GM and welcome to CoinStats Scoop! 💫 Here’s an overview of this week’s edition:
Aptos launch & crypto’s recovery this week along with numerous tokens’ strength
The usual flurry of crypto news, funding, and developments of the week
ETH’s supply change since the merge creating a massive future catalyst
Reading & thinking through what sectors of crypto appreciate most next cycle
Takeaways of the week & things to watch moving forward
As you can see from the above and below screenshots, crypto enjoyed a green week! 🤑 The total crypto market cap grew just over 2% this week while BTC (+1.5%) and ETH (+4.5%) pushed the market forward. As is usually the case, when BTC & ETH are up, various other alts and tokens tend to outperform the majors as risk trickles down throughout the crypto ecosystem.
Top gainers this week included the gaming focused blockchain Klayton (KLAY, +26%), Huboi’s exchange token (HT, +22%), DeFi lending/borrowing bluechip AAVE (+15%), liquid staking protocol Lido (LDO, +11%), L2 optimistic scaling solution Optimism (OP, +20%), omnichain messaging & bridge protocol Synapse (SYN, +9%), DeFi OG Balancer (BAL, +21%), and peer-to-peer NFT liquidity protocol sudoswap (XMON, +20%).
As you can see from the descriptions, the breadth of the crypto ecosystem continues to grow despite the down markets in recent months. Some of the top gaining tokens this week were not limited to a specific sector, but instead encompassed everything from NFTs to DeFi to scaling solutions and everything in between! 🤯
In addition to the strong week across crypto assets, we had an extremely hyped and long awaited launch of a new L1 blockchain. Aptos (APT) capped off a busy week across the crypto ecosystem with it’s official mainnet launch! After some hiccups surrounding their initial launch, APT has rallied back over the past few days and now sits just under $10 per token. If you were wondering about what/who Aptos is, our Twitter account provides you all the answers with the below linked tweet!
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.
Plaid, a fintech giant that provides verification and connection to thousands of banks across the world, launches Wallet Onboard — Wallet Onboard provides immediate integration & aggregation of over 300 ETH wallet providers for developers and Plaid confirmed that, “this is the start of Plaids journey of bridging Web2 and Web3 worlds.”
Warner Bros, the film studio conglomerate, is releasing 10,999 NFTs based on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to expand their push into Web3
New upcoming L1 blockchain that is focused on modular architecture Celestia, raises $55M @ a billion dollar valuation
Fidelity, traditional brokerage providing giant, launches the ability for institutional investors to buy, sell, and transfer ETH while their Digital Asset arm is hiring 100+ new people
Crypto hedge fund, Edge Capital, raises $66M for two new DeFi focused funds
Azuki, popular NFT collection, introduces the Physical Backed Token (PBT) — “an open source token standard tying a physical item to a digital token on the ETH blockchain”
Stardust raises $30M series A — Stardust is one if the most popular crypto gaming infrastructure providing companies, and their new funding should enable them to grow their team and services provide to the broad blockchain gaming/NFT space
Shardeum, an upcoming new L1 blockchain in development, raises $18M @ $200M valuation
A NFT representing ownership rights to a South Carolina home is bought and transferred on Ethereum for $175k
Brazilian Crypto Adoption — Brazilian digital bank Nubank plans to launch a native token integrated in Polygon’s MATIC; USDT issuer Tether is expanding the stablecoins availability across Brazil as it will be added to 24k+ ATMs
German neobank N26 is launching crypto trading of 100+ tokens for its customers in Austria with expansion to other countries coming soon
Mastercard, payment processing giant, to help financial institutions offer crypto trading, provide regulatory compliance, and security
XEN: At Peace With the (ETH) Deflationary Market
Chart of ETH supply available in real-time on ultrasound.money
While The Merge may not have resulted in the ETH price action we wanted to see, the fundamental change in ETH issuance was always the biggest takeaway from a successful merge. It’s important to remember that the mid to longterm impact of ETH’s reduction in supply issuance far outweighs any short term price action!
We’re now just over a month removed from The Merge, and ETH’s supply growth has been a trending topic across crypto twitter as it is now negative over the past 30 days! 🐼 ETH structural supply changes are beginning to take shape, propelled recently by a token called XEN. While the detailed mechanics of XEN are not important, the high-level overview is that the new token has no initial supply or cap, and is based on a “Proof-of-Participation” mechanism design.
All of this may be confusing, but the fundamental, simplified point is that less ETH supply = less ETH needed to buy to make the price go higher. Again, the high level details don’t need to be understand, rather the takeaway is that since The Merge ETH’s supply has only grown by 0.01%! For a frame of reference, and according to ultrasound.money, if ETH never successfully achieved the transition to PoS, the supply growth over the past month and a half would’ve been ~461k ETH.
To point these numbers into dollars, new ETH hitting the market since The Merge has been a total of ~1.9k ($2.56M). If ETH was still PoW, this number would be ~461k ($622M)!! This means that new ETH along with sell pressure from previous miners has reduced by almost 620 million dollars. Talk about a fundamental change!!
Eventually, when flows into crypto and broad markets return, the power of ETH being on the verge of deflationary will create reflexivity that massively benefits the price. Memecoins, altcoins, NFTs, and any on-chain activity drastically benefits ETH mid to longterm as the supply is further reduced creating greater upward effects on its price for every dollar brought! As we mentioned in the beginning of this post, majors (BTC/ETH) going up usually trickles down throughout the ecosystem and ETH’s fundamental change will likely pull the entire ecosystem upwards moving forward! 🥳
Read of the Week
This week, our Read of the Week comes in the form of a thread from none other than “Soona”. Soona is a founding & managing partner of the crypto venture capital firm Volt Capital and has been deep in crypto for as long as it’s been an investable asset class. As the first tweet suggests, the topic and takeaways that we’ll outline below focus on what to expect when crypto markets return to risk-on mode.
“winners of this past cycle often captured significant marketshare because they stayed around long enough for headwinds to change.” — remember to always stay engaged!
emerging theses include: “appchains, gaming, companies at the intersection of NFTs X DeFi, and zkVMs (zero-knowledge virtual machines)”
“though crypto prices are plummeting, developer momentum continues strong as evidenced by Standford Blockchain Conference seeing a record 4k signups a couple months ago”
“gaming is one of the fastest growing verticals in crypto and will likely be the primary onramp to crypto next cycle.”
scalability as a core focus — “scalability wars have separated into two camps: projects building an appchain or projects using general solutions including: zkrollups, established or nascent L1s” — think ETH, SOL, NEAR, ATOM, AVAX, etc.
“the next step for gaming monetization models is designing more robust crypto rails”
Once again, we stumble upon another deep crypto venture capitalist that is thinking through and monitoring the sectors that we’ve highlighted throughout this newsletter multiple times! 🤑 The core takeaways for us here at CoinStats is:
developers keep entering the space and building, which correlates to future growth 🚀
appchains & various scaling solutions are a big focus moving forward
the intersection of NFTs, DeFi, and gaming is relatively unexplored and will likely lead us out of the recent bear market while propelling us to a bright future!
Tweets & Memes
Outside of this newsletter & the CoinStats app, here are some helpful research tools!
Macro is boring & full of jargon, but if you wanted to dive in Jordi has you covered!
ETH scaling is once again at the forefront so dig in to the protocols solving it!
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that guide to ETH scaling solutions we’ll conclude this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🍨 Once again, the bear market can’t keep crypto from pushing forward from constant developments and adoption. This week was highlighted by Aptos launching their L1 blockchain along with further institutional adoption from legacy heavyweights including Fidelity, Mastercard, and Plaid! 🎉
We also covered ETH’s bright future due to its supply change since The Merge and how that likely translates to positivity across the broad crypto market. Speaking of the broad market, we read through @Soona’s thoughts on what to look for when the upwards momentum returns, highlighted by the intersection of gaming, NFTs, & DeFi! 🤑
Per usual, CoinStats will continue to guide you through the world of crypto and DeFi. We’ll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop.
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