Issue #6

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US1.11T, up 10% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• Google has integrated an Ethereum merge countdown clock natively to their search results. 
• Investment giant Franklin Templeton, in partnership with Eaglebrook Advisors, is set to offer digital asset strategies to wealth managers on their platform from mid October.
• Coinbase is funding a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department after their sanctioning of privacy protocol Tornado Cash. According to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, the Treasury Department had gone too far "by sanctioning an entire technology instead of specific individuals."
• Switzerland’s SEBA bank has launched institutional ETH staking services to meet growing customer demand. 
• SEC Chair, Gary Gensler, has supported commodity regulators, the CFTC, having oversight of Bitcoin spot and future markets. Whilst not commenting on Ethereum, he also commented that his belief was that most other crypto assets remained within the SEC’s purview. 
• The Bank of Russia agreed to legalise crypto for cross-border payments, reportedly citing the inevitability of crypto as a global settlement layer, particularly during times of geopolitical tensions such as those we are currently experiencing.
• Microstrategy, the software developer turned Bitcoin accumulator, has filed plans with the SEC to sell up to US$500m of stock to fund further Bitcoin purchases. Microstrategy already holds ~130,000 Bitcoin that has been acquired for ~US$4b.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Ethereum undertook its final step towards the transition to Proof of Stake, successfully activating the ‘Bellatrix upgrade’ late last week. Whilst the upgrade was uneventful, it was the necessary final step to prepare Ethereum for the upcoming ‘Paris Upgrade’ (i.e. the merge).
• Curve Finance has released the code for their proposed stablecoin (crvUSD) into the public domain. This code will act as an interface for the smart contracts that are yet to be deployed (which will also include more detail on the stablecoins design). 
• Algorand has undergone an upgrade to implement State Proofs on its mainnet, a technology that will allow applications of other blockchains to trustlelssly verify Algorand transactions, as well as features to increase its transaction throughput. These upgrades are expected to improve the security of cross chain communications and increase transaction speeds from 1,200 transactions per second (tps) to 6,000 tps.
• The Ronin Bridge, which was hacked for US$625m in March, has recovered US$30m thanks to help from the Chainalysis Crypto Incident Response team. 

The Weekly Deal Room

• Mysten Labs raised US$300M from FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, a16z and others to build core infrastructure for its yet-to-launch layer-1 blockchain Sui.
• Fuel Labs raised US$80M from Blockchain Capital and Stratos Technologies to continue developing its scaling solutions for Ethereum. 
• Web3 gaming studio Revolving Games raised US$25m, in a round led by Pantera Capital, to develop scalable and decentralised games and online worlds.
• 21.co, parent company of crypto ETP issuer 21Shares, has raised US$25M from London-based hedge fund Marshall Wace and others.
• Spice AI raised a US$13.5M Seed round from Madrona, Blackbird Ventures and others for its platform that enables developers to build data driven applications for Web3.
• Slide, a startup that provides user experience infrastructure for decentralised applications (dApps), raised US$12.3M in a seed funding round from Polychain Capital and Framework Ventures.
• Credix has raised US$11.25M to develop an on-chain, democratised credit platform matching institutional investors and FinTech lenders.
• Omni raised US$11M to continue developing its non-custodial wallet.
• HotStreak, a web3 sports betting platform aiming to improve payments and custody processes in sports betting, raised a US$9M Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital.
• GoGoPool, a decentralised staking service built on the Avalanche blockchain, raised US$5M in a seed round led by Framework Ventures and Coinfund.
• Stack raised US$2.7M to build the first crypto education and trading app for teens and their parents.
• Rated Labs, a web3 infrastructure project, has raised US$2.5M in seed funding from 1confirmation, Semantic, Placeholder and other prominent investors.

Metric of the Week

The percentage of total Ethereum transactions accounted for by its two largest Layer 2 scaling solutions, Arbitrum (14%) and Optimism (12%), is approaching all-time high. Current fees to swap tokens on Optimism ($0.08) and Arbitrum ($0.09) are ~97% lower than on Ethereum ($2.98).

Source: L2Fees.info