GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The usual market overview featuring an insanely green week for altcoins
Weekly updates on noteworthy news and developments
Highlights of Solana's & Polygon’s future in the crypto ecosystem
Reads about crypto messaging and social apps' future crypto integration
Tweets & Memes capturing last week’s crypto highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
The crypto ecosystem experienced another exciting week, despite BTC’s lack of significant action! BTC maintained its stability at around 30.3k, while ETH gained a respectable 4%. The latter briefly surpassed 2k before settling back down to its comfort zone of around 1.9k.
The broader crypto market experienced a significant surge, leading to the total crypto market cap surpassing $1.25 trillion.🤯 While BTC and ETH have remained relatively calm over the past few weeks, the overall crypto market cap has continued its upward trend, with various altcoins and sectors enjoying bullish flows within the expanding crypto ecosystem. Not long ago, we were celebrating the total crypto market cap's milestone of $1 trillion, and now it has consistently grown, with approximately $257 billion added to the crypto ecosystem in the past few weeks.
The notable increase in the crypto market this week was largely influenced by Ripple (XRP). Ripple, the company behind XRP, has been engaged in a legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since 2020 around the claims that XRP was an unregistered security. However, this week, a federal judge ruled that XRP was indeed a security when Ripple initially sold it to institutional investors, but XRP did not qualify as a security when it was sold to the general public on exchanges. The ruling became public on Thursday, leading to a significant surge in the value of altcoins across the crypto ecosystem. It also alleviated concerns surrounding altcoins potentially being classified as securities, resulting in increased investor confidence and appreciation for these alternative cryptocurrencies.💪
The outcome of the ruling was considered a massive win for the crypto industry in the United States. It highlights the distinction that tokens can potentially be considered securities when initially developed and sold to investors, but they're not classified as securities when sold on the secondary market from exchanges!
While the legal nuances might be complex, the impact was evident in the market's response, with crypto assets experiencing a surge in prices. XRP, in particular, demonstrated remarkable growth, rallying by 60% throughout the week. 🤯
We’ll clarify Arthur’s views expressed in the tweet on why he thinks the end of the 2022-2023 bear market occurred this week below:
Macro-wise, inflation continues to generally fall across the world, and central banks are more likely to start accommodating markets rather than trying to suppress them
Institutional acceptance of crypto as an asset class is here to stay, as all financial institutions generally follow BlackRock, which has just applied for a spot Bitcoin ETF
The US SEC is losing ground in an attempt to label crypto assets as securities; XRP’s case and the judge’s ruling signal a sooner-than-expected bright future for crypto in the United States
Crypto’s previous downtrend and bear market have washed out essentially all tourists; the only crypto holders left aren’t likely to sell anytime soon
“Market is extremely underallocated to everything except BTC & ETH; there’s a lot of catch-ups to occur for other crypto assets”
Hong Kong’s welcoming of crypto “is real and will open the floodgates for Asian financial institutions to enter the crypto ecosystem in a legitimate manner.”
Arthur's analysis reinforces our confidence in the end of the bear market, and the charts this week further support this notion as most tokens continue to make gains from the recent lows triggered by FTX. Similar to the previous week, two tokens outpaced most of the market this week, such as SOL (+32%) & RLB (+71%). In addition to the continued outperformance of Solana and Rollbit, OG ETH DeFi continued its resurgence, as evidenced by the following tokens:
1INCH +42%, COMP +28%, SNX +27%, DYDX +12%, UNI +9%, ZRX +8%, SUSHI +9%, & AAVE +6%
Solana, Rollbit, and OG DeFi weren’t the only tokens to outperform BTC & ETH this week. The below tokens also enjoyed green returns and built on their strong momentum to start 2023:
Scaling Solution Tokens — BIT +25%, OP +22%, ARB +13%, MATIC +11%, AZERO +10%, INJ +9%, MINA +7%, IMX +6%,
Alternative L1s — ADA +10%, NEAR +9%, XTZ +6%, AVAX +5%, DOT +4%
Infrastructure Tokens — HNT +18%, BAT +10%, LINK +8%, ENS +7%, LPT +5%
Bridging Protocols — SYN +21%, STG +10%, AXL +10%,
Gamefi Tokens — GMT +10%, SAND +7%, AXS +7%, MANA +7%, RON +6%, ILV +4%,
Miscellaneous Tokens — HXRO +37%, LQTY +34%, XLM +33%, FLEX +17%, LDO +13%, DOGE +6%
Looking ahead to the upcoming weeks and months, there may be some noise along the way, but we’re confident that the trend will continue to move upward. Ansem, one of the top crypto traders, envisions how insane the next cycle will be despite most not being prepared for it yet. The next 6-12 months will be an absolute blast, so remember to hop on for the ride ahead. 🚀
News & Developments
Google Play changes policy, allowing NFTs to be bought, sold, and traded in its apps, along with enabling users to earn tokenized assets
ConsenSys, the top Ethereum development ecosystem support company and founder of MetaMask, announces its ETH zkEVM L2 Linea is now available on mainnet alpha
The premier music NFT platform, Sound.xyz raises $20 million to continue building and scaling its platform
AAVE, one of the longest-running and most successful DeFi protocols on ETH, officially launches its native stablecoin GHO on Ethereum mainnet
Base, the optimistic rollup ETH L2 built by Coinbase, announces the completion of its launch criteria; Base mainnet is now live and open to builders
Polygon Labs, developers of MATIC and other scaling solutions, announce the Polygon protocol's upgraded POL token as the technical proposal of Polygon 2.0
Coinbase Wallet launches a new feature enabling users to send direct messages to and from Ethereum addresses
The CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, says cryptocurrencies will surpass traditional currency size, including the US dollar, as they are inherently accessible by an instant global market
The Future of MATIC & SOL
Both MATIC & SOL tokens were once again among the top performers this week as SOL gained 29% & MATIC followed up closely with a gain of 11%. While we've covered these tokens in depth in recent weeks, it’s still worth examining them again. Polygon finally outlined its endgame for MATIC, and SOL continues its upward trajectory, driven by a flourishing DeFi ecosystem and growing acceptance within the broader crypto community.
Despite experiencing a selloff, the SOL ecosystem has demonstrated resilience, emerging stronger after the collapse of FTX. In recent weeks, the narrative of Solana surviving and thriving has gained momentum on platforms like Crypto Twitter. Plus, SOL has consistently outperformed Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and the majority of the entire crypto ecosystem. 🤯
As mentioned, DeFi on SOL is currently experiencing a massive resurgence led by the lending and borrowing protocol marginfi! Despite past challenges, the ecosystem and the token have emerged stronger, with a resurgence in SOL DeFi on the way. The above thread highlights numerous interesting and nascent protocols helping SOL’s resurgence, with some upcoming airdrops on the way. 🤑
Plus, the return of memes is another great sign of acceptance from the Crypto Twitter community! This week's best was a video from cmsintern, the king of Crypto Twitter meme videos. 😤
Now, let’s shift our focus to Polygon’s MATIC and its future! You probably know that the rollout of Polygon 2.0 has been anticipated for a few weeks now, and we can finally see the end vision this week as POL, the Polygon protocol's upgraded token, has been announced. 🤯
The below picture clarifies Polygon's plans. The link between the expansion of Polygon’s zkEVM, the roadmap of Polygon 2.0, and the announcement of Polygon Supernets remained unclear during recent weeks.
So, the role of Polygon’s new POL token is to unify everything within the MATIC ecosystem under one roof. The upcoming POL token will also allow token holders to become validators of the POL network in exchange for additional yield and benefits. Ultimately, they'll enjoy better token utility and a more unified ecosystem of Polygon-based networks.
As Sandeep, the Polygon Labs founder, says, the new POL token is “going to be the building blocks of Polygon 2.0, the Value Layer of Internet: Infinite Scalability, Unified Liquidity powered with the fastest and most efficient ZK technology.” While it’s challenging to predict the exact outcome of Polygon's transition and the success of its new POL token and ecosystem, Polygon deserves recognition for its ability to adapt and adjust its goals and token utility based on the evolving environment. Regardless of the ultimate outcome, The Scoop will continue to provide valuable insights and information to keep readers informed about the developments within the Polygon ecosystem and beyond. 🤓
Read of the Week
“Crypto Chats for Crypto Chads?” — Zee Prime Capital
This week, our read comes from no other than Rapolas at Zee Prime Capital. The Zee Prime team is one of the most plugged-in, hands-on venture capital teams in the crypto space. 🤓
As you can see from the title and the above photo, the focus of this week’s read is on crypto messaging's past, present, and future! Teams and protocols can tap into the unique benefits of on-chain or crypto messaging, with Rapolas helping us navigate its faults, current applications, and future! 💪
“Crypto is social, reflexive, and prone to groupthink. Given the increasing amount of hours spent online, chat has become just one of the many features offered by more immersive products with content feeds. Blockchain is a graph, potentially not only a financial but also a social one. Pushing further along the utility axis to provide users with features unique to crypto is a hard but worthy endeavor. These vertical crypto chats for specific use cases could be applied to NFT discovery platforms, gaming, OTC desks, on-chain coordination of real-world activities, and, of course, Web3 social platforms.”
Tweets & Memes
Viktor provides a current narrative token watchlist!
Solana continues to reboot its ecosystem & DeFi protocols; things are heating up 🌞
Ryan Selkis, CEO of a crypto data platform, provides a plethora of bullish reading materials 🤓
The impact of Google’s announcement of allowing NFTs in their app store can’t be overstated!
Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager, says crypto is here to STAY!
Wrapping Up
With the tweet highlighting the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager being incredibly bullish on crypto’s future, we’ll conclude this week’s edition of the CoinStats Scoop! 💫
As usual, we provided the regular market update, including an overview of altcoins outperforming as a result of XRP’s positive court judgment, outlined what’s driving the resurgence of the SOL ecosystem, walked through the future of Polygon’s new POL token, read about the future of crypto messaging apps and their potential impact, 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! 😎
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