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
Breaking down Worldcoin’s (WLD) launch and how it benefits ETH and OP
Reads about the ongoing trend of telegram bot tokens and what that future looks like
Tweets & Memes capturing last week’s crypto highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
Continuing the trend of what we wrote last week in “Another Week of Slow Summer 🌞”, the crypto markets (specifically Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other “majors”) remained incredibly calm this week. As a result, BTC remained relatively unchanged, closing the week at ~$29,400 while Ethereum closed the week even more stable than BTC.
As you can see from the above picture, ETH has continued to trade within the same tight range! This week, only ~$40 dollars separated the high and low price that Ethereum traded at! 🤯 As we wrote about last week, there’s been an immense lack of volatility surrounding BTC and ETH as most market participants have moved down the risk curve to various altcoins. While the above chart only shows last week’s price action, Pentoshi highlights how “stable” ETH has been in recent weeks.
The 130 days he highlights equals 18 weeks, and that timeframe has contained ETH within a range of ~1600 & ~1900 with a few, quick breaks above and below those levels. While the summer calm has been appreciated for those of us who monitor the industry day in and day out, eventually something has to give! As the saying goes, a lack of volatility for an extended period of time eventually leads to an explosion of volatility as the market that was once lulled into sleep arises (hopefully higher!!). 🚀
While volatility has been missing from the majors as Bitcoin & Ethereum have essentially remained the same price for the last few weeks, there’s been plenty of fireworks and excitement throughout various altcoins! 🤑 As we’ve outlined recently, Solana (SOL) and Rollbit (RLB) have been the market leading alts in recent weeks along side the strongly recovering sector of the OG DeFi tokens.
SOL and RLB have given back some of their gains in recent weeks, but the OG DeFi sector continues to outperform both Ethereum and Bitcoin. When referencing OG DeFi, we’re generally talking about some of the first protocols built on Ethereum that include among others: Uniswap (UNI), AAVE, MakerDAO (MKR), Chainlink (LINK), and Compound (COMP). Those OG DeFi protocols have enjoyed a renaissance over the last few weeks which continued this week for MakerDAO (MKR +19%), Compound (COMP +10%) and Uniswap (UNI +8%).
Outside of the OG DeFi protocols continuing to outperform, there was an impressive performance from the older dog memecoins including: BONE +11%, DOGE +11%, SHIB +7%. As for the rest of the ecosystem, it was a relatively quiet week with the other notable top-performing tokens including:
XDC +13%, OP +8%, ANT +8%, GMX +7%, HNT +5%, CELO +4%, AXL +4%, AZERO +4%, BAT +4%, LTC +3%, RONIN +3%, SOL +2%
To conclude the “Market Overview”, we’ll highlight our above tweet that shows BTC’s strong outperformance this year! 💪 Despite the price remaining essentially unchanged in recent weeks, Bitcoin (and Ethereum + others) have returns that many people would dream of! Since the start of the year, BTC is up an impressive ~80% as it leads the entire crypto ecosystem in its continued recovery from 2022!
News & Developments
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, lists new stablecoin FDUSD and is currently offering zero trading fees for select FUSD pairs
ETH-centric research and development company aiming to remove the negative impacts of maximal extractable value (MEV) on Ethereum raises $60 million dollars at a valuation of $1 billion dollars to continue building and developing its MEV network SUAVE
Beam, a crypto wallet funded by giants such as Coinbase, a16z and others, officially launched and has the ability to send crypto payments by simply scanning a QR code
One of ETH’s longest running and most successful DeFi protocols, MakerDAO (MKR), approved a proposal to temporarily increase the interest rate for its stablecoin DAI and will allow DAI tokenholders to earn yields as high as 8%
The Bank of Italy’s [innovation hub chooses to build on Polyon (MATIC) and Fireblocks as their DeFi project to help institutions dabble with tokenized assets](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/07/26/italys-central-bank-taps-polygon-fireblocks-defi-project-to-help-institutions-dabble-with-tokenized-assets/#:~:text=The Bank of Italy's innovation,with DeFi and tokenized assets.)
Spanish bank A&G launches the nations first locally owned crypto hedge fund
The House Agriculture Committee of the United States advanced legislation to overhaul how crypto markets are regulated in the US, the bill is the most significant and first ever to advance this far
Amazon, the United States largest online commerce store, expanded their Web3 reach as they announced cloud tools that help blockchain developers (initially the feature will provide easy to monitor, use and build on data from ETH and BTC with more blockchains to come in the future)
Worldcoin’s Optimism
There are endless conflicting views about Worldcoin, but here at CoinStats we simply stay neutral and observe what the people are talking about. This week, Worldcoin has dominated the conversation as the long-hyped “Proof of Humanity” protocol officially launched this week.
As a result of Worldcoin’s launch, and with help from Coinbase’s ETH L2 BASE launching it’s testnet, Optimism’s (OP) transactions have been growing a rapid pace! The below tweet highlights Optimism’s recent growth as the number of daily transactions that occur on OP have surpassed Arbitrum (ARB) for the first time in the past 6+ months! 😮
While controversial, Worldcoin’s launch is just beginning, so it’s worth taking a moment to remember what they’re trying to achieve. As the Worldcoin website states, Worldcoin aims to be the “largest, most inclusive identity and financial public utility, owned by everyone.” That description is admittedly slightly vague, so the below screenshot from their most recent blog post provides some more color as it says:
For more info on Worldcoin, we can once again refer to their blog announcing the launch of the token that further describes what the protocol aims to achieve by saying:
World ID, a privacy-preserving digital identity designed to help solve important, identity-based challenges, including proving an individual’s unique personhood
Worldcoin token (WLD), where laws allow, the first digital currency to be freely distributed to people for just being a unique human*
World App, the first World ID-compatible app, developed and operated by Tools for Humanity, that enables payment, purchases and transfers globally using digital assets and fiat-backed stablecoins
Of course, we unfortunately don’t possess a crystal ball so we have no idea how the Worldcoin (WLD) experiment will play out, but at the bare minimum it’s a boost to Optimism (OP). While it’s always difficult to pin correlation to causation in crypto, Worldcoin’s launch has benefited OP’s price in the short term as the number of users and transactions increase resulting in a gain of 8% for Op this week. As mentioned, we have no idea how Worldcoin (WLD) will ultimately play at, but it’s clear that it’s launch along with Coinbase’s L2 is benefitting OP in the short to mid-term! 🤓
To wrap up this section, we’ll highlight our amazing in-house NFT tool Midas. While the NFT market has been admittedly slow and difficult to navigate as people take their capital to chase memecoins, Midas has still been hard at work! As you can see from the below tweet, while the NFT market has been slow for the past few months, Midas will always alert you to something you need to pay attention to (and potentially profit from)! 🤑
Read of the Week
“Random 🤡 thoughts on the explosion of telegram bots (+tokens)” — redphonecrypto
This week, our read comes in the form of a well-articulated Twitter thread as redphonecrypto, a crypto participant since ~2015 and investor at the incredibly native and active crypto venture fund Delphi Digital, provides some color on the current Telegram bot trend! 🤖 As we briefly touched on last week, the bot trend is insanely popular amongst crypto Twitter right now and redphone highlights the key points by saying:
“Trading via bots looks nothing like typical trading interfaces…no need for charts, order amounts, pairs/routes, etc.”
“Once you start using bots, you look at other trading interfaces like horses on the way to the glue factory (native UIs will stick around but will probably target pro traders)”
“Bots can help users interact on-chain without having to use user interfaces at all 👀”
“Most bot functionality can be easily copied rn, so the winning team/project is simply the team that can execute”
“Bots + AI will allow for some really interesting mashups…i.e. AI can identify interesting trades, then ask you in a message: do you want to go long Token X?…Type yes and done”
“If you’re building a UX-focused product on top of DeFi primitives, you should be paying attention & perhaps even prioritize building your own bo”
“I’m not sold on ‘terminals’ or webapps to do this stuff… I think the truly massive potential lies in providing functionality where the user already lives: on Telegram…don’t dilute efforts building elsewhere”
“Maybe people prefer dicking around w metamask and typing trades into little boxes that won’t even let you enter a decimal point without first typing a 0…but I doubt it…exponential improvements in UX are good...not bad”
As a company that consistently builds to always better our users, we understand the views that redphone has! We’re empathetic to the current trend of people utilizing the Telegram bots as we’re continually building for a better user experience which is exactly why we built native swaps directly into the CoinStats app. 🤓 Outside of our amazing app and the popular Telegram bots, it’s clear that crypto users want better interfaces and will pay a premium for them, so keep an eye on the constantly changing wallet and Telegram bot sector!
Tweets & Memes
Another great breakdown covering the future of SOL, SOL DeFi and the entire ecosystem!
Tether, the issuer of USDT, continues to gain market share throughout the quiet markets!
Estimations conclude that only 1.9 million ETH addresses have been active for 10+ days 🤯
Cheers to Ethereum being 8 years old and the bright future the next 8 years hold! 🌞
Wrapping Up
8 years!!! With that tweet showcasing Ethereum’s launch 8 years ago (!!) we’ll conclude this week’s edition of the CoinStats Scoop thinking about what we’re going to accomplish over the next 8 years! 💫
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 choppy range, detailed Worldcoin’s launch and its potential impacts on the price of ETH’s L2 Optimism (OP), read about the potential future of the current Telegram bot token meta along with its impact on wallets, 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! 😎