GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The usual market overview, including coverage of another slow summer week
Weekly updates on noteworthy news and developments
Highlights of Solana’s continued development and bright future
Reads about the factors driving the anticipated10x growth of crypto in the coming years
Tweets & Memes capturing last week’s crypto highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
Following last week’s volatility that caused BTC and ETH to dip slightly, we’re back to the predictably sluggish pace of the summer season. BTC concluded yet another uneventful summer week, maintaining its position at around 26,000. ETH remains stable above 1600, specifically at 1650, resulting in another week where the prices of crypto majors remained virtually unchanged. 🙄
Rollbit (RLB, +30%) was once again one of the best top-performing tokens, underscoring the enduring potential of the crypto casino, sportsbook, and futures trading platform. Several weeks ago, Rollbit announced its strategic move of buying back and burning tokens using the revenue generated by the platform. Since then, the token's value has doubled while maintaining a relatively stable position, unfazed by the fluctuations observed in BTC and ETH. While the sustainability of this trend remains uncertain, typical of anything in crypto, as of now, RLB continues to be a strong performer. 💪
The crypto ecosystem has expanded to such an extent that even during periods of stagnant or declining performance for BTC and ETH, it's common to observe outperforming tokens! In addition to RLB, some other outperforming tokens include LPT +21%, DFI +17%, DYDX +15%, TON + 9%, BONE +6%, BLUR +4%, MNT +3%, & TRX +2%.
As we await more exciting upward trends, crypto's development and adoption continue to expand! This week, Shopify, a major global e-commerce company, partnered with Solana Pay. Plus, another $50+ million crypto venture capital firm was announced to invest in the industry's future!
Additionally, stablecoins continue to demonstrate their use cases, as underscored by a recent report indicating that in 2022, “stablecoins on several Layer-1s (L1s) transacted $6.87 trillion, overtaking Mastercard and Paypal.”
Crypto's constant development, institutional adoption, and improvement of its infrastructure are poised to translate into a broader user base, growth, and potentially higher prices shortly.
News & Developments
Solana Pay, a decentralized payment protocol by Solana Labs, has integrated its plug-in with Shopify (a global e-commerce giant), allowing millions of businesses on its platform to use it for payments
Circle, the issuer of crypto’s second largest stablecoin, USDC, details its bright future in a new blog post, “Ushering in the next chapter for USDC.” USDC is launching on six new blockchains (Base, ATOM, Noble, NEAR, OP, DOT, and MATIC). Circle will take full control over the issuance and governance of USDC while also expanding its partnership with the largest U.S. crypto exchange, Coinbase
Starting August 28th, HashKey retail investors in Hong Kong will be able to purchase Ethereum and Bitcoin with plans to onboard more cryptocurrencies
Vessel Capital, a Web3 venture capital fund, emerges from stealth with a $55 million fund to invest in crypto infrastructure and applications
Beam Cash announces the launch of instant payouts, enabling users to transfer crypto from their Metamask straight to their debit card in under a minute for no additional fees
The latest transparency report by Tether, the issuer of crypto’s largest stablecoin USDT, reveals that its $3.3 billion liquidity reserve surpasses the total circulating supply of USDT tokens
Solana Strives to Bring Summer Heat
Solana (SOL) is slowly but surely reclaiming its position as one of the most talked about cryptocurrencies. And it's for a good reason, as its community, developers, and protocol teams have been relentlessly building and releasing updates throughout 2023!
This week was no different, as Solana again made headlines with three significant developments: Solana Pay partnering with e-commerce giant Shopify, Phantom announcing one-click Sign In With Solana (SIWS), and Elusiv launching its private token swap protocol on Solana.
Shopify is the third-largest U.S. e-commerce platform, with over 2.1 million daily active users (as of January 2023). It has processed billions of orders worldwide, accounting for $319 billion of global economic activity. Solana Pay's partnership with Shopify enables millions of businesses and users on Solana to integrate crypto payments. 😮
While the plug-in is still in its initial stages, it holds the potential to offer mutual benefits to customers and businesses, given that SOL’s fees are significantly lower than those charged by credit card companies!
Elusiv, the protocol enabling private token swaps on SOL, provides a potential “paradigm shift within a paradigm shift.” Below are highlights from Elusiv’s announcement thread on August 22:
“Token swaps in DeFi are among the most highly utilized actions; however, DEXs are entirely transparent, meaning token swaps leak critical user data. Privacy is key to unleashing the full power of DeFi. With just a few clicks, Elusiv transforms this fundamental action and helps circumvent a significant amount of counterparty risk. Now, private swaps are available on Solana for the first time. This is one of the key building blocks for DeFi to expand, creating a ripe environment for growth and innovation.”
Phantom is a wallet developer equivalent to Metamask on Ethereum (although with better UI/UX). As Phantom outlines in the following tweet, the new sign-in feature aims to standardize message formats to improve authentication UX and security while replacing the traditionally clunky “connect” + “sign message” flow with a one-click sign-in method.
Although none of these announcements immediately impacted the SOL price, they are additional validation and evidence of the enduring presence and expansion of the Solana ecosystem. Solana continues to set the foundation for an explosive 2024 and 2025 and an incredibly bright future!
Read of the Week
This week's read comes from rektdiomedes, the popular The Daily Degen newsletter's editor, who has been around for multiple crypto cycles.
As usual, we’re feeling incredibly optimistic about the crypto industry's future, and rektdiomedes provides us with several reasons why crypto will be 10x its value in the coming years! From fundamental crypto principles to institutional adoption to the increasingly digital economy and everything in between, we’ll summarize the reasons inspiring optimism for the brighter days ahead. 🌞
Stablecoins — “Stablecoins have clearly demonstrated themselves as the sticky use case. There is a massive demand for dollars, and stables are increasingly serving that need”
Superior Financial Rails — “The rise of extremely inexpensive blockspace, via L2s for instance, coupled with the ubiquity of stablecoins, has created a payments apparatus that is unequivocally superior to legacy banking”
Institutional Adoption — “It appears increasingly likely we will see a spot Bitcoin ETF approval as more and more respected traditional finance voices are expressing support for Bitcoin”
Privacy/Account Abstraction — “A lack of privacy-enabling options has hampered the adoption of crypto for mainstream business needs, but solutions from numerous protocols should provide a rocket boost in this direction”
The Increasingly Digital Economy — “The dominant theme of this decade seems to be the increasingly online nature of global commerce. As this evolution hastens, internet-native crypto assets/infrastructure will become more and more clear in their superiority vs. the existing bank-based systems that are ill-adapted to the online world”
Debasement/Reflexivity — “Creates a fascinating feedback loop where the debasement raises the nominal price of crypto assets, further catalyzing speculative fervor and thus public interest in them and, in turn, adoption”
Personal Sovereignty — “the value prop of permissionless and self-custody that crypto provides takes on an outsized impact over time”
Intellectual Capital — “Finally, perhaps the strongest reason I believe crypto is destined to 10x is that it has attracted the most brilliant/smart/creative young people on earth. To not bet on crypto’s rise seems to me a bet against this massive wellspring of intellectual capital, and that is not a bet I would want to make.”
Tweets & Memes
As Jake says, it’s quite simple: In the end, we win! ✊
Another day, another large financial institution applying for a potential future spot BTC ETF 🤓
People have been calling BTC and crypto dead for 10 years now; they’ll be wrong again 🤑
While it can be hard to imagine now, the next eventual crypto cycle will see massive growth and outlandish crypto use cases!
Wrapping Up
With these tweets highlighting the immense potential unfolding in the upcoming months and years, along with the evident folly of those who declared BTC “dead” since 2012, we’ll conclude this week’s CoinStats Scoop. 💫
As usual, we provided the regular market update with another slow summer week, highlighted the Solana ecosystem's continued development and future adoption, explored reasons for remarkable optimism about crypto's future, 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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