GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The usual market overview featuring another week of slow summer market action
Weekly updates on noteworthy news and developments
Highlighting LINK’s massive Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol launch
Reads about the hot sector of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs)
Tweets & Memes capturing last week’s crypto highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
Generally speaking, if there is one season where people take some time off of work, vacation, or just relax more, that almost always occurs in summer. As we’ve reached the middle of July, it appears as if Bitcoin and Ethereum have also decided to take a few weeks off! While their respective prices have remained elevated from the rally of ~5 weeks ago, the movement they’ve had since then has been almost non existent! 🧐
To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing at all, just an observation! Despite Bitcoin & Ethereum’s summer break, the crypto market has grown to a level where even if the two biggest tokens are remaining stagnant, the total crypto market can still grow! 💪 As you can see from the above image, the total market cap sits just below $1.25 trillion dollars, up $50 billion dollars since it was at $1.2. tirllion on June 27th. What’s largely lead that rally is the white hot altcoin market as when majors lack volatility, it shifts down the risk curve to lower market cap tokens.
Speaking of the majors (BTC & ETH) lacking volatility, let’s take a look at just how choppy and range bound they’ve been from the help of our great crypto tracking app! As you can see from the below images, since the 25th of June Bitcoin has been trading between $31,400 and $29,700 while ETH has been tightly trading between $2000 and $1850. Those ranges, for how bog the assets are, are incredibly tight!! Both BTC and ETH, the world’s largest and second largest crypto tokens have been trading within a 5% range for a month now! 🤯 We’ll see if next week can break them out of this range (hopefully to the upside!!) as generally speaking, a lack of volatility like we’ve seen recently usually leads to an explosion in volatility so buckle up!
ETH’s price movement over the past month visualized in the great CoinStats app!
Outisde of BTC and ETH remaining essentially flat for another week, LINK (+17%) was one of the best performing tokens this week as Chainlink announced their long awaited Cross Chain Interopability Protocol (CCIP) which we’ll break down in depth below!
Elsewhere, UNIBOT was the best performing token this week as the telegram bot meta has taken over crypto twitter and UNIBOT is the current market leader. 🤖 The result of that was a mouth-watering 97% (!!) gain for the token this week. Speaking of large gainers, SOL and RLB were two of the top performing tokens of the past month, but gave back some gains this week as the tokens consolidate lower and make a higher low before ideally continuing back upwards!
As for where we head next, as Ansem outlines below it’s hard to imagine that we go much lower from here! The crypto market has been through the guantlet over the past few months and we still have the potential Bitcoin ETF approval news on the horizon. Soon enough, onwards and upwards we’ll go as building towards the future of crypto adoption never stops! 🚀
Rounding out other notable performers this week includes the following tokens:
FLEX +60%, XLM +17%, AKT +16%, RDNT +15%, MKR +10%, AXL +10%, MC +10%, SNX +8%, AR +8%, TON +7%, DYDX +7%, UNI +7%, RBN +6%, BIT +6%, APE +5%, FIL +4%, TRX +4%, OP +4% & IMX +3%
News & Developments
ChainLink’s (LINK) long awaited Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) officially launches on ETH, Avalanche (AVAX), Polygon (MATIC), and Optimism (OP)
Polychain Capital, longtime crypto investment fund, raises $200 million dollars for a new crypto fund, the venture capital firms fourth crypto fund to date
CoinFund, investors and builders in crypto since 2015 (!!), announce that they’ve raised $158 million dollars for their “Seed Fund IV”
Crypto wallet company Gnosis partners with Visa to launch Gnosis Card allowing users in Europe (soon the US and Hong Kong as well) to spend self-custody crypto with the swipe of a debit card
Manta Network developer p0x Labs raises $25 million dollars at a valuation of $500 million dollars to continue building and scaling their modular ecosystem for zero-knowledge applications
Futureverse, company aiming to combine AI and blockchain, raises $54 million dollars to “build the infrastructure for users’ experience of the metaverse”
Solana Labs announces the launch of Solang allowing developers to build on top of SOL in Ethereum’s native smart contract language Solidity
Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap (UNI), announced UniswapX a new decentralized, open-source aggregator protocol that will be launched soon
Chainlink (LINK) launches CCIP
As we alluded to in the market overview, Chainlink was one of the most talked about protocols and tokens this week as they finally released their long-awaited Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP)! The market certainly liked the announcement as LINK was one of the top performing tokens this week gaining a strong 18%. 💪
At a very high level, CCIP aims to solve the insanely difficult challenge of secure cross blockchain mesaging (for example, sending tokens and contract functions safely and securely from Ethereum to Solana). To help us break down Chainlink’s impressive launch, we’ll rely on the help of none other tha ChainLinkGod! 🔗
While we always encourage you to read the thread for yourself, we always have your back in pulling away the need to know details! With that in mind, the most important takeaways from CCIP’s launch include:
Web3 consits of hundreds of independent L1s, L2s, appchains, sidechains, subnets & more launching every week so to create a truly interoperable Web3 ecosystem, data and value needs to be able to move seamlessly between blockchains
CCIP is a cross-chain messaging solution that has been designed from the ground-up with security as the priority
The Chainlink network has secured trillions in transactional value within the DeFi ecosystem
CCIP provides a plug-and-play solution for transferring any tokens cross-chain
CCIP enables immense composability with the example of enabling the ability to send USDC from Ethereum to Optimism, swap that USDC to ETH, and deposit it as collateral in a lending market all in one transaction 🤯
The ability to send any arbitrary data from one blockchain to another enables the creation of native cross-chain smart contracts
CCIP isn’t a single network, but actually made of multiple decentralized oracle networks that work in combination to securely transfer data and/or tokens cross-chain
So, we know CCIP is an incredible achievement, but ChainLinkGod summarizes it all perfectly by saying, “ultimately, CCIP represents a paradigm shift for the Web3 economy, enabling the secure transfer of both tokens and data across any blockchain network without the major security headaches that have afflicted existing solutions”! 💪
Chianlink is one of the longest running and most respected protocols in crypto, but while they stole the headlines and attention this week, some other OG protocols had announcements of their own that include:
UniswapX — Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap (UNI), announced UniswapX a new decentralized, open-source aggregator protocol that will be launched soon
SNX — Synthetix introduces their new product Infinex, a new DEX that aims to compete with centralized exchanges including Binance and Coinbase
CRVusd — a short few weeks ago, Curve made a splash as they successfully launched their protocol native stablecoin
GHO — last week, AAVE announced the launch of their protocol native stablecoin
Read of the Week
“DePIN & DeREN: Toward a Better Classification of Decentralized Infrastructure Networks” — Mason Nystrom
This week, we’ll be reading about the consistently developing world of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). We’ve covered these in the past, but it is beginning to look like the DePIN sector is going to be one of the fastest growing and most exciting sectors as we continue to climb out of the 2022 bear market! 💪
To explore this sector, we’ll be reading from Variant Fund’s Mason Nystrom as he breaks down the entire DePIN vertical. Reading from Variant Fund is a year ago (July 28th, 2022) they raised $450 million dollars ( 🤯) for two new crypto venture funds. With that out of the way, we’ll follow along with Mason as he says, “with the rapid expansion of decentralized infrastructure networks, it’s worth redefining these networks into two categories based on their unique properties”. As you can see from the below image, the DePIN sector has gorwn massively in recent years and many of the below projects have currently available tokens!
“Decentralized infrastructure networks — cryptonetworks that leverage token incentivez to generate liquidity to fund physical infrastructure operations — are proliferating fast…the value of these networks is clear: they offer a better solution for powering consumable resources, from computing to energy to data…crypto-based resource networks must still compete with their web2 counterparts like AWS and Google…while DePINs and DeRENs can leverage tokens to subsidize initial resource costs, the most successful networks won’t compete on price aline, but instead will unlock new demand or expand the market in unique ways.”
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) — cryptonetworks with consumable, non-fungible resources that leverage incentives to deploy location-dependent hardware devices
Decentralized resource networks (DeRENs) — cryptonetworks that leverage incentives to build marketplaces and increase the supply of existing or idle consumable, fungible resources that rely on location-independent hardware
Tweets & Memes
Some useful info on the insanely hot new craze of Telegram trading bots 🤖
If you haven’t listened to us for the past few weeks, the Solana Renaissance is upon us!
Ethereum Solidity devs now can easily write smart contracts on Solana! 🤓
It’s no longer a matter of if, but just a matter of when a Bitcoin ETF will be approved 🤑
Wrapping Up
With that tweet from co-founder and COO of CoinGecko highlighting how bullish market conditions are just on the horizon as a BTC ETF is only a matter of time now, we’ll conclude this week’s edition of the CoinStats Scoop! 💫
As usual, we provided the regular market update including a look at the top performing tokens this week along with Bitcoin and Ethereum’s continued tight trading range, broke down and detailed the imprresive CCIP announcement from Chainlink along with LINK’s strong week, read about the future of the decentralized physical infrastructure network ecosystem, outlined recent announcements from OG DeFi protocols, and covered the weekly news and developments. 💪
CoinStats will continue to guide you through the world of crypto and DeFi. We'll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 😎
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