+24%), and SYN (+24%) that continued its strong recent rally on the heels of its Synapse Chain announcement.
News & Developments
Below are some of the most impactful announcements over the week that indicate crypto’s rising demand across a broad swath of institutions, protocols, corporations, and legacy companies. Announcements, interest, and product developments continue, planting seeds for the next bull run and wider crypto adoption.
BlackRock, world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion+ assets under management, launches a private trust for institutional investors to access spot BTC exposure
Reddit partners with FTX and L2 scaling solution Arbitrum for the community points token
Circle, the creators of popular USDC stablecoin, confirm their support for ETH’s transition to Proof of Stake saying USDC will only support the new ETH PoS token
Interactive Brokers, publicly traded US company and automated global market maker, expands their crypto trading offerings to 24/7 and increases token support
Spartan Labs spins out of Spartan Group with $100M to invent, launch, and develop products
LongHash Ventures announces new $100M fund dedicated to early stage crypto investing
The Merge Is Coming
Ethereum developers, and developers in general, do some of the most tireless, under-appreciated work in all of crypto. Wednesday though, was a night of developer celebration as core ETH developers were streaming the ongoing merge of the final testnet Goerli. Below is a screenshot of the ceremonial way ETH devs celebrate successful development of the ETH core protocol as the page displays some version of happily coded pandas. 🐼
After 5+ long years of planning and development, we actually have a target Merge date! With the success of the Goerli testnet merge, the Merge is officially scheduled for September 15-16th. There are some technical details that affect the date, such as the number of blocks until the Merge and cumulative hashrate necessary to compute those blocks, but users don’t need to concern themselves with these nuances. The important takeaway remains that the Merge is no longer a meme, there’s a solidified date range about a month away. The Merge will forever change ETH and solidify its investment parameters forever.
As we outlined today and many times before, ETH has remained the market leader as individuals, funds, endowments, institutions, etc. look to gain exposure using the long-awaited upgrade and switch to PoS. As Arthur Hayes pointed out and Degen Spartan expanded upon, ETH demand and the bid for it are increasing by the day. Most importantly, many are apprehensively waiting for the completion of the Merge to deploy capital as Degen Spartan outlines in the thread below.
Yield on capital is a core tenant of the finance industry, and ETH’s transition to PoS will allow the abovementioned institutions to access yield by staking their ETH. Degen Spartan continues his thread by saying, “I expect the merge to be the trigger that sees perpetual 1 way net inflows from tradfi to ‘stake’ because everyone wants yield…i think by summer next year, ETH will be all warmed up, sails down and ready to catch maximum wind…my long game is guessing where external money flows, and I’m betting on ETH.”
TL;DR: The Merge is finally happening and we all can't wait to see those pandas one more time! 🐼🐼🐼
Read of the Week
“About Narratives” — @heartereum
Our Read of the Week this time around comes from @heartereum on Twitter. Heart wrote a thoughtful and useful reflection on memes, narratives, anonymity, and how they’ve impacted the crypto space and led to where we are today. The first quote that stood out to us revolved around anonymity online and highlighted one of crypto’s most powerful implications, as Heart wrote, “real anonymity has no reputation attached, no memory, you are just valued in the instant for the contribution of your ideas.”
This quote empowers crypto users and builders on a daily basis. ETH, SOL, BTC, ATOM, etc. don’t care about who you are, where you’re from, or what you believe in. They’re just a set of open source contracts that operate as long as predefined parameters are met. Various crypto ecosystem addresses don’t require personal information and are immune to the human biases that people across the globe fall for on a daily basis. Anonymity online and in crypto is powerful because you’re valued by your knowledge and what you contribute above all else, and it’s important to remember this compelling fact.
Narratives are nothing new in the crypto space, and just like in other fields, when they accumulate critical mass, they can overcome any rational thinking and logical analysis. Heart describes this phenomenon well and applies it to the “Ethereum killer” narrative we saw rage throughout 2021 saying,
“A narrative, much like memes, need some elements for people to recognize themselves in it, and thus adopt the concepts as their own ideas. In the case of ethereum killers, many participants felt that: Ethereum transactions were becoming expensive, Transaction times were getting long for players with low gas, and ETH price itself was getting expensive for new players to own “1 full ethereum”. So, it was easy to push a narrative based around cheap and fast transactions, and playing on naive but psychologically important factors.”
This eloquent two-sentence quote could just about summarize the entire past bull market run. Narratives are very much like self-fulfilling prophecies: if they work, they get stronger. The alternative L1 narrative and the bull market it established were a result of a choke-full of narratives that were reinforced as prices continued higher. Establishing a core set of beliefs and analysis that you can fall back on is paramount to surviving crypto cycles. Harnessing the ability to see the underlying fundamentals in trending narratives is key to survival.
Tweets & Memes
Vitalik on the cover of the new THE MERGE album dropping September 15th
Pollo with a great meme about our collective desire to find another trade to make it back
A great depiction of Vitalik and us waiting for the Merge yet another month
We just have one more cycle and we promise to take profits this time around!
Wrapping Up
Once again, we have another strong week led in part by the macro stock rally as the headline US inflation numbers beat the market’s expectations. Goerli testnet successfully merged, and we finally, finally have a tentative date for the long-awaited ETH PoS Merge (September 15-16th). The Merge should solidify ETH as an investable asset across all legacy institutions and there are structural and narrative elements that will confirm this thesis moving forward. Speaking of narratives, we learned from Heart in our Read of the Week that we should always be aware of the narrative trap that reinforces the structural upgrades to ETH as an institutional-grade investable asset!
As always, thanks for reading, and let’s hear your thoughts, comments, and feedback as we work together to improve CoinStats Scoop. We’ll see you next week! 🐼