Crypto Goes Gucci & Tiffany's 💎
Market Overview
GM and welcome to this week's edition of the CoinStats Scoop! 💫 As you can see from the images below, crypto markets endured a choppy week that mostly resulted in flat price action led by market leaders BTC/ETH. BTC dominance did interestingly continue to decline, as ETH, and various other coins outperformed BTC. Total crypto market went up around 2% this week, and the volume of transactions has steadily regained traction.
While BTC/ETH has remained mostly flat, there were several pockets of tokens that continued to outperform the broader market. As we predicted in the past editions of CoinStats Scoop (reason to continue reading!), DeFi and layer 2 (L2) tokens resumed their strength we outlined previously. Optimism (OP), Lido DAO (LDO), and AAVE displayed their continuous strength adding to the rallies they’ve enjoyed over the past month. The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s native token APE also had a strong week as market participants were buying the news surrounding Gucci’s announcement that APE will be accepted for at boutiques across the US.
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.
Facebook, now known as Meta, announced that their Instagram NFT integration is expanding to over 100 countries. The expanded offering will support ETH, FLOW, and MATIC NFTs.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, partners with Coinbase to offer institutional investors direct access to crypto, starting with BTC
Binance and Mastercard partner to launch a crypto-to-fiat Binance Card in Argentina.
Solana’s leading NFT platform Magic Eden to add support for ETH NFTs in coming weeks.
Luxury brand Gucci to accept APE token payments in select stores.
Tickmaster plans to expand their NFT offerings.
Luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co. releases their NFT-backed CryptoPunk pendants.
Crypto broker Voyager Digital approved to return $270M to customers.
Starbucks to unveil their web3 initiative, including NFTs and crypto rewards program.
Institutional Validation
While the market this week didn’t immediately accelerate based on any specific announcements, there were countless massive legacy brands that expanded or implemented crypto strategies in recent weeks. Whether it’s direct institutional access to crypto, macro investment giants announcing crypto funds, or brands offering/integrating NFTs, the announcements over the past 2+ weeks have come from the following companies and institutions:
BlackRock, Meta (Facebook), Mastercard, Snapchat, Tiffany & Co., Brevan Howard, Starbucks, Gucci, Instagram, and LVHM
The abovementioned legacy giants expanding their crypto strategies and integrations is another reminder that the entire crypto ecosystem is continuously pushing forward despite the selloff in markets over the past few months. Builders keep building, and institutional interest from every corner of the globe is accelerating, as crypto finds its footing and establishes itself as a big financial paradigm shift.
MATIC’s Ongoing Scaling Efforts
Continuing with our recent trend of highlighting the importance of layer 2 scaling solutions and the merge, let’s take a moment to talk about Polygon’s (MATIC) suite of scaling solutions and why they’re set to be a large player in the ecosystem for years to come.
Polygon has enjoyed a few consecutive weeks of price appreciation and has several verticals of scaling solutions that may enable them to continue the momentum. As the Blockworks tweet outlines, Polygon has six core products being developed with the goal to advance the ETH ecosystem.
Polygon ID — blockchain native identity system that enables programmable privacy
Polygon Avail — data availability focused blockchain enabling app improvements
Polygon Nightfall — uses Optimistic-Zero Knowledge tech to scale private networks
Polygon Edge — tools for projects to create their own app-specific EVM chain
Polygon Supernets — enables users to opt into shared security, maintenance, & upgrades
Polygon zkEVM — their flagship ZK scaling solution that should go live early next year
Along with several verticals of product development aimed to scale ETH, Polygon also has one of the best business development teams in crypto. Polygon routinely forms legacy brand partnerships as evidenced by their prominent partners below.
List of Polygon’s numerous web2 partnerships
Read of the Week
Our read of the week comes in the form of a thread from the popular crypto twitter personality Ansem (@coinzimp). Ansem outlines his plan for the month ahead at the beginning of each month, and August is no different. We would highly advise reading through the thread yourself, but we have also covered the core ideas below just in case.
As the first tweet suggests, some of the core stuff we’ve covered, and will continue to cover, are things Ansem and other major crypto players are monitoring. Below are the most important takeaways, trends, and protocols to be aware of as we progress through August.
The ETH merge and L2 fever we previously wrote about are still going strong through Optimism. Its burgeoning DeFi ecosystem and Lido are a strong merge play.
“Likely lower inflation prints…should give a good window prior to the merge in September.”
GMX as an ongoing L2/Arbitrum play while we wait for Arbitrum’s token launch.
Lido’s LDO, “probably the most straightforward merge bet on the market, most popular liquid staking service and cross chain by a large margin.”
DeFi 1.0 Revival, possible “new trend here…timing aligns well with merge backdrop”
Sudoswap and XMON as the best way to directly bet on the growth of the NFT asset class
“still nowhere near as much activity on chain as we saw last year so opportunity is definitely there to position yourself early in ecosystems that haven’t launched yet”
“Optimism playbook likely repeats on Arbitrum/zkSync/StarkWare/Fuel/etc.”
Closing the thread, Ansem mentions the unfortunate truth that we’ve reiterated in past editions: Macroeconomic factors are still leading the way. Likely sometime mid-September, we have the Ethereum merge catalyst. But it’s important to remember that, “markets have been very data-driven all year so would not hesitate to change bias given new information, market's reaction to macro events has consistently marked the most pivotal turning points.”
Tweets & Memes
Cathie Wood of $ARK fame, marking the bottom on $COIN only for it to rally massively
foobar’s excellent explanation of NFTs; patience for the non-fungible assets will be rewarded
Don’t overthink and mid-curve the impact the merge will have on ETH
Blockworks displaying Optimism’s rapid rise over the past few weeks
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that excellent Merge meme we conclude the fifth edition of CoinStats Scoop! To recap, while the majors (BTC/ETH/SOL) were largely flat this week, there are plenty of opportunities across the market led by layer 2 plays and the ETH merge that'll catalyze Lido and DeFi. Speaking of L2s, Polygon clearly has a place in the future of the ecosystem as they have many suites of products currently in development. Ansem outlined an excellent August plan and reiterated many of the trends, tokens, and protocols we had previously highlighted. Once again, thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week!
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