Market Overview
As you can see from the image below, the broad market ticked slightly down this week, mostly led by flat weeks from BTC & ETH. Still, BTC & ETH currently sit comfortably above their key levels of 20k/1.5k, with plenty of sectors and tokens providing impressive returns (as well as some exciting announcements) this week. Let’s dig in! 😤
As mentioned above, crypto remained relatively flat above key levels across the major indicators of total market cap ($1T+), BTC (20k+), & ETH (1.5k+). Those major indicators continued to range within the same levels they have for the past few months. While we’d obviously enjoy it if those prices only went up (soon!), the stagnation of the total market cap, BTC, & ETH gives other tokens a green light to push upwards! 🤑
Typically, when ETH & BTC push up, they routinely drain liquidity from other tokens as everyone rushes into the strongest coins on the market. When they remain stagnant, like this week, capital flows throughout the entire ecosystem and influences a wide range of coins.
This was evident this week as the top-performing tokens were spread out across a wide range of sectors, including L1s (CANTO +20%, ATOM +11% ), exchange tokens (BNB +16%), scaling solutions (OP +23%, MAGIC +16%), infrastructure tokens (LINK +10%), data-storage (AR +44%), soccer tokens (CHZ +46%), & various other tokens (RNDR +75%, LTC +24%, INJ +22%)!
We also saw Polygon’s MATIC amongst the other top-performing coins. The popular L2 token gained an impressive 28% this week, and we’ll dive into the thesis for MATIC as well as the fundamental reasons behind its price appreciation below!
News & Developments
Below are some of the most impactful announcements over the week. The news seem to indicate crypto’s rising demand across a broad swath of institutions, protocols, corporations, and legacy companies. Numerous announcements, rising interest, and product development continues, planting seeds for the next bull run and wider crypto adoption.
General News
Solana x Google — Google Cloud announces that they’re now officially running a SOL validator and are indexing historical SOL transactions for developers & users which will be available early next year.
Traditional asset manager giant Fidelity is expanding its crypto strategy and user acquisition by offering commission-free BTC & ETH trading.
Bakkt, a publicly traded crypto infrastructure company, is set to acquire Apex Crypto for $200M with plans to expand its crypto staking and NFT products.
Popular crypto exchange Kraken launches its upcoming NFT marketplace in a private beta.
Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest asset managers, is developing a “crypto classification service for institutional investors.”
Publicly traded peer-to-peer payments company MoneyGram expands to crypto tooling and enables the ability to trade/hold BTC, ETH, & LTC.
Token News
Immutable X (IMX), an ETH L2 scaling solution, officially launches the GameStop NFT marketplace.
Blockchain data querying protocol, The Graph (GRT), now supports Solana’s blockchain data, including all historical transactions.
Polygon’s MATIC is chosen as the initial base chain for Instagram’s coming rollout that enables creators to mint and sell NFTs.
Traditional asset manager giant JPMorgan uses Polygon’s MATIC blockchain to “trade tokenized cash deposits” in a test experiment.
NFT marketplace LooksRare (LOOKS) is launching an NFT aggregator.
NEAR-based DeFi protocol Orderly Network raises new funds with a $200M valuation.
Ethereum L2 scaling solution zkSync is adding support for Java, Go, and Python programming languages to expand the use cases developers can build for.
MATIC & SOL’s Week
As alluded to above, SOL & MATIC had some massive fundamental announcements that occurred throughout the week! While SOL’s developments weren’t having an immediate impact on its price (-1% this week), MATIC made a massive impact as it was one of the top-performing tokens gaining ~28%.
The thesis for MATIC is becoming clearer by the day, and it was summarized well by Andrew Kang in his tweet thread we’ll expand upon below! Andrew has been around the space during multiple cycles and currently works for one of the most successful crypto funds in the space, Mechanism Capital. He’s also a part of the popular and influential PleasrDAO, so his words carry weight!
The key takeaways from his thesis rest upon a combination of technical analysis displayed within MATIC’s chart and fundamental developments that MATIC has announced in recent weeks, including:
The Monetary Authority of Singapore completes a cross-currency transaction involving tokenized Japanese yen & Singapore dollar deposits on MATIC.
Proficiency of their business development (BD) team as one of the strongest in crypto.
Meta/Instagram partnerships & integrations for NFTs on Polygon.
MATIC’s recent L2 zkEVM developments & suite of ongoing scaling products.
The popularity and growth of Reddit NFTs that are minted on MATIC.
JPMorgan, the traditional finance giant, completing a DeFi transaction on MATIC.
BUSD (Binance’s stablecoin) is now natively available on MATIC.
Opensea’s NFT volume now growing faster on MATIC than on mainnet in recent weeks.
Whew, MATIC has a lot going on in the best way possible! It’s clear that MATIC’s partnerships and business development strategy, combined with their growing number of scaling solutions, has positioned MATIC for a bright future ahead!
Speaking of bright futures, Solana had a big week themselves, with a slew of announcements coming out of their conference in Lisbon. We previously acknowledged the impressive results of MATIC’s business development team, and SOL is the only competition they have in that regard.
The strength of SOL’s BD team was once again on display this week as they announced partnerships with two of the largest companies in the world: Google and Meta (Instagram/Facebook).
As we linked to and highlighted in News & Developments section, Google Cloud is now running a Solana validator, indexing the history of all SOL transactions so developers and users can benefit, and is adding SOL to its ongoing Blockchain Node Engine project so that everyday people can run and access a Solana node if they wanted to! 🤯
Along with the massive Google partnership, SOL was also chosen (along with MATIC) by Instagram & Facebook for their initial NFT product rollout! The combined billions of users of Instagram and Facebook can now easily connect or install SOL’s main wallet (Phantom) to display, purchase, and sell SOL NFTs. 😎 As we have previously stated, prices may currently remain stagnant, but the building blocks for an insane next cycle and global adoption are quickly taking shape!
Read of the Week
**“In bankrupt Lebanon, locals mine bitcoin & buy groceries with Tether” — MacKenzie Sigalos
While token prices may be down over the past months (but starting to regain strong momentum!), the utility, practicality, and necessity of crypto continues expanding upwards. This week, we were once again reminded of the importance of what the entire industry is building as CNBC published a great article from MacKenzie Sigalos on the everyday use and lifeline crypto provides across Lebanon (and the world)! 🤯
“Bitcoin has really given us hope…Bitcoin offers a system that is uncorruptible; a system that is permissionless and censorship-resistant…while tether (USDT) does not offer the same potential for appreciation as other crypto, it represents something more important: a currency that Lebanese still trust…the use of USDT is wide spread…it’s better for me to accept tether or U.S. dollars due to the huge inflation in the Lebanese Lira”
Whether it’s USDT, BUSD, USDC, or crypto more broadly, the ability for prices to remain relatively stable, settle instantly, always allow access to what you own, and not need the permission of governments, people, or regulators is its core promise. Oftentimes, the ability to permissionlessly and instantly move crypto anywhere across the world is unfortunately taken for granted.
Staying focused on the mid to long-term outcomes that crypto enables, while highlighting the immediate impacts like the article above is important! Not only is the future of crypto incredibly bright and built toward everyday use, but the real-time impacts continue to take place. The opportunity and promise of crypto has never been more clear, and the building taking place is evident that it’s just beginning. 💪
Tweets & Memes
Slowly, in the background, crypto adoption & integration keeps accelerating
A good overview of the current companies & protocols being built on SOL
JPMorgan executes its 1st ever trade on a public blockchain
The public perception of crypto’s future is increasingly encouraging!
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that positive note on the growing public acceptance of crypto and its outcome of becoming “the future of finance,” we’ll conclude this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🍨 While BTC & ETH remained relatively flat this week, pockets of green returning tokens were once again found across the ecosystem! 🤑
MATIC & SOL had numerous ground-breaking announcements that will aid them in garnering adoption in the short, mid, and long term! Institutions also continued developing their crypto strategies as we saw announcements from Instagram, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Google.
The building blocks for crypto’s mass adoption continue to take shape, and CoinStats will continue to guide you through the world of crypto and DeFi moving forward! We’ll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop.