GM and welcome to another CoinStats Scoop! 💫 Here’s an overview of this week’s edition:
An overall market update along with the best performing tokens and sectors
Updating you on the impactful news and developments of the week
Evaluating the State of Crypto and highlighting the endless positive developments achieved
Reading & thinking through the massive impact crypto will have on the creator economy
Takeaways of the week & things to watch moving forward
Market Overview
Despite what those Saturday night sampled red indicators would tell you, crypto bounced back strong this week! The appreciation wasn’t necessarily seen in the majors of BTC (-1%) and ETH (-0.2%) as they remained relatively unchanged, but across the entire ecosystem there were green charts and tokens to be found! 🤑
One of the top performing tokens this week was Huobi’s (HT) exchange token as it gained an astonishing ~60% (!!) behind Justin Sun’s continued support and buying along with Justin also saying that Huobi and Poloniex “could merge in the future”.
Elsewhere across the ecosystem, LINK (+17%) and APE (+15%) had strong weeks as market participants and community members display their excitement for each token’s upcoming staking integration! Both tokens will be eligble to be staked for rewards in early December, and their price action this week indicators people are getting ahead of that functionality going live.
Outside of the staking narrative propelling coins higher, there were two other clear sectors that benefitted this week: dinosaur coins and DeFi. 🦖 “Dinosaur coins” refers to tokens that have been around through multiple cycles now, and LTC (+23%) & DASH (+20%) are perfect examples! LTC, as a fork of BTC and one of the first altcoins, is experiencing positive momentum ahead of its next halving in August of 2023 as the market front runs the potential catalyst in the same manner that occurs for BTC (potential buyer of LTC beware).
As mentioned, some DeFi tokens were the other main beneficiary this week as GMX (+11%) continued its recent strength and CRV (+27%) releasing its code and whitepaper for its upcoming stablecoin fueled some DeFi momentum across the board as seen by CVX (+12%), RBN (+12%), BAL (+9%) all rallying this week.
Alternative L1s were another sector that appreciated this week as SOL (+7%) bounced back strong from its FTX-induced lows while BNB (+15%) continued its impressive resurgence. BNB may not have had the most profitable week amongst all tokens, but it continued to display its staying power! Not only did BNB gain ~15% in dollar terms this week, but it once again approached new highs verse BTC and ETH! 💪
Binance is benefitting from a confluence of factors including the recent collapse of FTX, BUSD (Binance’s stablecoin) growth, and CZ’s announcement of Binance’s now $2B support fund for the broad industry. Moving forward, CZ has clearly established and positioned Binance and BNB to benefit from the entirety of crypto’s growth, something we’ll continue to watch and monitor moving forward! 😎
BNB’s strong week visualized inside the great CoinStats App
News and Developments
Below are some of the most impactful announcements over the past week as adoption never stops! Numerous announcements, rising interest, and product development continue from some of the world’s biggest companies that plants the seeds for the next bull run and wider crypto adoption.
Binance’s “Industry Recovery Fund” — CZ confirms Binance has committed $1 billion BUSD to the initiative along with other industry giants such as market maker GSR, Polygon Ventures, Jump Crypto, Aptos Labs, Kronos, and Animoca Brands contributing to the fund that plans to support strong industry participants
Traditional asset management giants Hamilton Lane and Apollo Global Management partner with the fintech company Figure to launch blockchain based investment vehicles
Magic Eden, top Solana-based NFT platform, announces support MATIC NFTs after previously adding ETH NFT support
Across Protocol, a bridge supporting transactions from L2 to L1, raises $10M in a private token sale that values the protocol at $200M
Crypto exchange Bybit announces $100M fund to support institutional clients “during this challenging period in the crypto industry”
Tokyo-based crypto and VR gaming platform, Thirdverse, raises $15M to continue developing its game based on the 1980s manga Captain Tsubasa
Traditional asset management giant JPMorgan officially registers “J.P. Morgan Wallet” as a certified trademark in the United States
CurveDAO (CRV) releases the code and whitepaper that outlines their coming stablecoin
DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, completes a fixed-income trade on JPMorgan’s Onxy Blockchain network joining traditional finance titans Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas as asset managers to use the network allowing for settlement in hours instead of days
Crypto financial services firm Matrixport is seeking to raise $100M at a $1.5B valuation
The State of Crypto
Ryan Selkis is the founder and CEO of the crypto data, research, and analytics platform Messari. Ryan has been around since the early days and has built a massively successful crypto company throughout the ups and downs of many crypto cycles so his thoughts and words are valuable. Earlier this week, he outlined his view of the current state of crypto and which we’ve summarized below!
The elephant in the room — it’s been obvious bad week, month, and overall year for the perception of crypto but, the fraud and bad actors that have gotten us to this place are now thankfully gone and committed, passionate long-term builders and innovators remain
Opaque CeFi lenders, low-float predatory tokens, VCs not performing proper due diligence, and paid personalities are all washed out for a better crypto ecosystem moving forward
Despite the setbacks, crypto has made significant progress across its various verticals including: BTC development, stablecoins, NFTs, distributed computing, scalability, onchain financial primitives, and governance through DAOs
Stablecoins established themself as a killer crypto use case; the ability to transfer stable dollars across the world in a matter of seconds is a colossal breakthrough for crypto & DeFi
The Merge successfully completed!! 🐼 ETH’s biggest upgrade was a massive success and other L1s & scaling such as SOL, MATIC, ATOM, AVAX, OP, Arbitrum, zkRollups, etc. all found success and continue their growth moving forward
DeFi — the primitives underlying future growth are established, battle tested, & here to stay
NFTs — solidified as a massive future catalyst that are an emerging technology allowing anyone to “wrap” anything in a unique, identifiable, censorship resistance, global token
DAOs — on-chain voting, delegation, democracy, subDAOs, treasury management, and global community coordination emerged as possible through DAOs
“TENS OF BILLIONS in cash getting deployed into crypto’s development, and all time highs in talent, potential, and opportunity. Don’t get discouraged. LFG”
Well, we couldn’t possibly have said it better ourselves and we echo each and everyone of Ryan’s thoughts. The timing is impeccable, as last week in, “Spoonful of Doomer Optimism”, we wrote and stressed the importance of taking the long term view of crypto. The future remains as bright as ever despite the recent setbacks, and CoinStats will be here to guide you along every step of the way! 🌞
Read of the Week
“The Crypto Creator Economy” — BlockchainBrett
NotBoring’s depiction of Crypto Economy benefits
As we all know, the Creator Economy has become a massive part of our collective communities and economies. Encompassing all forms of art, music, videos, articles, books, podcasts, film, and much more the Creator Economy has become so engrained in our daily lives that we don’t think much of it anymore.
Throughout the day, essentially everyone engages in multiple forms of the Creator Economy such as Spotify, YouTube, various podcast services, newsletters (like this!) sent to you inbox, articles, tweets, etc. Despite the recent explosion of creators and content, their ability to monetize their talents and audience remains imperfect. Everywhere you look, middlemen services sit in between content creators and their audiences, taking their precious slice of the pie. Fortunately, crypto provides a hopeful escape as creators now have the ability to tap directly into their audiences on a global scale! 🤯
“Crypto is laying down the foundation for the future of the Creator Economy…NFTs lay the foundation for the future on content monetization and distribution for creators and audiences…The Content NFT Life Cycle is the flow of Content NFTs through upstream protocol layers of shared infrastructure including co-creation, minting, distribution, curation, and engagement layers…Creators can now make content that is immediately valued by their audiences becoming their collectors.”
Of course, the crypto solutions for direct audience engagement are far from perfect, but crypto rails provide a positive outlook on the future of content monetization! In the coming years, the ability for creators to tap directly into their audiences without the need for intermediaries will become evident. Crypto uniquely enables, as Brett writes, by improving the following:
NFT distribution as the rails for content, communities, and relationships to develop
Content published on crypto rails taps into the open-source, composable ecosystem as evidenced by the established DeFi protocols
Increased ability to directly monetize audiences — fee extraction from the processing companies that sit in between the creator and their audience are eliminated while royalties on transactions enable revenue in perpetuity
Crypto enables content creators to truly own their content despite where it is distributed
Increased interoperability across different verticals — social graphs embedded within the blockchain allow creators to transfer and port their audiences to any and every platform
Social tokens — while they haven’t made a large impact yet, their potential remains untapped as creators tap into larger audiences
Alright, so we’ve found yet another vertical of crypto growth and future impact that is slowly expanding! Just as with NFTs and DAOs, we’re in the earliest stages of understanding and experimenting with how crypto can provide a positive impact on the earning potential and reach of content creators.
Bitcoin started what we know of as crypto today, and one of BTC’s most promising features is its ability to allow peer-to-peer transactions. In the coming years, we expect crypto to enable creator-to-audience transactions without the need for any intermediary! 🤑
Tweets & Memes
Sandeep highlights MATIC’s continued growth!
ETH L2s are slowly finding their place and relieving the past pain of transaction fees
Another example of how long it takes for paradigm-shifting technology to take hold!
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that reminder of the Internet’s early growing pains and how long transformative technology (such as crypto) takes to undergo mass adoption, we’ll conclude this week’s edition of the CoinStats Scoop! 🍦
This week we highlighted top performing tokens including DeFi, exchange tokens, and dino coins, emphasized the state of crypto and its massive potential remains unchanged, read and thought through the potential of crypto’s impact on the creator economy by eliminating intermediaries, and covered the news and developments of the week! 💪
As 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.