GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 Here’s an overview of this week’s newsletter:
The usual market overview and analysis on where the current market stands
Updates on this week’s noteworthy news and developments
Breaking down the current NFT market and it’s insanely bright future
Reading & thinking about memes, tokens, and how they steal mindshare
Providing Tweets & Memes that capture the highlights of the crypto space
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
Another 7 days have passed, and another insane week in crypto is now behind us. Of course, there’s no quiet week’s in crypto (which is why we’re here to cover it) but this week, outside of the obviuous sad drop in prices, was as quiet as we can remember.
Fortunately, we’ve been prepared for these dips writing throughout the year something along the lines of “market’s never go up in a straight line, be prepared for price corrections”. Of course, we wish that didn’t have to be the case, but BTC, ETH and the crypto market at large unfortunately proved that to be true this week.
Last week we wrote that, “the market is currently hovering above the crucial pyschological levels of 30k and 2k for BTC and ETH, respectively. Although the aggressive rally could potentially slow down, the overall trend remins upward 💪…we must also acknowledge that the market trajectory won’t always be a straight upward line…nonetheless, despite the occassional bumps and bruises, the future of crypto looks pomising as dedicated teams, including CoinStats, continue to develop and innovate in the space.”
While of course we stand by all of our previous writing, and we’re upset to see the market correction this week, it’s entirely understandable when you zoom out. Year to date highs were made last week, and the previosuly mentioned pyschological levels crossed, as BTC and ETH are up 67% and 60% respectively to start the year. 🤯
Those type of percentage gains take years to make in traditional markets and we realize that most of the time key pyschological levels are crossed sellling occurrs. For better or worse, people that have held and bough BTC, ETH or any other crypto asset to start this year are likely selling to realize their multiples of gains in a brief amount of time. Even so, as Chris Burniske highlights, the energy and caliber of people building towards a brighter crypto future has never been better! 🤑
News & Developments
Bitcoin financial services firm Unchained Capital raises $60 million dollars to continue building BTC custody solutions and onboard institutions
Injective (INJ), the Cosmos-based L1 chain that previously announced a $150 million ecosystem fund, partners with global technology conglomerte Tencent to support builders on Injective
Helium (HNT), the decentralized wireless connectivity protocol, officially completes its migration to Solana (SOL)
Merit Circle (MC) and Avalanche (AVAX) partner to announce a new “sovereign network focused on gaming”
Societe General, a French bank, launches a euro stablecoin on Ethereum 🤯
Sui, the upcoming L1 focused on DeFi and trading, will officially launch their mainnet May 3rd
Square Enix, the massive game developer behind Final Fantasy, is partnering with Elixir to bring Web3 games to maistream audiences
a16z, one of the United States biggest venture capital firms, announces their development of a brand new Optimism (OP) stack rollup client Magi
Coinbase, the top U.S. exchange and publicly listed company, plans to launch an offshore derivatives exchange as soon as next week
The Euorpean Parliament votes in favor of a new crypto licensing regime, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework
The Current NFT Market
If you’ve been an active participant in the NFT market over the past few years, it’s no secret that the current state of NFTs appears bleak. Still, just as the proclomations of Bitcoin and crypto being “over” throughout the years, NFTs are destined to come back stronger than ever! 💪 As is usually the case, when the entire world, including those within the crypto ecosystem, begin to question the future of something in its earliest stage, that asset typically proves everyone wrong in the near future. BTC and ETH were proclaimed “dead” countless times in the past, and NFTs will rise to heights unimaginable in previous cycles just as BTC, ETH, and the broad crypto market did!
While NFTs will of course not immediately snap back to previous prices, it’s important to always continue exploring everything you enjoy about NFTs! While NFTs have been trending slightly lower for awhile now, this week discussion on their future was questioned as a combination of tax selling, market participants chasing memecoins like PEPE, and NFT floor prices down across the board has people questioning NFTs as an asset class.
As mentioned, these exestensial questions and horrendous market sentiment usually occurr around the price bottom of an asset class and NFTs are no different in that regard. NFTs, like crypto in general, are momentum assets that benefit from attention and price appreciation in an endless loop upwards or downwards. While attention in recent weeks has shifted from NFTs to memecoins, NFTs remain in their earliest stages of development with a future that is as bright as any asset throughout the crypto ecosystem! 🌞
While many of the top NFT collections were down this week prompting threads and the aforementioned questioning of the asset class, a new NFT minted Friday night highlighting the market’s demand for quality NFT collections. That NFT collection was Mad Lads, and the market response proved that liquidity was waiting to enter quality collections and NFTs are not “dead”.
Mad Lads had an incredibly oversubscribed public NFT mint, and minted out in under 30 seconds at the price of 6.9 SOL ($140). Since that public mint, the Mad Labs had heavy intial sell pressure right after mint around 30 SOL ($600) but the market absorbed that selling and quickly moved higher. As of writing Sunday night, the Mad Lads floor price is 66.5 SOL (~$1450) clearly displaying that the market can, and wants to, buy high quality NFT projects despite some market participants talking of NFTs demise.
While the Mad Lads are of course just a single data point, their success reinforces the bright future of NFTs at large! 🤑 NFTs are not immune to broad crypto cycles and just as BTC and ETH were once celebrated as “dead”, so to will NFTs rise higher than any can possibly predict. The entire CoinStats team is excited to watching this happen and continue to be dedicated to supporting the future of NFTs and crypto at large with our suite of crypto products! 🤩
Read of the Week
“Tokenomics, Token Design & FOMO Season” — Route 2 Fi
Our read this week comes from Route 2 Fi, an experienced crypto market veteran that has been through numerous crypto cycles. As most everyone is likely awhere, memecoins have been the hottest flavor over the past two weeks as PEPE took off going from a newly launched coin with a sub $1 million dollar market cap to $150 million+. 🤯
Route2Fi provides us with some valuable lessons in the face of memecoin season as he takes a close look at token design, how “easy” it is to create your own token, why some projects boom, and why some projects fade! Importantly, Route2Fi notes that tokens such as PEPE are an extreme outlier in their success and he highlights how “easy” it is to launch a token. Most market participants, including us, are better off just slowly buying fundamentally sound tokens such as BTC and ETH! 💪 Still, there are lessons to be learned from memecoins that include:
“crypto has been up for 3 months and altcoins are shilled to the righ and left on Twitter daily…as a consequence, memes and ponzi projects are making a comeback…to create trading volume you need marketing…for example, look at all the meme coins…they’re created for meme culture only…as a result, many projects like this fail after some weeks/months due to a lack of demand for their services or products…the first step to creating a crypto token is to decide which business problems your token will solve, why you need it, and whether you need it”
Tweets & Memes
On the heels of Mad Labs mint Friday night, Solana is making volume waves for NFTs!
Ordinals, BTC’s native NFTs, continue their astonishing growth and future promise
With ETH’s Shapella upgrade behind us, ETH has transitioned to yield-bearing collateral
Wrapping Up
We'll wrap up this week’s CoinStats Scoop with the above tweet demonstrating ETH’s potential to establish itself as a internet native bearer asset people covet. 💫
As usual, we discussed the regular market updates and the healthy pullback that occurred, we covered the recent developments of the NFT market and the asset classes bright future, read and examined the successful formula for meme coins and covered the important news and developments of the week! 💪
CoinStats will continue to guide you through the crypto and DeFi world. We'll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 😎