GM, and welcome to another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 🥂 Here’s an overview of this week’s newsletter:
The usual broader market update with insights into trending tokens
An insight into the recent development of Bitcoin NFTs!!
Updates on this week’s impactful news and developments
Highlighting DegenScore and the ways it helps you keeps track of the DeFi ecosystem
Some thoughts on cryptoeconomic models and their future impact
Weekly wrap-up: predictions & takeaways.
Market Overview
As we enter February, the markets have slightly cooled off from this year’s hot start. BTC and ETH, the two leading cryptocurrencies, are in decline this week - BTC lost 3.5%, while ETH is around the 1.65k range losing only 1%. As noted last week, market corrections like this are healthy and minor pullbacks in token prices are expected as we’ve had a rally in crypto prices for 4+ weeks. 💪Despite BTC and ETH prices declining this week, various sectors throughout the crypto industry continue pushing forward.
With small adjustments concerning the leading cryptocurrencies in our rear-view mirror, let’s examine the tokens across the ever-expanding crypto sector that continued their rally this week:
Scaling — SYN +51%, IMX +36%, OP +34%, METIS +25%, LRC +27%, MINA +24%, MATIC +9%
Alternative L1s — CANTO +56%, FTM +33%, INJ +53%, ATOM +10%, BNB +7%
DeFi — SSV +51%, GMX + 31%, DYDX +29%, SUSHI +14%, 1INCH +10%, CAKE +12.5%
Infrastructure — RNDR +95% GRT +18%, AR +18%, LPT +14%
NFTs & GameFi — LOOKS +60%, ILV +50%, MAGIC +19%
Additionally, the canine crypto sector gained momentum this week with the possible return of the dog! 🐕 Dogecoin gained 11% this week following optimism that Elon will eventually integrate DOGE into Twitter payments. Moreover, the dog-themed sector rallied after the Shiba Inu token developers announced the launch of its long-awaited Layer 2 on February 14th.
According to the Coindesk article covering Shibarium’s upcoming L2 launch, the release of Shib chain could “further bloster the fundamentals of Shiba Inu’s three ecosystem tokens: SHIB, LEASH, & BONE which together command over $5B in market capitalization.” As Shibarium comes into focus and DOGE tokens spike 11%, SHIB gains an impressive +28%, while BONE +41% and FLOKI +102%. In addition to following ETH & BTC prices, all eyes will be on DOGE and SHIB’s L2 launch to determine where the market is heading in the next few weeks! 💪
News & Developments
EigenLayer, an Ethereum staking protocol under development, is raising $50 million with a token valuation of $500 million.
Ebay’s NFT marketplace KnownOrigin plots hiring push amid crypto businesses slashing jobs and halting recruitment.
The English Premier League announced a $150 million value 4-year licensing partnership with SoRare, an NFT fantasy sports gaming platform enabling players to buy and use official Premier League-licensed NFTs.
Twitter is working on integrating fiat payments into the platform but intends to allow “crypto capabilities to be added later.”
Structured finance and administrative platform Intain launches an Avalanche-based AVAX subnet allowing the issuance and trading of asset-backed securities on-chain.
BNB-chain introduces a new storage-based crypto network aiming to provide users with control over their data.
Injective (INJ) announces the Solana assets’ integration into the Cosmos (ATOM) ecosystem: “Solana assets are now live on the Injective, bringing forth new forms of composability to the entire Web3 ecosystem!”
Amazon is looking to hire a Web3 market specialist with a focus on “Applications of Blockchains in Games Technology.”
Optimism, a leading ETH Layer 2 scaling network, has announced plans for its major Bedrock upgrade in March.
Bitcoin NFTs
Inscriptions are finally ready for Bitcoin mainnet! This Bitcoin version of NFTs, described as “digital artifacts,” was launched on Ordinals, the nonfungible token (NFT) protocol on the Bitcoin mainnet. Inscriptions are created by “including content, like an image, text, SVG, or HTML, in an inscription transaction.”
Ordinals was created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor, who describes Inscriptions as satoshis (fractional units of Bitcoin like gwei for ETH) “imbued with meaning.” The launch of Inscriptions has the crypto community divided over whether it’ll be good for the Bitcoin ecosystem, with some arguing that it offers more financial use cases for Bitcoin, while others say it’s straying away from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cash system.
Notably, in 1993, Hal Finney, some of Bitcoin’s longest-standing developers, expressed his enthusiasm about NFTs on Bitcoin, and Inscriptions are the closest thing to Hal’s vision.
In sum, while its impact and future are still unclear, Inscriptions are one of the projects to watch out for in 2023 and beyond! 🥳
Exploring DegenScore
As the crypto space is rapidly developing, comprising more sectors and on-chain activities, keeping up with everything becomes difficult. DegenScore is another great resource, along with the CoinStats Scoop, of course, to help you stay in the loop! 😉
In November, DegenScore released the DegenScore Beacon, an Ethereum soulbound token designed to identify and highlight a user's crypto skills & abilities and make them available both on-chain and off-chain. In addition to your DegenScore, it provides reputation-based traits that make it easier to segment and reward great users.
The Beacon grants you access to the DegenScore Cafe, where Beacon holders find exclusive opportunities curated by the DegenScore team or the Beacon community. Beacon holders can access exclusive opportunities, submit proposals, and upvote good opportunities while contributing to curating the Cafe. Users with a DegenScore above 700 points can even mint a Beacon.
DegenScore enables you to monitor the rapidly developing crypto ecosystem and the opportunities it provides! 🤑
Read of the Week
“The Next Frontier in Cryptoeconomic Business Models” — Mason Nystrom
This week, we’re covering an informative read from a partner at Variant that has been in our reads before as one of the most actively contributing crypto funds in the space. Variant has recently raised $450 million to invest throughout the ecosystem.
Mason examines cryptoeconomic business models such as Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, and NFTs and introduces the future models that’ll likely develop over the next years. Per usual, the outlook is bright as the crypto ecosystem continues to expand and develop in the coming months and years! 🌞
“Blockchain networks offer a blank canvas for token distribution and cryptoeconomic models. Bitcoin’s cryptoeconomic model — proof of work — sparked a variety of new PoW currencies, most notably Zcash and Ethereum…NFTs were yet another interesting technical innovation…each wave of crypto is dominated by new distribution mechanisms and cryptoeconomic models…new token distribution mechanisms and cryptoeconomic models will act as the critical catalysts for the next wave of experimentation and disruption.”
Tweets & Memes:
The trend through January and to this week continues to be bad news unaffecting markets
Here's a great guide for anyone wanting to get started on the new popular chain Canto
xNFT Backpack’s now integrating both SOL & ETH domains
ETH’s total supply is continuing with its downtrend creating future price benefits
Wrapping Up
We'll conclude this week’s edition of CoinStats Scoop with the above tweet on the diminishing supply of ETH thanks to the devs' completion of EIP-1559 and transition to Proof-of-Stake. 💫
To sum up: We’ve covered this week’s market movements and highlighted the dog-themed tokens’ recent rally, talked about the current
excitement for Bitcoin NFTs and introduced DegenScore, covered the usual news and developments, and highlighted the future cryptoeconomic models.
As usual, CoinStats will continue to guide you through the crypto world and DeFi. We'll see you next week for another edition of CoinStats Scoop! 😎