GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 In this week’s newsletter, you'll find:
The usual market overview featuring another green week
Weekly updates on the week’s noteworthy news and developments
A continued focus on Polygon’s future plans, along with an update on the L2 landscape
Analysis of the growing institutional demand for crypto & the improved crypto outlook
Reads about new NFT primitives and the future direction of the NFT market
Tweets & Memes capturing last week’s crypto highlights
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
Another week has passed, and the crypto markets have continued their recent rally, starting July with more beautiful green! The above image highlights the remarkable growth of the total crypto market, surpassing an impressive milestone of $1.25 trillion. BTC (+2%) enjoyed another positive week, closing above 30k at approximately 30.7k. Meanwhile, ETH (+4%) slightly outperformed BTC, making up ground in response to BTC's dominance in previous weeks. ETH concluded the week around $1.97k, edging closer to the $2k mark. 😤
One of the main topics across crypto Twitter this week was the strong resurgence and future outlook of Solana. The top alternative Layer 1 token, SOL, gained an impressive 17%, igniting a surge of momentum and excitement regarding its future prospects. While BTC and ETH continue to hold their positions as the top two tokens in the crypto ecosystem, SOL is gradually gaining mindshare and gradually entering mainstream discussions as a resilient and promising contender for the future!
The leading token this week was COMP, one of the OG DeFi protocols, which saw an astonishing gain of 71%. Close behind was Rollbit (RLB), an SOL-based token, which surged by an impressive 65% as it announced its transition to Ethereum. Interestingly, many of the tokens that outperformed this week were the "dino coins" – coins that have been present in multiple market cycles — BCH +55%, XEC +45%, LTC +28%, XLM +17%, & ETC +11%.
Other top-performing tokens kicking off July with a bang include:
DeFi sector tokens following COMP’s intense week: MKR +33%, YFI +10%, CRV +11%, FXS +10%, DYDX +10%, AAVE +8%, RUNE +6%, SNX +6%, & UNI +4%
PENDLE +42%, INJ +23%, GRT +22%, FLEX +20%, PEPE +18%, BIT +17%, FIL +16%, WOO +15%, LDO +12%, AXS +11%, ZCASH +9%, HNT +8%, SYN +13%, DOT +5%, & LINK +7%
It's evident that the upward trend in the markets is solidifying, leaving little room for doubt. While markets don't always go up linearly, the future outlook for crypto in 2024 and beyond continues to shine brighter with each passing day. 🌞
News & Developments
Polygon’s MATIC introduces a shared bridge to unify all its chains in a newly released Polygon 2.0 roadmap
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) updates its roadmap, including ETH Layer 2 interoperability with ENS domains
BITO, a 2x leveraged Bitcoin futures ETF, saw its biggest weekly inflow in a year
Shopify, one of the world’s largest online retailers, details how merchants can easily set up and build a “token-gated storefront”
Microstrategy, the tech company founded by Michael Saylor, purchases an additional 12,333 BTC for $347 million in cash 🤯 MicroStrategy now holds over $4.6 billion of BTC
zkSync, one of the longest builders of a zero-knowledge ETH L2, launches its ZK Stack, allowing builders throughout the Ethereum ecosystem to easily deploy customizable zero-knowledge scaling solutions
A new crypto company built by the founders of Compound Labs (COMP), Superstate, raises $4 million to expand access to Real World Assets (RWAs) and regulated financial products to blockchain networks
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), in collaboration with the IMF and other central banks, proposes common conditions for retail payments with digital money on blockchain
Warner Music Group partners with Polygon’s MATIC for a blockchain accelerator program
Zora, one of the most popular NFT minting platforms, announces the Zora Network, a gas-efficient and scalable L2 network built on Optimism’s (OP) stack
The Bank of International Settlements and Swiss National Bank released a report on the use of DeFi for swaps between various CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies)
CME Group, the world’s largest operator of financial derivatives exchanges, announces the launch of Ether/Bitcoin ratio futures on July 31st
CoinStats enables tracking all things TON natively on the CoinStats app!
Polygon 2.0 & the L2 Landscape
Polygon has indeed been at the forefront of news and developments in recent weeks, particularly with its token/protocol overhaul plans and the unveiling of the Polygon 2.0 roadmap. This week, Polygon Labs provided further details on the future of the MATIC ecosystem. The announcement revealed plans to integrate new L2 zero-knowledge chains and introduce new staking and interoperability layers as part of the comprehensive Polygon 2.0 upgrade. 🤯
Sandeep, the founder of Polygon, outlined how the design of Polygon 2.0 will utilize shared zero-knowledge infrastructure to power all networks within the future ecosystem. 💪
Polygon’s detailed image outlining the vision for Polygon 2.0
The Layer 2 landscape at large has also been a busy sector throughout June; here are the significant developments:
Optimum recently completed its monumental Bedrock upgrade and rebranded the Optimism chain to OP mainnet to better align its Superchain vision — OP now has Coinbase, BNB, Worldcoin, Zora, and more building on its tech stack
Frax (FXS) announces plans to build a fully functioning ETH Layer 2 scaling solution inside its consistently growing DeFi protocol
Binance’s BNB is building a Layer 2 on top of Optimism’s (OP) tech stack
Arbitrum (ARB) continues to lead Layer 2 adoption through strong total value locked (TVL) metrics and a resilient DeFi sector built on the Optimisitc rollup
Zora, one of the most popular NFT minting platforms announces the Zora Network, a gas-efficient and scalable L2 network built on Optimism’s (OP) stack
zkSync, a long-building zero-knowledge ETH L2, launches its ZK Stack, a customizable tech stack for creating zkSync-powered L2 scaling networks on Ethereum.
Institutional Demand Intensifies
The demand for serving crypto products to their customers continued to accelerate this week! Leading financial asset managers such as ARK, Fidelity, BlackRock, Valkyrie, Invesco, Wisdom Tree, and others continue to push for the approval of spot BTC ETF. 😤 The potential approval of these ETFs would substantially simplify access to cryptocurrencies for both retail investors and financial institutions worldwide. If granted, this development would be a substantial advantage for the overall crypto markets, streamlining participation and potentially attracting more capital into the space.
Head of strategic ecosystem partnerships of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, recently filed for a spot BTC ETF, says, “Institutional adoption of tokenization will take longer than people expect, but will be monumental in shaping our ecosystem.”
Fidelity, ARK Invest, Invesco, Valkyrie, and many more large financial institutions continue to apply for spot Bitcoin ETFs
Shopify, one of the world’s largest e-commerce retailers, details how merchants can easily “build a token-gated storefront”
CME Group, the world’s largest operator of financial derivatives exchanges, launches Ether/Bitcoin ratio futures on July 31st
Visa, one of the world’s top payment processors, shares its research on “the complex world of blockchain, exploring the monolithic and modular designs”
Nation-state banks are exploring the design space of crypto products as The Bank of International Settlements and Swiss National Bank released a report on the use of DeFi for swaps between various CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies)
Read of the Week
“Beyond 721 & 1155: Revisiting The NFT Design Space” — Natalie Mullins
This week, our read comes from Natalie at Volt Capital. Volt Capital is one of the longest-running crypto funds that has consistently delivered incredible open-source research on crypto markets and developers throughout the ecosystem for many years. 🤓
Natalie will walk us through “exploring the latest innovations in non-fungible token standards, utility & metadata infrastructure. This piece intends to revisit the fundamentals of NFT utility and highlight the innovations extending the capabilities of NFTs to create meaningfully richer user experiences.”
“In the bull market, trends around Google searches for the word ‘NFT’ are cited as a proxy for adoption and popularity, but ironically, this term fading out of the lexicon entirely will likely be the real sign of mass adoption. L2s are leading the way within the ETH ecosystem, while Solana doubles down on its monolithic architecture and leadership in token standard innovation. The ability to update metadata, particularly based on specific on or offchain events, is a subtle but game-changing superpower that makes dynamic NFTs significantly more useful. NFTs might just be our best chance!”
At CoinStats, we hold an exceptionally bullish outlook on the future of NFTs, and our confidence is reflected in our talented in-house developers, who developed the AI-powered Midas. Midas constantly monitors and extracts valuable signals from the noise in the dynamic and ever-changing NFT markets. We encourage you to explore Midas' capabilities today and harness its power to stay informed. 🤓
Tweets & Memes
Crypto investment products are beginning to see substantial inflows 😤
If the US continues to push crypto out, countries across the world are eager to adopt it!
CBS outlines a great framework on how to benefit from green weeks ahead 🤑
Wrapping Up
With some guidance on how to capitalize on the expected green markets ahead, we’ll conclude this week’s edition of the CoinStats Scoop! 💫
As usual, we provided the regular market update and walked through another green week highlighted by Solana’s strong recovery and bright future, once again covered Polygon’s 2.0 roadmap plans, highlighted the ever-growing institutional demand for crypto, read about new NFT primitives and how they’ll supercharge the NFT market, 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! 😎
Always love the holistic news and thoughts shared by you. Crypto ecosystem being emergent is something to keep track on. This is the best way I do, so thank you 🙏