Market Overview
GM and welcome to this week's CoinStats Scoop! 💫 Here’s an overview of this week’s edition:
Legacy markets continue their selloff while crypto displays strength
Examination of the possible next big crypto narratives
Crypto news, funding, and developments of the week
Consideration of a possible appchain future with UNIchain as an example
Takeaways of the week & things to watch
Once again, unfortunately, macro remains the key indicator to monitor for crypto markets. Worse-than-expected employment numbers have led to another selloff in legacy markets. Despite that, and what you can see from the screenshot below, BTC (+2%) and ETH (+2.5%) held up well and enjoyed modest but green weeks! 🎉
Elsewhere across the crypto ecosystem, there were plenty of gains to be had. This once again highlights the breadth to which the crypto ecosystem has expanded throughout the past cycle. Sushiswap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), was one of the best-performing assets this week as it rose 24% (!!) because of the announced support and investment from Avi Felman and GoldenTree’s vast experience across all markets.
Besides SUSHI, there were numerous other tokens that enjoyed positive returns this week despite the macro doom and gloom: FXS (+19%), INJ (16.5%), GMX (+19%), RBN (+8.5%), FOLD (+13%), PYR (+26%), XMON (+7%), MKR (+16.5%), XRP (+8.1%), EVMOS (+28%), and MATIC (+7%) 🤑!
Speaking of macro doom and gloom, Friday’s rout in the stock market saw the Nasdaq, a high-growth tech company index, lose just shy of 4% as equities of all shapes and sizes sold off to close the week. As mentioned in our previous edition, a 4% loss in the Nasdaq typically correlates to a drawdown of 10+% across crypto markets. Once again a sign of the pain already digested by crypto markets was evident as what we wrote last week remains true today:
“macroeconomic factors, unfortunately, remain in control of crypto markets. However, this week may have provided a glimpse of crypto strength as the main U.S. stock indices QQQ (-2.8%) and SPY (-2.5%) endured another week of selling. For us in the crypto world, 2.5-2.8% loss seems like a walk in the park, but it only speaks of crypto’s relative strength.”
Well, another week of macro selloffs and relative strength from crypto hopefully alludes to greener pastures moving forward as Alex’s tweet suggests. While crypto at large has moved in lockstep with macro, we’re now on the second week of outperformance from our beloved tokens. We hope this trend will continue! 🤯
News & Developments
Below are some of the most impactful announcements over the week that indicate crypto’s rising demand across a broad swath of institutions, protocols, corporations, and legacy companies. Announcements, interest, and product developments continue, planting seeds for the next bull run and wider crypto adoption.
Flamengo, one of Brazil’s biggest sports franchises, partners with MoonPay to launch multiple crypto products over the coming months and years
NYDIG raises $720M for its Institutional Bitcoin Fund
Golden, crypto tooling & data infrastructure protocol, raises $40M series B
Horizon Blockchain Games, an NFT marketplace & gaming platform, raises $40M series A
Visa dives deeper into crypto through new partnership with FTX to offer debit cards in 40+ countries
Bitwise’s new Crypto ETF (BWEB) is now listed and trading on public equity markets
Cboe Global Markets, a major traditional finance exchange operator & market infrastructure provider, partners with SOL-based oracle Pyth to enable legacy market data on-chain
Stash, a fintech unicorn company, launches the ability for its customers to make purchases of the eight largest cryptocurrencies
Hamilton Lane, a private equity giant with $832 billion of assets under management, will tokenize three of its funds through a partnership with Securitize
Japan’s Prime Minister says in a recent speech that Japan, “will promote efforts to expand the use of Web 3.0 services that utilize the Metaverse & NFTs”
Coolkicks raises $6M seed @ $50M valuation for their new MynaSwap digital collectible platform
Examining Upcoming Narratives
As with all financial markets, looking forward to the next potential trends and narratives is the best way to maximize potential returns. This week, crypto OG and one of the most respected investors in the space, Jason Choi posed a simple but thought-provoking question:
As with most legitimate questions posted in CT (crypto Twitter), there were many funny troll responses but there were also plenty of responses worth further analysis that align with CoinStats’ future vision of crypto, including:
zero-knowledge scaling solutions that protect user privacy while ensuring that identities & data remain verifiable
MATIC zk-rollups, zkSync, Aztec, StarkWare, etc.
financing physical infrastructure with crypto incentives
Helium (HNT), Pollen Mobile (PNC), etc.
sports — NFTs, fan tokens, on-chain gambling
CHZ, fan tokens, sports league/players NFTs, etc.
DeFi revival through the integration of Real World Assets (RWAs)
MKR diversifying their holdings with U.S. Treasuries, sustainable yield on-chain, stablecoin yield, etc.
DeFi expanding to interest rate swaps, fixed rates & expirable futures
consumer fintech converging with CeFi
the convergence of generative artificial intelligence 🤝 crypto
recent explosion of stable diffusion, AI, and its impact on crypto protocols and NFTs moving forward
cross-chain yield farming & cross-chain superDApps
convergence of interoperable applications & protocols across chains to enhance user experience and yield opportunities
improvements to NFT financialization making NFTs productive assets
products such as NFT lending & borrowing, XMON, Sudoswap, etc.
appchains & scaling through various composable solutions
Cosmos, protocol specific chains, Synapse (SYN), various upcoming L2 scaling solutions, etc.
Whew, that’s a lot of information to digest! While we’re aware of the anxiety that listing that many potential upcoming narratives and things to monitor can induce, fret not. CoinStats is always here to provide you with what you need to know. Being aware of just a couple of the abovementioned potential catalysts puts you ahead of the curve moving forward. 🤑 Certainly, some of the narratives will fizzle out and never materialize, but being aware and informed of what other investors and ecosystem participants are monitoring is key to staying ahead in this ever-evolving, fast-paced industry!
Read of the Week
“The Inevitability of UNIchain: A case study for an appchain-centric future” — Dan Elitzer
Dan is a venture capitalist at Nascent, a “multi-strategy investment firm focused on crypto & open finance.” The thread above is in reference to the article we’re reading this week and highlights the ability and motivation behind UNI and other top protocols’ potential move to establish their own chain on top of ETH, ATOM, SOL, or future security-guaranteed L1 protocols.
“The basic idea is having an independent blockchain with its own validators/sequencers, focused around a specific protocol/application..any application that grows big enough will likely at some point have similar reasons to consider moving their primary home to their own chain or rollup...appchains will eventually be a major force in the crypto ecosystem, the timeline in which we see this becoming a reality is 3+ years out. ”
If you’re trying to understand appchains or why they’re likely to be a trend in the future, we highly recommend this great thought experiment and piece from Dan! Of course, 3+ years is a lifetime in crypto, but being aware and ahead of future trends is where the most money is made 🤑!
Tweets & Memes
Polygon (MATIC) hits an all-time high in weekly active addresses
First look at Solana’s upcoming Saga phone
Only one more leg down then it’s 10x, I’m sure of it!
Wrapping Up
Alright, with that inspirational meme promising the next 10x, we’ll conclude another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🍨 There are two core takeaway we’re highlighting this week. First, crypto once again remained strong in the face of legacy markets continuing to selloff – a welcome sight for all and a potential precursor to outperforming strength whenever markets gain their footing again! Second, there are numerous potential “next big narratives” and trends that we outlined. Just giving our readers some homework during the current choppy bear market. 😉
We also read and thought through the future of appchains and their necessity to scale crypto to hundreds of millions+ users which is currently spearheaded by ATOM and the Cosmos ecosystem. Finally, we see MATIC’s continued growth and a sneak peak of SOL’s coming Saga phone in the Tweets & Memes which reminds us how no matter what the current markets look like, there are always teams and catalysts building to continue advancing the crypto space! 🤯
As usual, CoinStats will continue to guide you through the world of crypto and DeFi. We’ll see you for another edition of CoinStats Scoop next week!
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