GM and welcome to our holiday edition of CoinStats Scoop! ☃️ Here’s an overview of this week’s newsletter:
The usual broad market update with insights into outperforming tokens & things to watch
Reading, thinking through & analyzing potential crypto trends in 2023
Analyzing 2022 by looking through The Block’s research report
Updates on the impactful news and developments of the week
Wrapping things up with takeaways & predictions
Before we dig in, don’t forget about our newly released crypto gift cards!! 🤑
Market Overview
Happy holidays to everyone out there, we hope you’re enjoying some well-deserved time off! 🎄 The CoinStats team is constantly plugged in so you don’t have to be, and this week was no different. While many of us were hoping for a strong Santa rally to close the year, the pesky market had other ideas in mind. 🙄
Though we didn't enjoy a marketwide rally, at least the market saw some modest gains, including BTC (+1.5%) and ETH (+4.5%) slowly grinding higher. This week the volumes were lower all across the ecosystem (as you can see above) because many market participants are now away for the holidays.
Despite the low volume, BTC and ETH climbed a bit higher which gave many altcoins the ability to post some green Christmas tree gains! 🎄 Most notably, alt L1s were in the news this week as Polygon made a slew of announcements that you can read about below, AVAX completed a protocol upgrade, and ATOM (+5%) and BNB (+8%) enjoyed holiday growth.
Elsewhere across the ecosystem, some other notable tokens that rallied included Thorchain’s RUNE (+6%), Yuga’s APE coin (+5%), Immutable X’s scaling/gaming token IMX (+5%), Helium’s HNT (+13%), Arbitrum’s gaming ecosystem MAGIC (+6%), Synapse’s bridging protocol token SYN (+3%), BONE (+10%) and BitDAO’s BIT token (+2.5%). BIT has been gaining steam as DAO is contemplating a $100 million buyback of its token next year.
It was a relatively quiet week throughout the token ecosystem due to the holidays, but the News & Development section is nevertheless full. This growth will propel the ecosystem forward throughout 2023 and beyond! 🤑
News & Developments
Visa implements proof of concept on Ethereum scaling solution StarkNet that would enable users to send payments through a self-custodial wallet without having to directly sign transactions – This would enable recurring and automated payments on ETH
Argentine Football Association, fresh off its World Cup victory, is partnering with Metaverse company Upland for a web3 expansion that includes digital collectibles and a virtual gathering space for the team’s fans
Polygon’s MATIC partners with neo-banking app Hi to allow minted MATIC NFTs to be displayed as the face of a web3-focused debit card
Yuga Labs, the creators of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, hire new CEO, the former president and COO of gaming giant Activision Blizzard
One of MATIC’s co-founders, Sandeep Nailwal, launches web3 startup accelerator Beacon
Popular neo-banking app Cogni dives deeper into crypto as it releases a non-custodial in-app wallet that enables users to self-custody their crypto assets
Avalanche (AVAX) completes protocol upgrade to ‘Banff 5’ allowing direct communication between the alternative L1’s subnets
G-Rocket launches “Honk Kong Web3.0 Hub” startup accelerator initiative to help 1,000+ web3 startups enter the Hong Kong market next year
Crypto institutional custody and data provider Fireblocks receives Cryptocurrency Security Standard (CCSS) certification, the first of its kind for in the crypto industry
Through a new partnership with MoonPay, Uniswap (UNI) enables direct crypto purchases in the Uniswap Web App via a credit or debit card
2022 in Review
As we all know, 2022 was an absolutely insane year for crypto! 🤪 There were plenty of highs and lows with many previously unthinkable collapses occurring. Despite some of the negative events that took place, the crypto space continued its upward trajectory through many core metrics. 💪 Let's take a look at the data that summarizes 2022 through The Block’s Digital Asset Outlook Report of 2023 👀
15 publicly traded BTC firms mined 33.8k BTC worth over $550M
NFT/Gaming vertical attracted the most funding this year as $8.3B of funding went toward that sector in 2022
The number of crypto employees increased 351% from 2019 to 82.2k in 2022
ETH & BNB solidified their L1 status as the top chains by total value locked (TVL)
BNB & MATIC saw the largest growth in monthly active addresses (MAA)
Scaling — Arbitrum, Optimism, & dYdX dominated the ETH scaling landscape while Celestia, zkSync, Scroll, and Polygon’s Hermez are currently in development
Binance upped its market share of exchanges from 60% to 75%
NFTs — marketplaces competed for their share of users and we saw Blur, LOOKS, x2y2, and XMON emerge as NFT marketplace competitors to OpenSea
The top 3 metaverses (Yuga’s Otherdeeds, The Sandbox, and Axie Infinity) are worth between $230M and $340M
Read of the Week
“2023 Blockchain Themes and Bold Predictions” — Ace_da_Book
Ace is an accomplished trader and DeFi aficionado, as well as portfolio manager and yield strategist for the hedge fund Four Moons. Four Moons is deeply crypto native as they run blockchain validators on Cosmos appchains OSMO and CANTO, so do take into account what they’re watching heading into 2023! 😎
General Market — while it unfortunately seems likely that crypto will go where traditional markets go, Ace highlights that he believes that “crypto native money will continue to flow to BTC, good layer 1 tokens, and the decentralized apps that are built on top of them”
Layer 1s — Watching Solana and its upcoming apps including Neon and Nitro, ETH, Cosmos (ATOM), and newly developing layer 1 chains, including Canto, Monad, and Berachain
Other Chains — Binance Smart Chain (BNB) because of ecosystems around Wombat, Thena, and Level, Osmosis (OSMO) new applications of which including Stride, Quicksilver, & Mars Protocol, Synapse (SYN) and its upcoming Synchain that bridges to Canto and Berachain
Upcoming L1s — Sei, a new blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, and Celestia’s modular scaling architecture that allows it to separate transaction and data availability layers to tap into the best of all ecosystems across ATOM, ETH, and SOL
DeFi Dapps — Derivative Protocols, including GMX, Gains Network, & Perpetual Protocol, DEXs' increased use after the collapse of FTX (especially Velodrome, Uniswap, Equalizer, and Camelot)
NFTs — “I expect most of mainstream crypto adoption will be in the NFT space in 2023” which will likely occur through the growth of NFT lending protocols such as Llama Lend and JPEGd, Sudoswap’s (XMON) new innovative NFT AMM, and the incorporation of NFTs into games
SocialFi — SFTX’s community trading strategies along with decentralized media protocols that are in the early days of their development (such as Farcaster and AAVE’s Lens Protocol)
Mass Adoption — “Credit card companies like Visa see how blockchains simplify the payment process…Polygon (MATIC) NFTs (Reddit, Starbucks, Nike, etc.) adoption will continue…another much-needed development is helping crypto investors onboard fiat directly to decentralized exchanges bypassing the risk of holding assets on custodial platforms”
Ace and Four Moons cover many of the themes we’ve talked about throughout previous issues of the CoinStats Scoop. While markets may be treading water now, the developments and trends that will emerge and reward market participants in 2023 never slow down. The CoinStats Scoop remains your best and reliable resource for all the goodness that will happen throughout 2023! 🤑
Tweets & Memes
CMS intern provides us with an amazing lookback on the insane year of 2022 in crypto
The Solana ecosystem in 2023
Cheers to the most wonderful time of the year!! ❄️
Wrapping Up
With a reminder about our innovative one-click crypto gift cards, we’ll conclude the holiday edition of the CoinStats Scoop. ❄️