Issue #19

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US876.8B, down 3.4% from last week.

Below is the weekly performance of the top crypto and NFT assets. 

News Headline Highlights

• Goldman Sachs announced their intentions to purchase "Tens of millions" on crypto related investments whose valuations have been hit after the implosion of FTX. Mathew McDermott, Goldman's head of digital assets commented "We do see some really interesting opportunities, priced much more sensibly".
  
• Fnality and HQLA×, together with Banco Santander, Goldman Sachs and UBS, demonstrate the first cross-chain repo swap pilot across Corda and Enterprise Ethereum. The transactions were atomically settled across the two platforms and demonstrate how platforms running on different blockchains can be linked to deliver enhanced resilience, reduced risks, and reduction of fragmented liquidity.
  
• Canada's biggest pension fund, CPP Investments, has ended its effort to study investment opportunities in the volatile crypto market. The news comes after two of its peers wrote off investments after the collapse of crypto business FTX and Celcius.
  
• Starbucks have launched the Beta of their Web3 'Odyssey' Loyalty Program on Ethereum Layer 2, Polygon. The program is aimed at combining customer loyalty rewards with NFT collecting and other gamified elements.
  
• Independent crypto media site The Block was secretly funded over the last two years by Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. The Block’s CEO, Michael McCaffrey, immediately resigned after the loans came to light, and will also step down from The Block's board. The company said no one at the company had any knowledge of the loans except for McCaffrey.
  
• Vanguard Super Australia has started to use DLTA, a blockchain-based back office solution for asset management to reduce manual processes and improve efficiencies.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Magnet Capital Portfolio Company, Lyra will be launching on Arbitrum in 2023 after LEAP-38 was approved by the governance council. Option contracts on Arbitrum will be hedged using GMX’s perpetual markets, another Magnet Capital portfolio company.
  
• Ethereum core developers target March 2023 for Shanghai hard fork. This upgrade will enable staked ETH, that is currently locked in the network, to be redeemable. Developers also anticipate a second hard fork sometime in Q3 2023 to introduce "proto-danksharding," (EIP 4844). EIP 4844 is expected to further improve the network's capacity to handle more transactions at lower costs.
  
• Both Chainlink and ApeCoin staking launched this week. 
  • Chainlink’s v0.1 community staking pool filled within 24 hours and  stakers are earning ~4.75% APY.
  • ApeCoin pools are still filling but are currently paying over 300% APY to early stakers.
• RTFKT, a digital fashion and collectibles firm owned by Nike, unveiled what it claims to be the first native web3 sneaker. The sneaker collection, "Cryptokicks iRL", boasts many advanced features including auto-lacing, enhanced lighting, haptic feedback, gesture control, walk detection and app connectivity. 

The Weekly Deal Room

• Crypto accounting and compliance platform, Bitwave, raised $15m in a Series A led by Hack VC and Blockchain Capital.
  
• Perennial, a derivatives DeFi platform, raised $12m in seed funding led by Polychain Capital and Variant. The round closed earlier in the year but was only announced this last week.
  
• Forum3, a firm specialising in branded digital collectibles, raised $10m in a seed funding round led by Decasonic.
  
• Shibuya, an NFT video platform co-founded by popular artist Emily “pplpleasr” Yang, raised $6.9m in seed funding to expand its Ethereum NFT-driven, interactive video platform and onboard new creators. The round co-led by a16z and Variant Fund.
  
• For-profit social impact NFT startup, Metagood, raised $5m in its pre-seed round from Animoca and others. Metagood aims to give members the chance to promote and fund social good projects through its DAO.
  
• Earn Alliance, a game community platform, raised $4.75m in seed funding to connect game developers with fans and gamers across the globe. The round was co-led by CoinFund and Fabric Ventures.
  
• Panoptic, a Uniswap-based decentralised protocol for perpetual options, raised $4.5m via an equity plus token warrant arrangement. Gumi Cryptos Capital led the round, with Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Jane Street and others participating.
  
• Outdefine, who are building a decentralised hiring network on Solana, raised $2.5m in a seed round led by TCG Crypto and Jump Crypto.

Metric of the Week

Stablecoins seem to have found strong product market fit, demonstrated by their increased usage throughout the 2022 crypto bear market. Stablecoins’ daily on-chain transfer volume is near an all-time high of $25b per day (90-day moving average). About $20b of this is sourced from USDC (on Ethereum) and Tether (Ethereum and Tron) transfers.

Source: Coinmetrics