Recapping Our Coverage
GM and welcome to the second edition of the CoinStats Monthly Review! 🎉 Before we dive into covering all that happened in crypto land throughout September, we’ll briefly recap and link to what we’ve written and covered throughout another busy month of crypto!!
“Enjoy NFTs on Insta & Vitalik-endorsed tea ☕” — we covered our excitement around NFTs, sudoswap, & it’s corresponding tokens XMON & SUDO along with ETH liquid staking tokens and the excitement ahead of The Merge
“Crossover of The Year ⚽🏀🏈” — as the title implies, we covered the growing connect between professional sports league and crypto highlighted by SoRare’s partnership with the NBA and the growing trend, volume, and excitement about Chiliz (CHZ) fan tokens
“🎷Cure Your Post-Merge Blues 💙” — we wrote in depth about The Merge’s success and continued excitement about ATOM and the Cosmos ecosystem while reading and thinking through how tokens/NFTs and their incentives empower creators & companies alike
“Pockets Full of Green 🌱🌵” — we talked all things macro along with its current impact on crypto markets, NFTs and their addressable market, analyzed some crypto data, and highlighted crypto’s vast array of developing sectors through some green tokens
Market Overview
The market throughout September was dominated by the two core factors that we continuously highlighted throughout the month: ETH’s merge and macroeconomic factors. Looking back on September, the good news remains that the merge was an overwhelmingly success despite the bad macroeconomic news that clouded the market.
As a result, September was a rangy, chop-filled month that saw BTC remain relatively flat at -1.5% while ETH bounced back and forth between 1.8k and 1.25k before closing the month down 13%. ETH’s price action may not have been the merge result we all wanted, but it’s important to remember the long term structural changes we’ve written about that will slowly begin to take hold as the market recalibrates itself.
ETH and BTC may have been down this month, but the crypto ecosystem is vast and there were several notable tokens that closed the month on a positive note! 🤑 Alternative L1s including SOL (+6.5%) and ATOM (+7%) remained strong throughout September, and ATOM continued its strength into the Cosmoverse conference that took place at the end of month. Ripple (XRP, +43%) ended September as one of the strongest tokens across crypto along with positive returns from everyone’s favorite oracle token LINK (+18.5%).
Speaking of favorites, CHZ (+20%) continued its impressive rally over the last several weeks as excitement around soccer fan tokens builds ahead of the World Cup in late November. Elsewhere across the ecosystem, COMP (+29%) performed admirably along with SYN (+11%) and RBN (+12.5%).
While token prices may have broadly been down across September, crypto achieved one of its most monumental accomplishments to date with ETH’s successful merge while funding dedicated to crypto accelerated, improved protocol developments continued, and corporations across the globe continued to develop and expand strategies directed towards the space! 🤯
September 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.
FTX and GameStop announce a new partnership
Whampoa group, a Singapore-based investment firm, plans to raise $50M for a new crypto hedge fund and to allocate $100M to crypto venture investments
Mysten Labs, a new competing L1 blockchain by ex-developers of Facebook, raises $300M @ $2B valuation
Puma, one of the world's largest sports brands, launches interactive metaverse Black Station to showcase limited edition NFTs of its sneakers
Legacy traditional finance giants Citadel, Fidelity, Sequoia, Virtu, Charles Schwab and Paradigm partner to launch digital asset exchange EDX Markets
Meta, the parent company behind Facebook and Instagram, launches full-service, in-app support for NFT display and verification shown natively in Facebook and Instagram
Limit Break, the parent company behind the DigiDaigaku NFTs that exploded onto the scene this week, raises $200M as they expand operations to build up their crypto game
Alexis Ohanian, the famed venture capitalist that founded Reddit, is raising $177.6M for liquid token investments via his Seven Seven Six fund
Former Galaxy Digital & Genesis executives partner to raise $500M for their new crypto fund
Animoca Brands continues their funding push as it accelerates expansion into the crypto gaming and NFT space by raising another $100M
NEAR token’s Foundation launches a $100M venture fund for new initiatives
Private equity giant KKR enables access to their Health Care Strategic Growth Fund available on AVAX’s Avalanche Chain increasing access to tokenized funds for retail
Crypto investment fund North Island Ventures launches a new $125M crypto fund
Google Cloud will become a validator of the Ronin Network that is developed by the parent company and creators of Axie Infinity
NFT platform Sorare partners with the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the release of fantasy basketball games that include digital collectibles
Global coffee giant Starbucks announces its crypto strategy that includes tokenizing their Loyalty Reward program into digital collectible NFTs after partnering with Polygon’s MATIC
Traditional brokerage giant Fidelity to integrate BTC trading for retail investors on its platform
Takeaways & Things to Watch
Sports x Crypto
The intersection of professional sports and crypto is continuing to gain steam, something that we highlighted in our September 12th newsletter, “Crossover of The Year ⚽🏀🏈”. The core focus of that issue was the National Basketball Association (NBA) partnering with NFT platform Sorare to launch a NFT-focused fantasy basketball game. While that was the focus, September saw a number of other sports x crypto crossovers including:
Professional Golf Association (PGA) announcing NFTs are coming in early 2023
Puma, one of the world's largest sports brands, launches interactive metaverse Black Station to showcase limited edition NFTs of its sneakers
The NFL launching it’s NFL ALL DAY NFT collections on FLOW as the season kicks off
Italian soccer club AC Milan launching new NFT collection in partnership with SOL-based esports franchise MonkeyLeague
CHZ launching its 3rd testnet while excitement around soccer fan tokens continues
Clearly, the intersection of sports and crypto is something that will only continue to increase moving forward as team associated fan tokens along NFTs representing players and intellectual property rights are a perfect fit! ⚽
Institutions Continue Adoption
Outside of the notable confluence between sports and crypto, one of the major trends across September was institutional interest in crypto despite down markets. Some of the world’s largest corporations expanded their strategies for crypto over the last several weeks which includes:
Starbucks, Google Cloud, Fidelity, Facebook & Instagram, Citadel, Sequoia, Virtu, Charles Schwab, Puma, AC Milan, PGA, NBA, NFL, KKR, Blackrock, and more 💫
While some of these names may not ring a bell to you personally (and that’s okay!! it’s a giant world out there!!), they’re a confluence of some of the most influential names across the globe spanning a wide range of business interests including: coffee brands, internet companies, private equity giants, legacy financial institutions, sports leagues and teams, the world’s largest social networks, athletic clothing brands, and the world’s biggest asset manager! Clearly the most successful corporations aren’t phased by a few months of down markets, so we shouldn’t be either! 😉
Tweets & Memes
On the heels of Arbitrum’s Nitro upgrade, Ethereum L2s continue reducing fees
We would all be on beaches in Puerto Rico by now if the bull market continued 🙂
The astonishing technological accomplishment of The Merge
Wrapping Up
Crypto never rests and September provided us with another action packed month! While it didn’t result in the short-term price we wanted, ETH’s merge was a massive success and will push the space forward throughout the mid to long-term horizon 🐼
Elsewhere across the ecosystem, the News & Developments section was hefty this week as the the institutions and global corporations setting their sights on crypto continues to grow. Included within those global corporations is professional sports league and their interest and strategies towards crypto continues advancing.
With that exciting note, we’ll close the second edition of the CoinStats Monthly Review, and we’ll be back as usual on Monday with the usual weekly CoinStats Scoop!
Nice
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