GM and welcome to another CoinStats Scoop! 💫 Here’s an overview of this week’s edition:
Market update and highlighting the numerous positive developments in recent weeks
Updating you on the impactful news and developments of the week
Reading & emphasizing the importance of embracing the long term view of crypto
Highlighting the ongoing institutional adoption despite turbulent markets
An overview of our NFT product Midas & the future impact and growth of NFTs
Takeaways of the week & things to watch moving forward
Market Overview
Until this weekend, it was a relatively quiet week in crypto. As the weekend approached, the rumor mill starting operating in high gear as market participants across the crypto ecosystem increased their worry of FTX-induced contagion. Despite the worries, BTC and ETH remained relatively stagnant with BTC clinging to 16k and losing ~0.5% this week while ETH gave back some of its recent strength to close the week down ~7%.
In the face of another week resulting in prices that trickled downwards, the fundamentals of crypto remained strong as always. Institutional adoption once again accelerated (which we’ll cover more in depth below) and several positive developments have occurred as a result of FTX’s centralized collapse that strengthen crypto’s eventual future including:
SOL developers and ecosystem participants continue to push forward, shedding the toxic overhang of FTX/Alameda
Centralized exchanges and protocols continue to update their proof of reserves and provide greater clarity into their holdings
DeFi’s adoption accelerates as users seek non-centralized alternatives
Uniswap (UNI) reaches a new all-time high in users
DeFi protocols such as FXS, DYDX, ACX, SNX, AAVE, CRV, COMP, MKR, and LDO have seen user growth of greater than 30%
Self custody wallet solutions such as Ledger, Trezor, and Gnosis Safe are experiencing new all-time high metrics
Macroeconomic improvements that we talked about last week continue to provide a better picture for risk assets across all asset classes
Further exemplifying the flight to decentralized crypto protocols are the tokens that provided positive returns in the face of BTC and ETH ticking lower. While most of the market was down this week, DeFi and decentralized trading venue tokens such as GMX (+12.5%), SNX (+5%), and YFI (+5%) outperformed the market.
These tokens appreciating reiterates the fact that despite FTX’s monumental, centralized failure, DeFi once again worked without interruption as expected. The market may take some time to digest recent events, but it’s important to remember that regardless of all the noise, DeFi and crypto at large continues to operate as it was built to do. The blockchains of ETH, BTC, SOL, MATIC, and all others continue to produce blocks and verify transactions while their DeFi protocols continue to operate seamlessly. 😎 There may be some bumps and bruises along the way, but there’s no going back on what has been and what will be built in crypto that will empower and reward the next generation of users. 😤
News & Developments
Global sportswear giant Nike announces .Swoosh, their upcoming digital collectible marketplace for web3 wearables
World’s largest publicly traded hedge fund, Man Group, is set to launch their crypto hedge fund strategy despite the recent failures of FTX and centralized companies
UK crypto focused, fintech giant TrueLayer partners with Coinbase to enable easy user deposits through their mobile banking app while also eyeing a Great British Pound (GBP) backed stablecoin
Binance, in the wake of FTX’s failure, plans to relaunch their bid to purchase the assets and users of bankrupt crypto lender Voyager
Matter Labs, the company behind the popular and long awaited zero-knowledge ETH L2 scaling solution zkSync, raises $200M in new funding to accelerate its mission of scaling ETH and reducing transaction fees
OKX exchange, world’s second largest crypto-only exchange by trading volume, plans a $100M market recovery fund to help
Binance is launching a new “Industry Recovery Fund” that CZ said will help fund projects “who are otherwise strong, but in a liquidity crisis.”
BTC mining hosting provider Applied Digital is expanding its services to Texas after securing a $15M loan
Uniswap Labs, creators of the UNI token, announce their recent upgrades including a Universal Route & Permit2 — the Universal Router enables the ability for aggregation of NFT transactions & regular token swaps to be completed in a singular transaction
Sony, Japanese technology conglomerate, applied for patents surrounding the tracking of digital assets in video games using blockchain technology and NFTs
Circle’s USDC stablecoin is added to Apple Pay as an option of payment for merchants that accept crypto payments
Midas, NFTs, & Their Unstoppable Future
As we’ve previously written about numerous times, CoinStats is excited about the future of NFTs. NFTs are currently working through their first iteration of product-market-fit, similar to the way that some of the most robust DeFi protocols did. It wasn’t too long ago that people were questioning if DeFi had a place within the broad crypto ecosystem, something that clearly looks insane in hindsight as evidenced by the recent developments we wrote above.
Similarly, NFTs and their application/impact has been questioned in recent months, something that we think will look just as foolish as questioning DeFi in hindsight. NFTs are simply a technological innovation that allows any unique asset to be verified and traded on a public, global, permisionless, 24/7 database. All of that is why we’ve built a custom, in-house NFT product called Midas that allows you to more efficiently monitor and engage with the NFT market. Midas is a breakthrough time-saving, potential profit enhancing product that provides custom deliverable insights to the NFT market at-large. This week, we broke all of Midas’ core features down in a thread linked below.
If you want the tl;dr of Midas’ mind-blowing features they include:
Custom-built algorithm to monitor smart wallet NFT purchases
Aggregation and sorting that saves you time and money
Increased signal by filtering through the endless noise of new NFT mints
Provides alerts of smart wallets buying NFTs on secondary markets
Customizable alerts delivered directly to Discord or Telegram
Developing added functionality and new product features for down the road 🤫
Free to view @ coinstats.app/midas with enhanced features for premium members
Institutional Adoption Never Stops
While some may be understandably discouraged by recent market events, the largest asset managers, corporations, brands, and companies in the world continue their expansion to crypto despite the recent downtrend.
In the last few weeks we’ve seen Google announce partnerships and validator services for both Aptos (APT) and Solana (SOL) while Itau Asset, the investment arm of Latin America’s largest bank, announced that they’ll offer a physically backed crypto ETF in Brazil. In addition to Google and Itau Asset, several of the world’s largest entities furthered their crypto strategies this week including announcements from JPMorgan, TrueLayer, Man Group, Nike, Sony, Adidas, and Apple Pay.
As we’ll see below in our Read of the Week, it’s extremely important to focus on the long term future of crypto. Some of the world’s largest corporations are strengthening their crypto strategies in spite of the recent market turmoil and it’s important to remember that this is the case because we’re all here playing the long term crypto game. 💪
Read of the Week
“Taking A Long Term View of Web3” — Katie Haun & Fred Wilson
As we alluded to, focusing on the long term impact of crypto is paramount. As such, this week we’re reading about that mindset from two of the most successful investors of the past few decades. Katie Haun and Fred Wilson have tremendous experience investing throughout the growth and skepticism of web2 (the internet) and are now focusing their efforts on web3 (crypto). Their entire post is an extremely valuable resource for developing a proper long term framework, but it can be summarized by the key quotes below.
“At times like this, it helps to have a long-term view of web3 as a sector…most of the well-known meltdowns in web3 including recent failures like 3AC, Celsius, and Alameda/FTX, have happened to centralized companies operating trading, lending, and speculating businesses…the most important software innovation of the last decade, which started with the Bitcoin white paper fourteen years ago, is the emergence of open-source software and decentralized protocols that are the foundation of web3. ”
Katie and Fred echo exactly what we wrote in last week’s issue, **“Down But Never Out”. Sure, crypto may be down in recent weeks but its resiliency and unparalleled potential remains. As always, it’s important to focus on long term goals and realize that crypto is not only here to stay, but its future remains as bright as ever. 🌞
Tweets & Memes
One of the world’s best crypto traders, GCR, with some wise wordsPol
Polygon’s MATIC continues to lead the charge in institutional adoption
As we’ve said, markets may be down but crypto never stops innovating!
JP Morgan emphasizes the difference between the recent “crypto” failures
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that sample of positive tweets from this week that highlights crypto’s staying power, we’ll conclude this week’s edition of the CoinStats Scoop! Once again, we’ve covered a ton this week with the core takeaways revolving around DeFi’s continued growth, the separation of centralized and decentralized failures, and highlighted the importance of taking the long term view of crypto! 🤑
Crypto never stops and neither does the innovation and commitment of us here at CoinStats which we highlight on a weekly basis in this newsletter along with product innovations such as our new Midas NFT product. 🤯
As usual, 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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