Base Jumping Into Blurry February
February in Review
GM, and welcome to the second 2023 edition of the CoinStats Scoop Monthly Review! 🥂 Before a dive into February’s exciting developments, here’s a refresher on what we’ve covered throughout the month:
“👾 What's Your Degen Score?” — looked into the BTC and NFTs development, explained DegenScore and how it helps you track the crypto ecosystem, and read/talked through cryptoeconomic models and their future impact
“🍿 Crypto Meets Movie Magic” — covered ETH’s fundamentals’ consistent improvement as a result of the merge & EIP-1559, reimagined crypto brands as movies, introduced our Affiliate Program, and talked the usual news and market movements
“🍳 Eating Bad News For Breakfast” — highlighted Polygon’s MATIC’s big week and announcements, discussed the DeFi market and it’s insane potential, and talked through the weekly market overview
“🤔 Who's Winning the War of L2s” — provided the usual market update, broke down Coinbase’s new Base L2 in the entire L2 space & walked through the ongoing NFT marketplace war between BLUR and OpenSea.
Market Overview
We closed the “🍨 The Big Fat January Scoop” review like this: “While minor pullbacks in token prices are expected, the outlook for 2023 continues to improve drastically, and the long-term future of crypto has never looked brighter!” While February was packed with token and global crypto adoption news, BTC (-1.5%) and ETH (-1%) lost small portions of their large start of the year gains.
The above tweet on January’s strong rally perfectly encapsulates why choppy and sometimes down months happen in crypto. When an asset class erases 5 months of decline in a single 2 week stretch, that’s often followed by corrections as, unfortunately, crypto can’t go up every day! 😒
With that being said, there were still endless things to be excited about in February which you can see in February’s Noteworthy Developments below! Speaking of which, we could touch on this month’s two biggest stories, BLUR token’s launch and Coinbase’s Base announcement, but we’ll save them for their own deserving section beneath the Noteworthy Developments.
Besides BLUR, Optimism (OP), and Base stealing the show, and BTC and ETH giving back some recent gains, numerous tokens throughout the ecosystem have also displayed strong performances this month! 🤑
As we’ve said several times, due to the crypto space’s vertical silos, plenty of tokens can enjoy good weeks while others, including BTC & ETH, may slightly dip! This is an incredible “problem” that highlights crypto’s continuous growth! Some of this month’s leading tokens and sectors include:
Dog & Meme Tokens — FLOKI +96%, BONE +24%, ELON +17%
Liquid Staking Tokens — LDO +35% RPL +17%
Bridging Tokens — STG +72%, SYN +57%,
Infrastructure Tokens — GRT + 63%, FIL +20%, RNDR +19%
Scaling Tokens — IMX +63%, INJ +45%, OP +19%, ROSE +12% , FLOW +7%, MATIC +5%
DeFi — DYDX +32%, YFI +21%, MKR +22%, GMX +20%, SNX +15%, ZRX +11%
BTC scaling — STX +231% (!!)
February’s Noteworthy Developments
The English Premier League announced a $150 million value 4-year licensing partnership with SoRare, an NFT fantasy sports gaming platform enabling players to buy and sell official Premier League-licensed NFTs.
Twitter is working on integrating fiat payments into the platform, but intends to allow “crypto capabilities to be added later.”
Amazon is looking to hire a Web3 market specialist with a focus on “Applications of Blockchains in Games Technology.”
Optimism, a leading ETH Layer 2 scaling network, has announced plans for its major Bedrock upgrade in March.
MetaMask crypto wallet is integrating Onramp.money to allow Indian users to purchase crypto directly from the in-browser wallet.
One of the world’s largest technology companies, Dell, joins the Hedera (HBAR) governing council.
Sushiswap (SUSHI) acquires ATOM-based derivatives trading platform Vortex Protocol.
Internet Browser Brave adds support for Solana (SOL) & its wallets on iOS and Android.
CoinStats launches its Affiliate Program, enabling affiliate partners to earn up to 40% of all premium sales.
Maker (MKR), one of the OG DeFi protocols, announces the launch of Spark Protocol - a “growth-focused arm of Maker Protocol.”
The popular fintech app Revoult launches ETH & ADA staking for its 25 million users.
The CEO of Mastercard, one of the world’s top credit card processing companies, tweets, “I think we’re going to have a world where everything will be tokenized and passed around safely.”
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.”
Square Enix, the massive game developer behind Final Fantasy, says its new blockchain game Symbiogenesis is launching on Polygon’s MATIC in spring.
Cosmos (ATOM) completes its Rho upgrade adding a new “global fee” module to improve security and laying the groundwork for the upcoming Interchain Security launch in spring.
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).”
Polygon (MATIC) announces their long-awaited ETH scaling zkEVM L2 will be officially launched on ETH mainnet on March 27th.
Blur & Base Steal February’s Valentine Heart
February was of course another whirlwind, an action-packed month in crypto. But two specific announcements take the cake for the most impactful news - Coinbase launching its L2 “Base” built on top of Optimism’s tech stack and Blur releasing its much anticipated NFT marketplace token.
In Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong’s words, Base is “an Ethereum Layer 2 that will help improve scalability and usability of crypto, so we can bring economic freedom to 1B+ people.” 🤯 Base’s goals are incredibly ambitious but not entirely out of the question as Coinbase alone currently has over 110 million active users!
Base’s announcement confirms that it’s currently open to developers and users alike on testnet, while plans for its upcoming mainnet launch are still to be determined! Its statement on building on top of Optimism (OP) has helped Optimism strengthen its position in the never-ending L2 wars. For more info on Coinbase’s launch, check out our last week’s thread breaking everything down!
Speaking of the ongoing L2 war, Base wasn’t the only impactful Ethereum Layer 2 development throughout February, as we also saw:
Polygon announced the launch of their highly anticipated zkEVM on March 27th
Scroll, a zkEVM developer, announced they took the final step to ETH’s Goerli testnet before launching on ETH mainnet soon
Arbitrum became the first L2 to surpass Ethereum in daily transactions
Polygon updated details on partnerships with Square Enix, Siemens, Starbucks, and Reddit
Optimism announces its major protocol upgrade Bedrock is coming on March 16th.
As we can see, the ongoing L2 wars only heat up as protocols, and crypto at large, continue to develop, launch updates, and improve their products for all future crypto users! Ethereum’s roadmap is likely to be rollup-centric, and the involved players/protocols will continue to try to one up each other in the battle for users and market share.
Coinbase and Optimism may have stolen the show at the end of February, but BLUR has been the top story throughout most of February. Blur launched its token on Valentine’s Day, taking a subtle but true shot at most NFT and crypto traders’ not having plans with a significant other for the holiday! 🤣
Despite the joke, BLUR token’s price and the free money aidropped to platform users was anything but funny! The token initially traded at around $0.40, but took off and rallied ~300% to ~$1.40. 🤯 While BLUR has since declined from it’s recent highs, at around $0.86, it’s still +100% higher than its initial price.
As for its effects on the NFT market cap, Blur has been stealing significant market share from the leading incumbent OpenSea due to its “seasons” airdrop strategy, continually incentivizing people to use the platform, combined with a beautiful user interface. Plus, it increased the activity throughout the entire NFT ecosystem, i.e., on February 17th, $91 million worth of ETH was traded, marking the highest daily transaction volume of NFTs in the past 9 months. 🤩
While BLUR and Optimism stole the show in February, March brings us a new month of opportunities and product developments! So, expect more announcements from Blur, Optimism, and the entire L2 Ethereum ecosystem throughout March and beyond. 🌞
Tweets & Memes
Ordinals, BTC’s version of NFTs, are a historic accomplishment!
Arbitrum’s growth and user activity have continued to skyrocket throughout February
As a reminder, the CoinStats app always has you covered with all things crypto!
Wrapping Up
February has been a choppy month in the crypto seas, but ETH and BTC remain essentially where they were when the month started, and the News & Developments section has been chock-full of goodies throughout February, planting the seeds for future crypto growth. 🌞
While minor pullbacks in token prices are expected, the outlook for 2023 continues to improve drastically, and the long-term future of crypto has never looked brighter! As usual, CoinStats will continue to guide you through the world of crypto and DeFi. We'll see you on Monday for another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 😎