Magnet Crypto Review | The weekly roundup of all things blockchain

Issue #29

Written by Magnet Capital | Feb 21, 2023 5:00:00 AM

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.17T, up 10.0% from last week.

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

 

News Headline Highlights

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

  • NFT marketplace Blur bombarded the Ethereum blockchain with a $400m airdrop of the BLUR governance token to customers. The airdrop dove nearly $10m in daily volume to the JPEG-trading platform as devs waged war on OpenSea's royalties program.
  • Decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol Platypus Finance, was hacked for almost $10m during the week. In an astounding example of how communally supportive the blockchain community is, within a day, security company BlockSec helped recover around $2.5m of funds from identifying a vulnerability in the hackers contract. Further, on chain sleuth ZachXBT mapped out wallet interactions to identify the hacker, finding their Opensea account which had a linked twitter profile. Platypus are currently in negotiations to recover more funds.

Regulation Station

The Weekly Deal Room

  • Taurus, a Swiss digital asset tokenisation platform, raised $65m in a Series B led by Credit Suisse with participation from Deutsche Bank, Pictet Group  and Arab Bank Switzerland.
  • Monad, a new EVM-equivalent L1 aiming to deliver 10,000 tps (1 billion tx/day) through changes to both consensus and execution, raised $19m in a Seed Round led by Dragonfly Capital.
  • Decentralised web3 communication stack Sending Labs raised $12.5m in a seed funding round co-led by Insignia Venture Partners, MindWorks Capital, and Signum Capital.
  • Alongside, a crypto index-focused platform hoping to bring passive, long-term investing to crypto, closed an $11m Seed Round led by a16z.
  • Caldera, a web3 layer 2 blockchain 'rollup' company, raised $9m across two funding rounds led by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly.
  • Ironblocks, a smart contract cybersecurity platform, raised $7m in a Seed Round led by Collider Ventures and Disruptive AI.
  • Zero-knowledge (ZK) hardware startup Cysic closed a $6m Seed Round led by Polychain Capital.
  • Stelo Labs, a web3 security company striving to increase safety of consumers in crypto, raised $6m in a Seed Round led by a16z.
  • Orb Labs, a blockchain interoperability company, raised $4.5m in a Seed Round led by Bain Capital Crypto.
  • Phi raised a $2m Seed Round led by Chapter One and Delphi Digital to build a “Social gaming onboarding platform for the web3 ecosystem”.

Metric of the Week

Chainalysis, the crypto forensic company that works with global regulators and federal agencies, determined that in 2022 a total value of $20.6B was from identified illicit activity. This is slightly higher than the $18.1B of identified illicit activity in 2021. 

In their report, they note that as expected, total transaction volume fell with the onset of the bear market, however legitimate transaction volumes declined faster than illicit volumes. This resulted in illicit activity rising for the first time since 2019, from 0.12% in 2021 to 0.24% in 2022.

However, of the $20.6B, 43% ($8.8B) came from activity associated with sanctioned entities, in a year when OFAC launched some of its most ambitious and difficult to enforce crypto sanctions yet. Crypto exchange Garantex, which accounted for the majority of sanctions-related transaction volume last year, was sanctioned by OFAC in April 2022. Accordingly, most compliance professionals treat this as illicit activity.

However, Garantex is a Russia-based business. As such, the exchange has been able to continue operating and servicing Russian citizens with impunity.

Source: Chainalysis