Market Overview
GM and welcome to this week's CoinStats Scoop! 💫 While prices may have been down across the board this week, Ethereum’s long-awaited transition to a proof-of-stake consensus model was successfully achieved! 🎉 This week, we’re not just providing the usual market analysis, we're also digging into all things Merge, highlighting news and developments across the crypto ecosystem, and explaining crypto’s unique ability to enable and empower new monetization strategies. Let’s dive in!
The obvious highlight of the week, as we mentioned, was the successful Merge. While prices certainly don’t reflect the amazing technical achievement accomplished, its future impact can’t be understated! However, broad macroeconomic impact overshadowed the Merge and led to the markets' decline this week. 🙄
We wrote about the unfortunate reality of macroeconomic factors controlling crypto markets in the August 29th edition of CoinStats Scoop, and those thoughts are once again relevant this week. The declining prices across many sectors of the crypto ecosystem were the result of pesky U.S. inflation data released Tuesday morning. As the wise white wolf points out in the tweet below, legacy stock market correlations remain extremely elevated and keep impacting our precious tokens.
While the broad market ticked down this week, there were also some sectors of green! 🤑 A few of the standout ecosystems this week were tokens that we’ve previously highlighted: Those tokens displayed relative strength and consistent demand thanks to fundamental and narrative catalysts (which is why you should keep reading and sharing). 😉
ATOM and the entire Cosmos-based ecosystem (including tokens such as OSMO, JUNO, and EVMOS) remained strong this week ahead of the highly anticipated Cosmoverse conference taking place at the end of September. Another strong token this week, which we previously covered, was Chiliz (CHZ, +18%), a token that supports the broad soccer fan token ecosystem. As BTC and ETH declined this week, ATOM and CHZ, along with APE (+7%) and XRP (+8%), are good reminders of the vastly different verticals crypto has expanded to. As always, CoinStats Scoop has you covered!
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.
Legacy traditional finance giants Citadel, Fidelity, Sequoia, Virtu, Charles Schwab and Paradigm partner to launch digital asset exchange EDX Markets
NEAR token’s Foundation launches a $100M venture fund for new initiatives
New crypto market maker Portofino is launched after raising $50M
Private equity giant KKR enables access to their Health Care Strategic Growth Fund available on AVAX’s Avalanche Chain increasing access to tokenized funds for retail
Non-profit technology advocation giant Linux Foundation launches their OpenWallet Foundation to support and develop a secure, open-source, interoperable digital wallet
Crypto investment fund North Island Ventures launches a new $125M crypto fund
Popular NFT collection Doodles raises $54M @ a $704M valuation
Token management platform for DAOs, NFT collections, and crypto businesses raises $15M with a $70M valuation
Global coffee giant Starbucks announces its crypto strategy that includes tokenizing their Loyalty Reward program into digital collectible NFTs after partnering with Polygon’s MATIC
Traditional brokerage giant Fidelity to integrate BTC trading for retail investors on its platform
BigCommerce partners with BitPay and CoinPayments to provide crypto payments solutions
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will auction off $70M in historical artwork to boost their digital art reach including potentially buying NFTs
🐼 Pandas Pandas Pandas 🐼
As you're likely aware, Ethereum’s Merge was successful, and screens all across the industry displayed the much-anticipated pandas! While the short-term price impact wasn’t what anyone wanted to see, it’s important to keep our eyes on the exciting mid to long-term implications.
As the above tweets highlight, the structural flows and sell pressure reduction of this transition to proof-of-stake are long-term catalysts that will eventually take hold. The main effect of ETH moving to PoS is the massive issuance reduction and consistent sell pressure from previous ETH miners. Eventually, these structural changes will be present in the market and ETH reflexivity will occur when broad markets and macroeconomic conditions improve. As we wait for these impacts to take place, we’ll give one more shoutout to all the ETH developers and contributors that made the transition of a live, $200B network extremely seamless. 🤯
Read of the Week
“The New Creator Playbook: Jumpstarting Communities Through Tokens” - Li Jin
This week’s highlighted read comes from Li Jin, cofounder of Variant Fund, and explains how crypto and token issuance, “is inverting the online creation model.” Li and her partners at Variant Fund are some of the most thoughtful people in the space surrounding the evolution of tokens, NFTs' current and future impact, and ability to empower creators.
“Similarly, tokens also represent a powerful new tool for creators to bootstrap audiences and capital. Instead of creating content for free with the hopes of gradually growing an audience and one day being able to monetize it, creators are now able to monetize and build an audience upfront through tokens—and then use that money and that following to produce their content and grow their business.”
While we definitely recommend reading the entire article, the above quote and image contain the important takeaway. As crypto continues its expansion and growth, its ability to invert traditional monetization strategies for individuals and companies will become increasingly relevant. Tokens and NFTs are amazing new monetization strategies that can immediately tap into a global, permissionless 24/7 market that drastically increases creators' and companies' ability to monetize and build an audience! 🎉
Tweets & Memes
CMS Intern with another great meme video depicting ETH’s PoS transition
An interesting analysis of daily users across various protocols
Nothing was more important this week than watching the Merge!
Confirmation of the Merge from Vitalik himself
Wrapping Up
Merge week has finally come and gone! While macroeconomic factors impact ETH and the broad crypto market in the short term, ETH’s transition to PoS and the resulting impact on issuance and sell pressure can’t be understated. Elsewhere, ATOM and the Cosmos ecosystem remained strong along with CHZ having a good week as the crossover of crypto and sports continues. ⚽
Li Jin highlighted crypto’s unique ability to invert traditional monetization strategies through tokens and NFTs as the ecosystem continues its push forward. Despite the declining prices, the fundamentals and catalysts are always improving, so think ahead! As always, thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop. 🍨