GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 Here’s an overview of this week’s newsletter:
The usual broader market update with insights covering another week of green
Updates on this week’s impactful news and developments
Highlighting Polygon’s MATIC and covering several announcements they made this week
Some thoughts on the DeFi market and its opportunities
Weekly wrap-up with predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
2023 continues to be an amazing year for crypto: The market was once again bright green this week! 🤑 As usual, it was led by strong weeks from BTC (+11%) and ETH (+9%). As BTC continues to poke its head around 25,000, ETH flirts with 1700+. BTC is now up an extremely impressive 50% (!) since the start of the year while ETH is closely behind at 43%. 🥳
The impressive part of the past few weeks of gains is that they’ve come despite a flurry of perceived bad news. This signals a healthy, broad strength at the base of the crypto markets. Market participants, unconcerned about the headlines, buy crypto because they're sure of its bright future and think its price is undervalued. 🌞
As a result of the market strength led by BTC & ETH, tokens across every sector of crypto rallied:
Liquid Staking Tokens — LDO +27%, SD +10%, RPL +10%
Scaling — KLAY +75%, MATIC +20%,
DeFi — BTRFLY +71%, GNS +40%, CRV +28%, COMP +18%, GMX +17%, AAVE +15%, UNI +12%, SUSHI +10%, DYDX +10%
Infrastructure — FIL +65%, RNDR +21%, HNT +15%, ENS +14%, LINK +13%, BAT +11%, AR +9%
NFT Tokens — BLUR, XMON +147%
Bridging Tokens — STG +64%, SYN +17%
Gaming Tokens — ASTR +30%, MAGIC +20%, MC +11%
Alt L1s — FLOW +26%, DOT +20%, SOL +17%, NEAR +12%, FTM +9%, AVAX +9%
News & Developments
Collab.Land, the popular crypto community management tool, confirms an airdrop of 25% of the total supply of COLLAB to 2 million+ eligible wallets
The gaming guild Yield Guild Games (YGG) is raising $75 million for its first crypto fund
GQ, popular men’s fashion magazine, confirms its first NFT collection launch that will grant holders access to magazine subscriptions, merchandise, and live events
Arbitrum, the most popular L2 scaling solution, is now directly integrated into Coinbase so users can withdraw ETH, DAI, and WBTC directly to the L2
Square Enix, the massive game developer behind Final Fantasy, says its new blockchain game Symbiogenesis is launching on Polygon’s MATIC in the spring
Cosmos (ATOM) completes its Rho upgrade which aims to add a new “global fee” module to improve security, laying the groundwork for the upcoming Interchain Security launch in the spring
Tencent Cloud, the cloud component of the Chinese tech conglomerate, is partnering with MultiversX (EGLD) to help the company expand its crypto offerings
Siemens, a German multinational conglomerate, issues a $65 million dollar one-year bond on Polygon’s MATIC
Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s tech ecosystem, begins a $2 billion dollar initiative to “back Web3 and blockchain technology startups in the region”
Sony, the Japanese multinational conglomerate, partners with multi-chain smart contract network Astar Network (ASTR) to “launch a Web3 incubation program for projects that focus on the utility of NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)”
Crypto payments firm Wirex signs long-term partnership with Visa to expand its reach to 40+ countries mainly in the UK and Asia-Pacific; Visa will now be able to directly issue crypto-enabled debit and prepaid cards to 40+ countries
Polygon (MATIC) announces that their long-awaited ETH scaling zkEVM L2 will be officially launched on ETH mainnet on March 27th
Polygon’s MATIC Continues Building
The eighth biggest token by market cap had an exciting week full of major announcements! Polygon has made a name for itself through years of committed building and the strength of its business development team that routinely onboards massive corporations to crypto rails. 😎 As a result of a strong week and announcements from Polygon, MATIC was one of the best performing tokens this week gaining 20%.
Polygon’s biggest announcement this week was a confirmed date for their long-awaited zkEVM L2. The zkEVM is projected to be live in mainnet beta on March 27th. Polygon’s zkEVM is a massive accomplishment not only for MATIC but also for the entire crypto ecosystem: Users will benefit from drastically reduced transaction fees and significant transaction throughput improvements. 🤯
As the Polygon team says in their accompanying blog post, the zkEVM’s importance can’t be overstated:
“The conventional wisdom has been that an EVM-equivalent zkEVM wouldn’t exist for many years…true EVM-equivalence means that Ethereum can be scaled without resorting to half-measures. The best way to scale Ethereum is to preserve the existing Ethereum ecosystem: code, tooling, and infrastructure needs to just work. And that’s what Polygon zkEVM is aiming to achieve. ”
Other MATIC developments this week are:
Reddit’s digital collectibles built on MATIC see 1.82 million collected ahead of the Super Bowl
Siemens issues a $65 million dollar one-year bond on MATIC
Square Enix confirms their upcoming blockchain game based on MATIC
Starbucks Polygon NFTs hits the secondary market with prices around $2,000
Read of the Week
“everything [defi] everywhere all at once” — 0xsmac
Our read this week is centered around DeFi and comes from 0xsmac who just joined CompoundVC as a venture partner. 0xsmac, a great thinker, provides us with a rundown of the current DeFi landscape and provides an optimistic outlook for its bright future! 🌞
Before diving in, 0xsmac sets the table with why we’re all so excited about the future of DeFi and crypto at large, saying, “let’s quickly level-set the DeFi landscape and what the potential size of this space looks like. If we take a peek at the existing financial services market, we see it’s roughly $23 trillion and growing nearly 10% YoY. Global GDP is ~$100 trillion so financial services comprise nearly 1/4 of the entire world economy.” 🤯
“If 2022 taught us anything it should be that trusting centralized parties, especially when it comes to financial security, is not without risk…I’m also happy to say there are new primitives being built and teams are starting to experiment again, an encouraging sign…The creation, custody, velocity and innovation of money will only move more on-chain as we progress…blockchain technology can solve a lot of complex problems and is orders of magnitude better than existing solutions for many use-cases…couple this with the realization crypto rails remain in relative infancy, and it’s easy to see that today’s technology is as janky as it’ll ever be. It will only improve from here.”
Tweets & Memes
NFT trading volume continues to gain back strength
As we covered last week, the importance of BTC NFTs can’t be understated!
Behind the strength of its recent token launch, BLUR continues to gain market share
Wrapping Up
With that note of BLUR’s continued adoption and their token airdrop, we'll conclude this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop 💫
To sum up, we covered another green week in crypto markets, talked about Polygon’s (MATIC) big week of announcements and continued growth, read about DeFi and the massive addressable market it has to develop into, and covered the usual news and developments of the week.
CoinStats will continue to guide you through the crypto world and DeFi. We'll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 😎