GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The usual market overview/analysis including updates on PEPE and the memecoin insanity
Updates on this week’s noteworthy news and developments
Analyzing ETH’s burn and its long-term effects and benefits to ETH the token
Walking through the reasons that an eventual next cycle will be bigger than any before
Reading and thinking through the history of crypto gaming and what the future holds
Tweets & Memes that capture last week's highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
It was another slow week for the major crypto tokens as memecoins and PEPE continued to dominate mindshare and volume! As a result, the majors, BTC and ETH floated around where they were previously. Specifically, ETH barely outperformed BTC as ETH gained a small 1% and BTC gave back the corresponding amount closing the week down 1%.
As mentioned, PEPE continued to steal the show this week as the now four week old token gained another ~500%! 🤯 With it’s rapid ascension at its back, Binance and other large centralized exchanges took notice of the volume it was trading and listed the hottest token in the crypto market.
Last week, we were in awe at the scale with which PEPE reached and somehow this week all of those metrics were once again shattered! The total number of PEPE holders has since crossed 100 thousand and currently sits at 108,000. 😮 From its peak market cap, PEPE has since retraced as centralized exchange listings usually signal a local top, but before any retrace in price the recently launched token climbed to a market cap of greater than $1.6 billion!
$1.6 billion is obviousbly an insanely large number and the brief frenzied demand for the PEPE token saw it pass several notable names in total market cap. On Friday May 5th, the current local top for PEPE, the demand for the token reached euphoria as PEPE’s market cap climbed higher than familiar names includign Arbitrum (ARB), Apecoin (APE), Lido’s liquid staking protocol (LDO) and the once hyped alternative L1 NEAR.
Since that parabolic rise, PEPE has since calmed down a bit but still comfortably sits above a level that many crypto projects ascribe to hit at a $1 billion+ market cap. As of writing, PEPE is the 45th largest crypto token market cap sitting right between EOS and the data indexing protocol The Graph (GRT). As for where PEPE goes, it’s anyones guess but the launch of the memecoin that is barely 3+ weeks old has been a resounding success regardless! 🤑
As usual to conclude the market overview, we’ll highlight some of the week’s best performing tokens in an ever expanding crypto ecosystem. This week, those tokens include:
UMA +51%, RAD +32%, AXL +13%, FLOKI +13%, GNO +9%, METIS +5%, RPL +5%, RBN +3%, WOO +3%, TRX +3% & STX +3%
News & Developments
Hong Kong based venture capital firm, CMCC Global, launches a new $100 million dollar fund focused solely on blockchain opportunities and crypto investing
Stripe, one of the world’s largest payment processors and the world’s biggest fintech company, announces that they’ve expanding access to their crypto onramp solution and decentralized applications throughout crypto can now easily onboard fiat to crypto payments
Sui launches its long awaited mainnet, the DeFi focused L1 had previously raised $300 million dollars with a valuation of over $2 billion
The Cosmos Hub (ATOM) has passed a signal proposal to replace existing Cosmos Hub staking, distribution, and slashing modules with the Liquid Staking Module (LSM) enabling liquid staking tokens to gain traction like they have on ETH
Yuga Labs, the creators behind Bored Ape Yacht Club and Apecoin (APE), appoint former Epic Games and EA games veteran as their new Chief Technology Officer
The number of Bitcoin addresses holding at least 0.01+ BTC reaches a new all-time high of 11.8 million as adoption continues to slowly but steadily increase
Coinbase and Gemini both launch offshore derivatives exchanges
Sports Illustrated, one of the most renowed media publications in the United States, launches a NFT ticketing platform on Polygon’s MATIC
Deloitte, the world’s biggest accounting firm, will use Polkadot’s (DOT) parachain technology to enhance its identity protocol as the world’s largest companies continue embracing crypto
Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of one of China’s largest public companies, partners with Avalanche (AVAX) to deploy metaverses on the blockchain
Disney announces that Star Wars NFT toys are on their way through partnership with Cryptoys
Bitcoin purchases on the popular fintech app Cash App surge to $2.2 billion in the first quarter of 2023
Axelar (AXL) launches General Messaging Passing (GMP) that connects Cosmos (ATOM) and Ethereum chains providing composability for decentralized apps across both ecosystems
The ETH Burn Continues
Regular readers may be tired of us mentioning the bright future crypto holds, but the data and facts continue to support that thesis! 🤑 One of the most talked about things on crypto twitter is the so called ETH burn. Ethereum, before the transition to proof of stake, implemented EIP-1559 which saw partial transaction fees from every transaction burned in an effort to reward miners and validators of the Ethereum protocol.
Since the burn (EIP-1559) was successfully introduced, in combination with ETH’s transition to proof of stake, the reduction in ETH supply during high transaction activity windows is up only. To be clear, up only in this case refers to transaction activity drastically reducing ETH’s total supply. Over the past week alone, ETH transaction fees combined with EIP-1559 and PoS have resulted in ~60 thousand ETH burned and a yearly projected supply decrease of -2.6%! 🤯 Those numbers, when translated to dollars, equal the amount of ETH burned this week alone totaling $114 million dollars!
We’ve previosuly written on this topic back in September after Ethereum succesfully completed its transition to proof of stake, but the numbers over the past few weeks have mind boggling! Of course, a large part of these numbers in the frenzy caused by PEPE and the associated memecoin mania!
What’s exciting about the burn and ETH’s transition to PoS is that even if you missed PEPE and all the memecoin craziness, simply holding ETH benefits you as well! As market participants chase lottery tickets on-chain, the casino operator (ETH) is slowly burning supply in the background benefitting everyone who holds ETH. Again, this is just another data point to highlight the health of the crypto ecosystem as we gear up for the eventual next chaotic, upward pushing cycle! 😤
The Eventual Next Cycle
While prices continue to fluctuate in the short and mid term, as we’ve stated countless times throughout past issues, the future of crypto has never looked brighter and more clear! 🌞 Providing further evidence to that thesis is a thread this week from redphonecrypto. Redphone is an anonymous contributor to the crypto space and has been through multiple crypto cycles along with currently actively investing throughout the entire ecosystem. Redphone’s recent thread provides some insights into why the future of crypto looks so bright and we’ll dig into them below! 😤
To date, most of crypto has been proofs of concept with successful and sustainable use cases such as decentralized trading and lending/borrowing
Speculation continues around the future of NFTs, metaverses, gaming and zero-knowledge technology
We’ve finally reached a point where crypto infrastructure isn’t limiting what’s possible so decentralized applications can finally attract and handle users who want to access their services
“Initially, we draw the innovators who are playing with tech out of love, but the tech eventually fades to the background as infrastructure for truly profound experiences”
“I expect the next cycle to onboard the biggest group of crypto users we’ve ever seen. It will be the beginning of the grand migration from Web2 to Web3”
Soon, a handful of decentralized applications will catch fire seemingly overnight and single-handly onboard tens of millions of users
Trends (specifically crypto, AI and metaverses) are converging to produce something that will catch fire with insane speed
In the end, we finally have the proper infrastructure in place and now we wait for dreamers to unleash their full potential
Read of the Week
“A Brief History of Web3 Gaming: What We’ve Learned So Far ” — Sterling Campbell
This week, our read comes from Sterling Campbell who is an investor through Blockchain Capital which is one of the biggest and most active funds throughout the crypto ecosystem. As we know, crypto gaming has largely been a flash in the pan to this point, spurred to mainstream relavance by the massive, brief adoption of Axie Infinity.
Huntercoin, the first onchain gaming experience launched in 2014
Still, the crypto gaming ecosystem remains in infancy with a future that is as bright as any sector throughout the crypto ecosystem. As the saying goes, studying the past helps shine a light on the future as history doesn’t repeat but often rhymes. 🤓 To help us look towards the future of crypto gaming, Sterling provides us with learnings from the sector’s past that include:
“Since before the launch of Ethereum, gaming has been a burgeoning sector in crypto…the first game to generate real traction was CryptoKitties back in 2017…the game was a resounding success in demonstrating the potential for NFTs…Axie iterated and coined the term ‘play to earn’ which attracted over 1 million monthly active users…since then, the Web3 gaming ecosystem has grown rapidly, with a wide range of games being developed for everything from trading and strategy to adventure and role-playing games…we’ve seen the powerful customer acquisition and retention engines possible when players can own game assets..we’re excited about all areas of Web3 gaming.”
Tweets & Memes
Bitcoin was quite literally created for the current economic factors ongoing around the world
Slowly but surely, crypto gaming continues advancing ready to onboard millions of users!
Stripe, one of the world’s largest payment companies, continues embracing crypto! 💪
Wrapping Up
With that tweet highlighting Stripe’s commitment to bettering the crypto ecossytem through improved fiat onramps, we’ll conclude this week’s CoinStats Scoop! 💫
As usual, we discussed the regular market updates including PEPE’s monumental rise, BTC and ETH’s calm week, covered the usual noteworthy developments of the week, analyzed the insane ongoing ETH burn, talked through the eventual next massive crypto cycle, and read about the history and future of crypto gaming! 💪
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! 😎