Weekly Recap: Get a Scoop of Crypto with Caramel Drizzle 🍦
Weekly recap of crypto news, 1st edition
Hello and welcome to the first edition of the CoinStats weekly recap! This newsletter aims to be an informative recap of the main events, token developments, and protocol updates that occurred within the crypto ecosystem.
The recap will be purely info-based and will never contain financial advice. What it will contain is relevant developments and thoughts that'll help you navigate, explore, and think about the crypto ecosystem in a more informed manner.
Market Overview
As you can see below, the market has responded with a beautiful green week all across the crypto landscape.
As evidenced by the market’s response this week, much of the ambiguity, forced selling, and liquidations as a result of LUNA's, and subsequently, 3AC’s collapse has been largely processed. Ripple effects were felt throughout many lenders and most affected Celsius, BlockFi, and Voyager.
Where 3AC left a void, FTX and SBF stepped in to provide liquidity and support for markets. It was around the time BTC and ETH locally bottomed at ~18.8k and ~900. It's refreshing to see a green market and rallying tokens now, and hopefully, the momentum will be sustained over the coming weeks. However, correlations between crypto markets and macro, legacy stock indexes are still near all-time highs so we need to be aware of their movements and FED policy.
Image depicting Three Arrows Capital’s demise from @ShildrenOBottom
Weekly Biggest Gainers
CVX (43%), CRV (52%), dYdX (46%), LOOKS (24%), AAVE (24%) LDO (68%), EVMOS (30%), AR (20%), ATOM (18%), RUNE (22%), SYN (53%)
Weekly Largest Fallers
KCS (-7%), HT (-5%), LTC (-3%), LUNA (-18%), ZRX (-18%), LPT (-17%), SRM (-15%), RNDR (-12%)
News & Developments
Below are some of the most impactful announcements over the past few weeks that indicate crypto’s rising demand across a broad swath of institutions, protocols, corporations, and legacy companies. Announcements, interest, and product developments continue despite market sentiment, planting seeds for the next bull run and wider crypto adoption.
ETH testnet Sepolia undergoes successful merge simulation, Goerli is next
Reddit launches NFT avatar marketplace and new “blockchain-based avatars”
Konvoy Ventures launches $150M web3 gaming focused fund
1Confirmation launches $100M, 10-year life NFT fund
Shopify releases Tokengated Experiences, enabling merchants and users to connect noncustodial wallets for exclusive drops, merch, experiences, etc.
Christiano Ronaldo and Binance team up for an exclusive multi-year partnership
eBay acquires NFT marketplace KnownOrigin
ConsenSys & StarkWare partner to bring ZK rollups to MetaMask & Infura
Facebook rolls out NFT feature for select US creators with expansion later
Teller Protocol partners with Tower Fund Capital to bring real estate investments on chain
AAVE proposes over collateralized with yield-generating stablecoin GHO
Compound releases code for COMP III, a multi-chain lending protocol
Polygon announces Avail, a custom scaling solution for EVM chains
Solana Announces Saga
As the beautifully drawn above picture shows, Solana became the talk of crypto twitter over recent weeks as they announced their ongoing plans to build Saga. Saga is a fully integrated web3 native Android smartphone featuring built-in private key security, a 6.6-inch display and 512GB of storage. As mhonkasalo outlines in his great overview, Saga has four key components:
Key custody solution through a seed vault
Mobile Wallet Adapter providing transaction signing support
Solana Dapp Store featuring no fees
Solana Pay for Android integration
Crypto-accessible mobile apps (minus CoinStats, of course) are severely lacking and completing any transaction outside of a general swap is a nightmare. While Solana’s Saga is obviously widely ambitious, anyone building with a focus on mobile and applying added pressure to the duopoly of app stores that largely shuns crypto is a welcome development. Solana aims to release their Saga smartphone in early 2023 with the first access available for preorder now ($100 deposit, $1000 total cost).
Another factor potentially affecting SOL’s price is Magic Eden’s announcement of raising $130M at a $1.6B valuation. Magic Eden is the premier NFT marketplace on SOL, a burgeoning ecosystem over the last ~6 months that is also worth monitoring moving forward.
Solana holdings insights from the CoinStats Premium token profile
dYdX Moves to Cosmos
One of the biggest market developments over the past few weeks was dYdX’s announcement regarding the release of V4 of their protocol. In their announcement, they revealed that the protocol will be leaving the ETH ecosystem and “will be developed as a standalone blockchain based on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol.”
dYdX is a perpetual swap exchange that was one of ETH’s most used dapps, previously built on StarkWare’s ETH L2 technology. L2s are the future of ETH scaling and dYdX’s decision to build their own appchain using Cosmo’s SDK left market participants questioning the current and mid-term future of L2 scaling as their decentralization and scaling capacity wasn’t enough for dYdX to remain in the ETH ecosystem. The appchain narrative has garnered attention since their announcement and being informed about the developing dynamic between scaling L2s and standalone app chains will be beneficial over the coming months and years.
The market and speculators responded by buying the developing narrative around Cosmos and dYdX as ATOM is up 14% since the announcement while dYdX has gained 35%.
ATOM token profile accessible from the CoinStats Premium subscription
Read of the Week
“It’s All a DeFi Thesis” by Regan Bozman
DeFi tokens have been battered and beaten for more than a year, but the protocols' ability to handle volatility and operate seamlessly by their design has never wavered. Protocols, such as AAVE, MKR, UNI, LINK, and CRV, have once again demonstrated the vast benefits of global, verifiably open protocols that their blackbox CeFi counterparts and previously highlighted insolvent lenders could never provide.
From Regan Bozman’s excellent article It’s All a DeFi Thesis
The core thesis of Regan’s post boils down to the idea that as crypto expands both horizontally and vertically, DeFi remains the beneficiary.
“In the medium term, emerging Web3 categories like DAOs, NFT’s, gaming, and physical networks will exponentially expand on-chain economic activity. These assets will expand DeFi’s addressable market by an order-of-magnitude. Betting against DeFi is betting against crypto succeeding.”
Tweets & Memes of the Week
Cobie’s amazing depiction of FED’s changing sentiment
State of the market over the past few weeks
Wrapping Up
Another eventful week capped by the return of strong rallies across every crypto sector. Solana announced an Android smartphone, dYdX applied pressure to L2s and the ETH ecosystem by moving to Cosmos, and DeFi was predicted to eventually rise from the depths it has been sent to. Product development, investment, and interest in crypto continues to accelerate, exemplifying the desire to advance the space despite prices declining in recent weeks. This highlights the long-term upwards trajectory of the crypto ecosystem.
On this positive note, we’ll conclude the first installment of the new weekly CoinStats recaps. What do you think of our weekly newsletter? Share your feedback and help us improve.