GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The market overview as BTC & ETH maintain stability while altcoins continue to rally
Weekly updates on noteworthy news and developments
Highlights of Coinbase’s highly anticipated L2 BASE launch
Reads about crypto's cyclical nature and the similarities between SOL and ETH's last cycle
Tweets & Memes capturing last week’s crypto highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
It was another week of insanely low volatility for the crypto majors as BTC (+0.2%) and ETH (+0.03%) closed the week essentially unchanged. Throughout this week, BTC maintained its position around 29.3k, while ETH remained at 1.85k. Ansem’s tweet below highlights just how stable the current ETH price has been. 🤯
While BTC and ETH have remained stagnant, crypto's ongoing development and adoption lay the groundwork for the eventual upward surge. This week, the adoption was underscored by the fintech giant PayPal announcing the launch of their PYUSD stablecoin!
In its press release, PayPal describes PYUSD as “fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term U.S. treasuries, and similar cash equivalents, and can be redeemed 1:1 for U.S. dollars. Fully backed, regulated stablecoins have the potential to transform payments in web3 and digitally native environments. To address that emerging potential, PayPal announced the launch of a U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD).”
Blockworks characterizes the launch of PYUSD as the biggest crypto news in 2023, more significant than news about any future bitcoin ETF approval, and says, "PayPal is on a journey to onboard millions of people to crypto and public blockchains."
Check one of Blockworks' founder's tweets here:
We enjoyed another week of standout performances from the top on-chain coins. The pack was once again led by Rollbit (RLB), as the casino/sportsbook/leverage trading platform gained an impressive 64%! This sharp upwards momentum was triggered by the Rollbit team's announcement of the new tokenomics revolving around its buyback and burn program. Looking ahead, Rollbit will use 10% of its casino revenue, 20% of its sportsbook earnings, and 30% of the revenue derived from its leverage futures trading platform to buy and burn RLB tokens. 🔥
Following RLB's surge, several other strong-performing tokens include UNIBOT (+27%), Telegram bot narrative's leader, and PEPE (+22%), the memecoin that ignited the entire on-chain summer trend, demonstrated robust performance. Rounding out this week's notable token performers is SOL (+7%), benefiting from the combination of Solana’s recovery and the sustained prominence of on-chain tokens throughout the summer months.
Here are several other altcoins with substantial gains: AKT +100%, LPT +97%, RUNE +45%, TON +19%, RBN +16%, SHIB +12%, ILV +9%, DYDX +9%, MINA +8%, APE +7%, WOO +5%, & LINK +5%
News & Developments
Fintech giant PayPal announces the launch of PYUSD, the company’s native stablecoin on the public Ethereum network
Zurich, Switzerland-based L1 Digital AG, an investment advisor focused on digital assets and Web3 with $400 million of assets under management, raises $152 million for its second Web3 venture capital fund
The United States Federal Reserve Bank announces a new program to oversee crypto activity at federal banks
David Rubenstein, billionaire investor and co-founder of private investment firm The Carlyle Group, says Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies “aren’t going anywhere.” He expressed “enormous interest” in the constantly developing crypto ecosystem
NoLimit Holdings and ClearVue Partners join forces to launch a $50 million venture fund focused on early-stage investment in crypto startups
Circle, the issuer of crypto’s second largest stablecoin USDC, banks on over $1 billion of cash reserves to continue building and pushing forward the USDC adoption
PancakeSwap (CAKE), the second-largest decentralized exchange (DEX), launches on Arbitrum One, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling network
BASE & the Friend.Tech Mania
On August 9th, Coinbase’s long-awaited Ethereum Layer 2 BASE, built on Optimism’s (OP) tech stack, became accessible to users! As of today, over $200 million worth of tokens have been bridged to BASE, led by over $150 million worth of ETH. 😮
Friend.tech, the new on-chain social networking platform built on BASE, took the crypto market by storm with its invite-only beta launch. The rollout quickly captivated crypto Twitter's mindshare and helped propel the number of daily active users on BASE to 100k for the first time!
Notably, Friend.tech is a new social network protocol enabling users to tokenize themselves and trade “shares” of their online persona. Owning a share enables you to access that user’s “room” and privately chat with them. As of Sunday afternoon, the total trading volume on the platform exceeded 6,000 ETH. 🤯
While trading volume and user influx have declined after Friend.tech’s frenzied launch, the new social platform has shown the power of Coinbase’s L2 and, by extension, the broader capabilities of L2 technologies. The platform's seamless onboarding process helps avoid the complexities of conventional on-chain crypto transactions!
Coinbase declares there will be no token for its newly launched L2. However, Olimpio provides a helpful thread to initiate an exploration of BASE and potentially position yourself for a lucrative future airdrop. 🤑
Read of the Week
This week's read is in the form of a great thread by Sal. Sal summarizes the in-depth report by Delphi Digital, one of the top crypto venture and research funds. The report includes plenty of data and takeaways and its recent coverage of Solana and crypto market cycles! 🌊 We’ll summarize the key charts and takeaways below.
“Crypto market cycles tend to last ~4 years, and the data seems to suggest we are on track for another 4-year cycle. The April 2024 BTC halvening is right on schedule to occur 1.5 years after the local BTC bottom.”
“It really seems like Solana will repeat the same story arc that Ethereum did last cycle: massive run-up during the bull, huge drawdown/heavy fud during the bear, re-emergence from the ashes by next bull.”
“Solana has already shown signs of life with a strong YTD performance relative to other L1s. Lots of similarities to ETH’s DeFi Summer” of 2020.
“If there’s any chance that non-EVM chains have a future, Solana seems like the safest bet based on its dominance of TVL relative to other non-EVM chains.”
One of Solana’s unique advantages heading to the next cycle is the insanely low cost of recent developments surrounding compressed NFTs (cNFTs), and the ability of Solana to gain users through cNFTs and transform those users into DeFi users
“Could Solana fulfill the prophecy of its Ethereum fractal? This chart seems to suggest we are on-track. Solana is meaningfully differentiated technically with an incredibly strong ecosystem and solid fundamentals.”
Tweets & Memes
A great roundup of the top NFT collections' recent developments
Sparks, part of the CoinStats reward program, have undergone incredible changes ⚡
$18.6 million worth of Bitcoin in a single purchase is quite a bullish statement 🤯
Wrapping Up
With the tweet highlighting the continued impressive demand for BTC, we’ll conclude this week’s CoinStats Scoop. 💫
As usual, we provided the regular market update, including this week's top-performing tokens resulting in another strong week for the on-chain tokens, along with Bitcoin's and Ethereum's continued choppy range; detailed Coinbase’s BASE launch and how Friend.tech stole the show; highlighted crypto's cyclical nature and how SOL is eerily similar to ETH's last cycle; and covered the weekly news and developments. 💪
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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