GM and welcome to CoinStats Scoop! 💫 Here’s an overview of this week’s edition:
Crypto's relative strength as legacy markets shift lower
Crypto news, funding, and developments of the week
Google’s crypto splash & the ongoing support of crypto from the world’s largest corporations
Reading & thinking through the future of Web3 social applications
Takeaways of the week & things to watch
Another week, another macroeconomic indicator impacting crypto prices 🙄 On Thursday, US inflation data released through “CPI” came in slightly higher than expected which resulted in markets progressing through a volatility whirlwind. Ultimately, markets pushed back whipsawing throughout Thursday. This led to BTC (-1.5%) & ETH (-2%) remaining relatively unchanged while continuing their range-bound levels.
As the dust settled on legacy markets Friday afternoon, the S&P fell 1.8% this week while the Nasdaq (high-growth tech sector) was down 3.2%. BTC, ETH, and crypto at large once again showed relative strength against another week of selloffs in legacy markets – a welcoming sight!
Throughout past issues of the CoinStats Scoop, we’ve highlighted how crypto continues to show impressive relative strength against legacy markets. We saw that again, as not only did BTC & ETH remain relatively unfazed, there were numerous tokens throughout the ecosystem that displayed impressive gains. 🤑
While the major tokens aside from SOL (-9%) continued relatively flat, numerous tokens across various sectors of the crypto ecosystem displayed positive returns. Examples include Huboi’s exchange token HT (+56%), Frax Finance’s FXS (+17%), Arweave’s permanent data storage protocol token AR (+12%), Ethereum Name Service’s token ENS (+10%), MKR (+8.5%), DYDX gaining a strong ~15%, and SUSHI (+3.5%) continuing its strong recent run. Despite the broad market trends, crypto returns continue to be available across a wide variety of sectors! 🤯
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.
Google made a couple of announcements this week including partnering with Coinbase to offer and accept crypto payments for providing its cloud services & integrating Etherscan data allowing anyone to search an ETH address to see ETH balances with native links to Etherscan
USDT issuer Tether confirms they’ve eliminated commercial paper holdings from their reserves and say they’ve increased their exposure to U.S. Treasuries by more than $10B
BlockTower, longtime crypto supporter & crypto asset manager, announces the launch of their $150M crypto venture fund
Uniswap Labs, the parent company behind the Uniswap protocol (UNI), raises $165M @ a $1.66B valuation; UNI token holders also unanimously approve vote to deploy UNI’s DEX on L2 scaling solution zkSync
America’s oldest bank, BNY Mellon, receives approval to custody customer deposits of BTC & ETH on the same interface/platform as traditional investments
Copper, a crypto custodian firm based in London, raises $196M to improve crypto custody
Nxyz, a blockchain indexer building a protocol similar to The Graph (GRT), raises $40M
Binance launches a $500M fund to provide loans to BTC miners
OpenSea announces support for Avalanche (AVAX) NFTs
Blockchain developer platform Tatum raises $41.5M to improve crypto infrastructure across NFTs, developer tooling, and more
Betterment, a traditional robo-advisor investment platform with 730k+ users, partners with Gemini to launch crypto investment services
Adoption Builds in the Background
Price charts may not properly display it, but crypto adoption and vertical expansion continues regardless of how you or the charts feel. As you read in News & Developments, Google made a big splash this week as they’ve announced they’ll accept crypto payments for Google Cloud services and they’ve integrated Etherscan data for easy ETH address searching.
Regular readers know that Google is not alone in the legacy adoption of crypto, something we’ve written about and covered several times. In our August 9th edition titled “Crypto Goes Gucci & Tiffany’s 💎” we noted the growing institutional demand saying, “While the market this week didn’t immediately accelerate based on any specific announcements, there were countless massive legacy brands that expanded or implemented crypto strategies in recent weeks.” In that post, we also outlined the growing number of institutions unveiling their crypto plans:
Google & Google Cloud Services, Starbucks, Fidelity, Facebook & Instagram, Citadel, Sequoia, Virtu, Charles Schwab, Puma, AC Milan, professional sports leagues such as the PGA, NBA, & NFL, private equity giant KKR, the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, and more 💫
Google’s announcements this week were not the company's first foray into crypto. As all eyes across the crypto industry and beyond were on ETH’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), Google provided the extremely helpful, timezone-agnostic, countdown to one of the biggest events in crypto’s history.
Google’s timezone-agnostic display users would see when searching for “the merge”
Since then, Google’s efforts to support and strengthen the crypto ecosystem have continued to increase. Of course, Google, and some of the world’s largest organizations listed above, are relatively isolated corporations but their partnerships and strategies involving crypto are heavily weighted across global markets. Price charts may continue to slide downward, but fundamental advancements and strategies toward the crypto ecosystem from global institutions remain up and to the right. 🤑 Eventually, the charts will catch up with global institutional adoption!
Read of the Week
“Social Web 3” — Zee Prime CapitalSocial crypto applications have been mostly unsuccessful so far, but the future seems bright for them and crypto at large! Zee Prime Capital, one of the best venture investors and researchers in the space, released their analysis of Web3 socials that said:
“We believe that the next generation of social media will leverage technologies that are these days referred to as Web 3. Social will not stop evolving…While current models optimize for engagement (time on the platform, click-throughs, etc.), future Web 3 platforms will be able to offer flexibility of curation…we see a world of attestations/souldbounds/nfts adding the vertical context necessary to make Web3 socially relevant.”
Moreover, outlining Web3’s ability to optimize for engagement via social platforms and thus provide the most desirable experience to users, Zee Prime highlights specific examples:
desired balance of personal social content (your friend got engaged)
non-social content (like news)
profitability (users opting to see more ads)
learning (educational content)
emotional tone (feed for happiness)
While we’re of course in the earliest days of crypto social applications, it is nonetheless another vertical that is quietly developing in the background of the bear market. Crypto is consistently widening its surface area despite what the charts would tell you. Each vertical that is routinely being developed and iterated upon is working in the background to prep and fuel the eventual forthcoming rally and next cycle! 🤑
Tweets & Memes
While price hasn’t shown it yet, ETH’s supply change is no joke
CMS intern once again provides us with amazing commentary on markets in video form
Tree of Alpha with an informative thread on market reactions to news events
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that thought-provoking thread from @Tree_of_Alpha, we’ll conclude this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🍨 Information was abundant this week: Google’s continued advancement into crypto markets, the usual frenzy of News & Developments, crypto’s ongoing relative strength despite legacy market woes, and the past, present, and future of crypto social applications. Whew, markets may be “stagnant” but the developments and advancement of crypto adoption never stops.
As usual, we’ve covered a lot this week and hopefully refreshed you on all things crypto you may have missed. If not, please leave us a comment below on what we can improve and we look forward to seeing you next week! 🤑
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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