GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The usual market overview and analysis
Updates on this week’s noteworthy news and developments
Analysis of the ongoing institutional demand for crypto
Reads about crypto narratives, how to profit from them & from what’s next
Tweets & Memes that capture last week's highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
Another wild week in crypto! On the bright side, this week’s price action resulted in gains for BTC, ETH, and the total crypto market cap. As you can see above, the total crypto market cap gained ~1.3% this week. Of course, 1.3% doesn't seem too impressive, but 1.3% of $1 trillion+ is a significant amount of capital. 🤑
BTC as the king of the crypto ecosystem gained an impressive 7% this week, leading this upwards momentum. ETH followed closely behind gaining ~4%. BTC once again dragged the entire crypto ecosystem up, in part as reaction to the collapse of yet another US bank. On Friday, news that First Republic Bank was headed for bankruptcy began trickling in. As a result, the stock price of FRB continued its recent selloff as market participants rushed to sell their holdings in the bank.
The narrative of Bitcoin as a self-custodial, safe haven asset grew stronger as a result of FRB’s collapse. While most of the money entering the crypto ecosystem has never been because of fears about the US banking system, it still highlights the reason Bitcoin was created in the first place. A self-sovereign, digitally native asset that is yours to own and transact with becomes a lot more attractive when banks are slowly collapsing around you.
The crypto space is slowly growing to a point where there are always tokens and ecosystems that are performing well despite BTC & ETH price action. There were several tokens that outperformed the majors this week:
PEPE +165%, RENDER +39%, FLOKI +17%, BLUR +14%, & SOL +9%
News & Developments
Hong Kong regulators urge the banking sector to embrace licensed crypto firms
Filecoin, crypto’s 30th largest token by market cap, announces the FWS (Filecoin Web Services) to provide an open-source alternative to compete with Amazon, Google & Microsoft
Circle, the issuer of crypto’s second largest stablecoin USDC, delivers USDC interoperability across different blockchains with the mainnet launch of its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol
Mastercard, one of the world’s largest payment processors, is partnering with Solana, Polygon, Avax and Aptos to launch a new set of standards “Crypto Credential” in order to build the trust of consumers, governments, and businesses
Visa, another of the world’s largest payment processors, is hiring software engineers for its “ambitious” crypto product roadmap
Robinhood, the popular trading platform and publicly listed company, unveils a new feature Robinhood Connect that allows users to easily fund their Web3 wallets
The global payments company PayPal is extending the ability of users to transfer crypto to more than 60 million Venmo customers
Animoca Brands, one of the largest crypto gaming firms in the space, subsidiary TinyTap raises $8.5 million for Web3 education bringing its valuation to $100 million
Standard Chartered’s crypto focused subsidiary Zodia Custody raises $36 million to expand its crypto services internationally and to improve the product
Solana’s main crypto wallet Phantom expands to multichain support adding the ability of users to transact on Ethereum and Polygon
Lens Protocol, a decentralized social media platform built on Polygon, announces its optimistic scaling solution Bonsai
Franklin Templeton, an investment management giant with $1.4 trillion assets under management, expands its onchain US Government money fund to Polygon’s MATIC
Google Cloud and Polygon Labsannounce partnership to advance the adoption of the MATIC ecosystem
Consensus & Growing Crypto Adoption
While prices have remained relatively stagnant over the past few weeks, the adoption and overall outlook of crypto has never looked brighter! 🌞 This week alone, we saw several announcements that will massively benefit the crypto space in the coming months and years! Most news are from massive Web2 companies that don’t want to miss the next wave of the internet consumers adopting crypto:
Google Cloud is partnering with Polygon (MATIC) Labs
PayPal has announced that all Venmo customers (60 million+) will be able to transfer crypto to any external account they want
Mastercard is partnering with Aptos, Polygon, Solana & Avalanche
Visa is hiring for its “ambitious” crypto roadmap plans
Robinhood has announced its new product feature allowing users to easily purchase crypto
Hong Kong has again emphasized its approval of crypto companies registering there
Circle has announced its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP)
In addition to these foundational developments that will drastically increase crypto’s future demand, several other observations this week will likely have an impact on crypto. Most of these observations were voiced at Consensus, CoinDesk’s giant annual crypto conference. Consensus routinely draws some of the largest, most active crypto participants. Ram’s thread that we've summarized below provides plenty of insights into where the crypto market is headed 🤑
The core takeaways of the thread include:
China, contrary to public perception, is seeing major NFT adoption: Very few venture capitalists are indexed to crypto growth in Asia.
The liquid staking ETH market should exceed $100 billion in revenue by 2030.
Zero knowledge proofs/scaling solutions continue to be a dominant theme for the next leg of growth.
Crypto's institutional adoption isn’t going anywhere.
New stablecoins are coming soon: a fluent stablecoin that can provide tokenized KYC (know your customer), KYB (know your business), and AML (anti-money laundering), all onchain.
Fully trustless liquid staking solutions will continue to gain traction.
Fruitful conversations about whether L1s or L2s capture more value will be had.
More hospitable crypto startup locations are increasingly in Asia.
Asia markets are growing by the week with a core focus on crypto gaming.
Crypto is, of course, inherently global and uncensorable, but it’s increasingly clear that regulations are becoming unworkable in the United States while the rest of the world embraces crypto and its whole potential. 😎
Read of the Week
“Counter-Narrative Trading: My Guide to Outperforming the Markets” — Ignas | DeFi Research
This week, our read comes from Ignas, a crypto market participant veteran that provides valuable in-depth insights on DeFi. We’ll be reading about strategies for finding mega-narratives and short-term plays, discovering Ignas’ approach to counter-narratives, and learning to use this info to find hidden market opportunities.
“We often get swept away by what is popular and end up making impulsive decisions based on trends but following the popular narrative in investing is a sure way to failure…counter-narratives or unpopular opinions are ideas or investments that already exist, but are either not well-known or disliked by many…it’s important to remember that not all bets will pay off, and you may need to adjust your strategy based on new information…it’s challenging to stick to a strategy when another narrative is driving some random token’s price up by 100%”
In addition to the wise words about chasing narratives and what works across crypto cycles, Ignas was kind enough to provide us with the “mega-narratives” he’s watching develop, including:
Real World Assets (RWAs) — RWAs enable lending outside of the circular crypto world and open up DeFi lending's potential to grow from tens of billions to a $1.6 trillion traditional finance credit loan market
DeFi Options — options are a contract that gives you the right (but not the obligation) to buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price, a way to speculate on the future price of an asset
Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) — represent a person’s identity onchain. They’re like NFTs but are non-transferable therefore “bound” to your “soul”; SBTs can record your educational, employment, medical or even credit history while serving as proof of attendance
CoinStats Reads
Did you know that you can learn and earn in crypto without investing any money? Do you want to be able to evaluate anyone's crypto portfolio performance like a pro? Do you wanna know how to manage your Binance directly from CoinStats or what are the 5 biggest crypto exchanges by average daily volume? We've compiled a list of reads just for you!
Check out these brand new CoinStats articles for insights and pro tips:
Find out about the 5 best learn-and-earn crypto programs on the market, including those of Coinbase, Binance & CoinMarketCap.
Apply the best methods and approaches to evaluating a crypto portfolio's performance.
Learn more about managing your Binance portfolio directly from CoinStats for maximum efficiency.
A very important factor to consider when choosing a crypto exchange is trading volume. Read more about the 5 top exchanges by average daily volume!
Tweets & Memes
The usual reminder of the powers of Midas, our amazing AI-powered NFT monitoring tool
Polygon continues its recent business development success 💪
Since Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade last week, the number of staked ETH keeps going up 🙌
Wrapping Up
We’ll wrap up this week’s CoinStats Scoop with this healthy dose of ETH optimism! 💫
As usual, we discussed the regular market updates including another great week for BTC, ETH and the crypto market at large, covered the announcements from Consensus that you need to know including increased institutional adoption of Visa, Mastercard, and others, read about market narratives and how to capitalize on them, and covered many other important news and developments of the week. 💪
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! 😎