Market Overview
GM and welcome to your new CoinStats Monthly Review! Before we dive into recapping August, some housekeeping and links to what we’ve written and covered this month are as follows:
“ETH on the up?” — covering a range of upcoming narratives, protocol developments, and trends to monitor as well as outlining core crypto verticals funds such as Variant watch
“Crypto Goes Gucci & Tiffany’s 💎” — we wrote about the increasingly broad demand of institutions accessing crypto along with outlining MATIC’s ongoing ETH scaling solutions
“All About That Merge 🪁” — covering all things merge and the final successful ETH testnet merge along with incoming structural flows (good) for ETH and examining narratives in crypto
“Still Waiting for Pandas 🐼” — further examining the merge, potential PoW forks as a result, institutional crypto demand, and ETH’s great releveraging benefitting DeFi & ETH price
“Sailing on, Eyes on the Prize ⛵” — talking the recent macro-induced sell-off, examining trends & relative strength to follow, and highlighting the eventual convergence of Defi & NFTs
Alright, with that out of the way let’s get to the updates and developments that occurred across the crypto ecosystem in August! First, the tokens.
August was a mixed month of token returns as the core major tokens such as BTC (-13%), ETH (-3%), and SOL (-22%) declined to varying degrees after they rapidly appreciated off the lows throughout July. As we wrote in last week’s post, macroeconomic factors continue to have the most influence on crypto markets as central banks across the globe work to enact policies to lower inflation. ETH wavered throughout the month touching as high as 2k+ while marking 1.4k as its lows but finished August relatively flat in appreciation as market participants are hesitant to sell leading into one of the most important events in crypto’s history (the merge which we’ve covered extensively)!
The market wasn’t all doom and gloom though as several sectors, and the tokens within them, where green across August. Many of the sectors we highlighted throughout the month enjoyed positive returns including CHZ (+65%) and the explosion of soccer fan tokens across Europe, GMX (+22%) as a real-yield narrative token and L2 (Arbitrum) adjacent token along with MAGIC (+60%), and ATOM (+24%) along with the Cosmos ecosystem tokens we highlighted in last week’s issue focusing on relative strength and the Cosmos/Arbitrum outperformance!
Soccer fan tokens continue to be one of the biggest recent stories (fanmarketcap.com)
August Monthly News Highlights
Below are some of the most impactful announcements throughout August 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.
Facebook, now known as Meta, announced that their Instagram NFT integration is expanding to over 100 countries. The expanded offering will support ETH, FLOW, and MATIC NFTs.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, partners with Coinbase to offer institutional investors direct access to crypto, starting with BTC
CoinFund announces launch of their new $300M crypto fund
Shima Capital raises $200M for first crypto fund from Bill Ackman, Dragonfly, Animoca, Andrew Yang, and others to invest in early stage crypto
Dragonfly Capital rebrands as Dragonfly, acquires crypto fund Metastable Capital ($400M+ AUM) founded in 2014
Luxury brand Gucci to accept APE token payments in select stores
Spartan Labs spins out of Spartan Group with $100M to invent, launch, and develop products
LongHash Ventures announces new $100M fund dedicated to early stage crypto investing
The University of Pennsylvania’s renowned Wharton Business School is implementing a “Business in the Metaverse Economy” course
BlackRock, world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion+ assets under management, launches a private trust for institutional investors to access spot BTC exposure
Reddit partners with FTX and L2 scaling solution Arbitrum for the community points token
Variant announces their third fund with $450M to deploy across the crypto ecosystem
Former Facebook Diem developers raise $150M for their new blockchain L1 called Aptos
World-renowned brand Nike’s NFT revenue reaches $185M+ through past acquisition of NFT collection RTFKT — Nike has amassed $93.1M in primary sales & $92.2M in secondary sales
Symbolic Capital launches a new $50M fund for early-stage crypto investments
Bitcoin Depot, a crypto ATM company, to go public in SPAC with an initial $885M valuation
Ethereum Name Service (ENS), creators of the .eth domains, has now created over two million ENS names
Jump Crypto announces their plans to build an open source Solana validator client to “increase the throughput and reliability of the network”
Takeaways & Things to Watch
Throughout the month of August we covered numerous trends, protocols, and developments to watch as crypto continues evolving and pushing forward! The obvious most important upcoming data is Ethereum’s long awaited transition to PoS that should occur on or around September 15th. Other crypto specific developments and their subsequent impact we’re monitoring as they develop over the coming weeks and months are as follows:
The growth of NFT liquidity through XMON and the coming SUDO token
DeFi’s continued product market fit and expanded use through tokens such as UNI, AAVE, MKR, LINK, and COMP
Synapse’s (SYN) announcement of their Synapse Chain launch, full release here
Arbitrum’s rollout of Arbitrum Nitro and the potential for ARBI token soon along with any updates on tokens from L2 scaling solutions StarkWare & zkSync
ATOM and the associated Cosmos ecosystem’s continued strength against ETH & BTC
Liquid staking tokens associated with the merge including LDO & RPL
The likely release of stablecoins from AAVE & CRV
40 of the world’s largest publicly traded companies invested roughly $6 billion dollars into crypto startups between September 2021 and June 2022
The growing intersection of DeFi, NFTs, and novel crypto enabled use cases
CHZ growth and onboarding new users to the soccer fan tokens that we’ve written about previously, especially as we approach the upcoming World Cup
Watching sectors that venture capital funds deploy money into including: financial empowerment through DeFi, the expanding layer cake of blockchain computing, the new frontier of the Web3 consumer, and user experiences defined by new forms of ownership
Ongoing debate and value accrual of tokens through the “Fat App Thesis”
Tweets & Memes:
Vitalik and us waiting another long ~two weeks for the merge and pandas!
Binance with the transaction of the month sending ~$2.8 billion for a $0.32 fee 🤯
The challenges of explaining crypto to friends and family when we’re so early
A peak inside the CoinStats office as we manifest a successful merge and price pum🙏🏽
Wrapping Up
Crypto never rests and August provided us another action packed month! Hopefully you find this as useful as we do, and look forward to the monthly reviews that will continue moving forward. We’ll be back as usual on Monday with the weekly CoinStats Scoop and look forward to an exciting September led by ETH’s merge!! 🐼
Thanks for reading, and let’s hear your thoughts, comments, and feedback as we work together to improve CoinStats Scoop. We’ll see you next week! 🥂