GM and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 Here’s an overview of this week’s newsletter:
The usual broader market update with highlights of this week's impactful news
Updates on this week’s noteworthy news and developments
Breaking down MetaMask, Polygon, and Uniswap announcements
Reading & thinking about all things Bitcoin NFTs as they continue taking off
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
While this week crypto continued to take a massive step forward from mid to long-term adoption, the prices, unfortunately, dropped in the short term. 😒 This week saw impactful announcements throughout the entire crypto ecosystem at the annual ETH Denver conference, but prices rained on the parade as the conference kicked off.
As a result, BTC and ETH both lost around 5% this week, still remaining on the rise since the new year! Also of note, the total crypto market has been holding steadily above the psychologically important one trillion dollar mark as prices have stabilized since Thursday evening's flash crash. 🌞
Concerning the small pullback, our remarks from January and February reviews are worth mentioning once again: “While minor pullbacks in token prices are expected, the outlook for 2023 continues to improve drastically, and the long-term future of crypto has never looked brighter!”
We'll cover the big announcements from the likes of Metamask, Uniswap, & Polygon made at ETH Denver in-depth below. Interestingly, despite BTC and ETH consolidating a bit lower this week, several DeFi tokens displayed strong performance. 💪 Some of the best performing tokens this week were:
LQTY +80%,
KWENTA +58%,
MKR +36%,
SNX +27%,
EUL +10%,
YFI +7.5%
While the weekly market remains fickle and unpredictable, crypto's mid to long-term outlook continues to improve thanks to the committed companies, teams, and protocols pushing it forward.
News & Developments
MetaMask, the most popular crypto wallet, launches its SDK in Unity’s Asset Store, allowing game developers to easily integrate the crypto wallet into any game.
Chainlink (LINK) launches the Chainlink Functions beta version enabling users to easily connect a crypto smart contract to any Web2 API to bring real-world data on-chain.
Ethereum’s highly anticipated Shanghai upgrade, enabling the withdrawal of staked ETH, is now scheduled for early April.
Robinhood, the popular self-custody wallet, now supports MATIC and ETH for global iOS users.
Figment Capital, a crypto venture capital firm that launched its first fund in 2021, is looking to raise $50M for its second venture fund.
Chiliz, the sports & entertainment Fan Token ecosystem, announces a $50 million incubator program backed by Jump Crypto.
Near Protocol (NEAR) launches ‘Blockchain Operating System’ to focus on user experience.
Uniswap Labs, the entity behind the popular decentralized exchange UNI, announces the release of its new mobile wallet.
Polygon’s MATIC launches Polygon ID, the “open source identity infrastructure unlocks passwordless login, verifiable proof-of-uniqueness, reusable KYC, and instant onboarding use cases for web3 developers.”
Crypto’s top venture firm Polychain Capital is looking to raise $400 million for its fourth crypto fund.
Ethereum developers deploy the “EntryPoint” upgrade enabling crypto wallets to operate as smart contracts.
IOST announces strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services for Web 3.0 development.
CoinStats' CEO Narek Gevorgyan will be speaking at SushiSwap’s “The DeFi Kitchen: A virtual DeFi Summit & Hackathon” on March 9th in the Middle-East's biggest Ethereum Hackathon – The Sushi x ETHDubai 2023 Hackathon.
Building & Adoption Never Stops
This week, developers, investors, crypto entrepreneurs, media, and people from all over the world traveled to Denver, Colorado, to participate in ETHDenver, the "world's largest annual Web3 #BUIDLathon and Community Innovation Festival'' to celebrate crypto’s bright future!
25,000+ people registered to attend the annual conference as opportunities and excitement over crypto remain abundant. 🌞 Usually, at major conferences, teams and protocols make announcements to draw favorable attention, and this year was no different! As mentioned earlier, three of the week’s most important announcements came from the Ethereum ecosystem, including Polygon, Uniswap, and MetaMask.
Polygon ID
Once again, Polygon made headlines this week with the launch of Polygon ID and the corresponding identity infrastructure. Polygon ID is based on Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology enabling users to verify their identities or credentials without revealing sensitive information! 🤯
Here are some benefits of using Polygon ID:
Bar owners can use the credential-verification system to verify that a patron is of age without looking at any identification card
Provides identity in a way that the average consumer can use
On-chain private verification while maintaining users' privacy
Enables compliance for both Web2 & Web3 industries which strengthens the regulatory framework through KYC/AML checks
Empowers users to control & own their data while verifying its authenticity.
Uniswap’s Mobile Wallet
This week's second incredible announcement is from Uniswap. The most used DEX and one of the most recognizable crypto brands is introducing the Uniswap mobile wallet.
Uniswap made the headlines this week with the launch of its mobile wallet, “a completely self-custodial, open-source mobile app from the most trusted name in DeFi.” Uniswap’s new wallet enables users to:
Swap and switch seamlessly between ETH, MATIC, Arbitrum, and Optimism (OP)
Send & receive ERC-20 tokens
Track ERC-20 tokens, ERC-721s (NFTs), & your favorite wallets
Favorite tokens and wallet addresses to stay up to date on trends and activity
Use Web3 apps on different networks at the same time
Unlock your wallet w/ FaceID & back up your seed phrase manually or encrypted in iCloud
Get push notifications to know when transactions are complete on any device
WalletConnect to any app on Mainnet or L2s.
Metamask’s Unity Integration
On February 28th, Metamask and Unity announced that Unity, a leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D content, "introduced a new ‘Decentralized’ category page in the Unity Asset store with vetted solutions to support developers interested in technology that enables decentralization in gaming.”
As a result of the Metamask x Unity partnership, game developers across the globe can easily integrate crypto wallets and smart contracts into their games if they choose to. Last but not least, Metamask’s announcement was covered; it will likely end up being the most impactful news as crypto's future adoption continues to look brighter by the day! 🌞
Read of the Week
“Bitcoin Inscriptions & Ordinals” — Galaxy Research
We covered BTC NFTs in the February 6th edition of the CoinStats Scoop! Well, our prediction that they’re “only just beginning” has been proven correct, and the crypto market agrees. This week, Galaxy's research team dropped an impressive report detailing everything you could possibly want to know about Bitcoin NFTs (Ordinals & Inscriptions). Galaxy is one of the crypto space’s largest asset managers and most respected institutions currently managing over 2 billion dollars, so it's worth paying close attention. 🤯
Galaxy describes its report as aiming to “detail the history of NFTs on Bitcoin, examine the foundations and current landscape of inscriptions and ordinals, explore the opportunities and challenges that inscriptions and ordinals present, and argue that not only do they create significant growth potential for the bitcoin ecosystem, they can improve the fidelity and security of the overall Bitcoin network.”
“Our base case for the market size of Bitcoin NFTs built on inscriptions & ordinals is $4.5 billion by 2025…even the NFT use case along has the potential to dramatically widen the scope of Bitcoin’s cultural impact…enhance the likelihood of additional Bitcoin adoption…”
Galaxy Core Takeaways:
Bitcoin Inscriptions will be a large market
Inscriptions significantly expand the design space for Bitcoin
New use cases will drive growing interest and adoption for Bitcoin
Inscriptions can be large even without “ordinal theory”
Inscriptions can put a floor on blockspace demand, benefiting Bitcoin’s security and fee market
Significant market infrastructure to support Bitcoin NFTs will be developed by Q2 2023
Tweets & Memes
Slowly but surely, crypto is making its way into mass adoption
A casual reminder of how early and small crypto is in comparison to other assets
Our Midas NFT monitoring system continues to provide insane value 🤯
Wrapping Up
We'll conclude this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop with the highlight of Midas’ incredible power to find the signal in the noise for CoinStats Premium users. 💫
We covered the broad market and token news, including DeFi’s power, Uniswap, Polygon, and Metamask announcements of new products and partnerships. We also read and internalized BTC NFTs.
CoinStats will continue to guide you through the crypto and DeFi world. We'll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 😎
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