Market Overview
GM and welcome to this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🍦 It’s been a long summer waiting for the Merge, but the wait is finally over. Our beloved tokens seem to be excited as well, as the broad crypto market rallied just shy of 1% this week. A 1% increase in the total market cap may not seem significant, but taking a look at some trending tokens below, including BTC and ETH, paints a greener picture. 🤑
The move upwards across the industry this week kickstarted with more buying momentum behind ETH (+12%) and powered through the week with BTC (+9%) rallying and claiming some dominance back. Other top performers this week were Ravencoin (+91%), Helium’s HNT token (+25%) as it prepared to move to the Solana blockchain, Cosmos’s ATOM (+27%) maintaining ecosystem strength through OSMO (+17%) and EVMOS (+12%) that we’ve discussed in recent weeks, and SYN (+40%).
Alternative L1s also followed Ethereum’s lead as the abovementioned ATOM rallied along with NEAR (+14%), SOL (+12%), and AVAX (+8.5%) gaining strong momentum this week. Speaking of ETH, let us once again reiterate that it is MERGE WEEK 🎉 which we’ll cover in more depth below. Cheers to a green week and let’s dive in!
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.
FTX and GameStop announce a new partnership involves plans of selling FTX gift cards in physical locations along with efforts toward online marketing & e-commerce initiatives
Mysten Labs, a new competing L1 blockchain by ex-developers of Facebook, raises $300M @ $2B valuation
Puma, one of the world's largest sports brands, launches interactive metaverse Black Station to showcase limited edition NFTs of its sneakers
Tessaract, a new crypto startup which aims to tokenize energy markets, raises $78M
Whampoa group, a Singapore-based investment firm, plans to raise $50M for a new crypto hedge fund and to allocate $100M to crypto venture investments
MetaWeb Ventures raises $30M for its first crypto venture fund
Crypto game developer Revolving Games raises $25M
Google Cloud will become a validator of the Ronin Network that is developed by the parent company and creators of Axie Infinity
NFT platform Sorare partners with the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the release of fantasy basketball games that include digital collectibles
Coinbase to provide the necessary infrastructure for Enthusiast Gaming to build a browser-based first-person shooter game EV.IO that rewards players in crypto & NFTs
Merge Week 🎉
Everyone in the crypto industry and beyond is excited for what next week's Ethereum Merge brings! This includes some of the largest, most influential companies in the world, including Google. If you simply type “the Merge” into Google, you'll see a running countdown in your local time zone. Very cool to see Google so excited and partnering with crypto native companies such as Axie Infinity! 🐼
The successful implementation of ETH’s Bellatrix upgrade on Tuesday solidified the start of the Merge process. We’re now a few short days away from the Merge and it was worth reiterating that the best possible way to protect your hard-earned assets is to simply do nothing, wait, and observe trusted sources. In one of the issues of CoinStats Scoop, we highlighted a thread from the founder of Compound Protocol Robert Leshner. We'd advise you to read through his thoughts once again and follow his suggestion of doing nothing during and shortly after the Merge as scams, attack vectors, bad links, and airdropped tokens trying to steal your assets will unfortunately be rampant. Stay prudent and protect your capital! 😃
Sports x Crypto
One of the growing trends across the crypto industry is the increased collaboration between professional sports leagues and crypto, more specifically NFTs. Proprietary intellectual property of sports leagues represented through NFTs is a natural fit and a space we see continuously expanding in the coming months. NFT platform Sorare is the latest to benefit from the ongoing trend as they started a long-term partnership with the National Basketball Association (NBA).
As former Messari analyst Mason Nystrom points out in his thread below, “NFT fantasy cards and platforms like Sorare provide ownership to fantasy leagues which further financialized a hobby of millions of people around the world. As a whole, the crypto fantasy sports sector continues to be one of the most promising applications that can bring millions of non-crypto native users into web3.”
We touched upon the intersection of crypto and sports leagues in our August 22nd issue of CoinStats when we highlighted the recent explosion of soccer fan club tokens. As the platform has gained regulatory approval across Europe, the ecosystem has exploded with excitement and volume: The associated tokens consistently garner close to $200M in 24 hours. Going forward, we’ll be closely monitoring any developments that further expand this niche! ⚽
Read of the Week
“ETH Merge: What to Expect”— Onchain Wizard
We’ve obviously focused heavily on the Merge leading up to the event, and our Read of the Week is once again on ETH’s transition to PoS! Onchain Wizard wrote an extremely informative, relatively short primer on all things Merge which we would highly recommend. As we stated above, and one of the best crypto analysts reiterated, the best thing to do during the Merge is to patiently watch it unfold. 🐼
“The real source of chaos will come from the ETH PoW fork…given ETH is currently a PoW network, its transactions rely on miners, the transition to PoS is forcing them to find a new home for their mining equipment. So some of the miners will be “forking” ETH, and will airdrop PoW ETH to all ETH holders…Look out for scams: There will undoubtedly be other real and fake airdrops around the merge date, so be careful with what sites you interact with (best course of action here is don’t touch anything)”
The core takeaway is in the thread's quick tl;dr saying, “(1) expect volatility, (2) you don’t need to do anything, as the upgrade to PoS will be seamless from a token holdings/user interface point of view and (3) the ETH PoW fork equates to a ~1.9% airdrop for all ETH (mainnet) holders (CEX holders may not be eligible).” Once again, there is no reason to act quickly, please be safe and protect your hard earned assets as we move past one the biggest and most bullish events in crypto history.
Tweets & Memes
Crypto’s tribute to The Queen in a very crypto fashion, RIP The Queen
ETH merge cheatsheet on its short, mid, and long term impacts
We would all be on beaches in Puerto Rico by now if the bull market continued 🙂
Everyone’s mood ahead of the Merge as we can’t wait any longer!
Wrapping Up
Tokens had another week of green and positive momentum ahead of ETH’s long-awaited Merge. The Merge is now just a few short days away, and users should be extremely careful around tokens and links during and shortly after. Protect your assets! 🔒
We’re excited about the growing number of Crypto x Sports partnerships, a trend which we expect to continue developing as NFTs grow in their ability to protect intellectual property rights. Cheers to all the hard-working ETH developers and let’s enjoy Merge week as we celebrate the biggest event in crypto’s recent history. We’ll see you next week as we cover all the fallout from the Merge and pandas returning to our screens! 🐼
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