Issue #8

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US976B, down 1.8% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• Nasdaq, the second largest US stock market operator, has declared intentions to launch an institutional crypto custody service.
• The US House has drafted legislation that proposes to ban the new issuance of algorithmic stablecoins that rely solely on the value of another digital asset from the same creator to maintain their price. This proposal comes after the fallout from TerraUSD.
• Colorado citizens can now pay their tax in Bitcoin and Ether after the state’s Department of Revenue launched a new tax payment program in partnership with Paypal.
• Microstrategy, the largest corporate buyer of Bitcoin, has acquired another 301 BTC (US$6m), which increases their total holdings to 130,000 BTC. 
• Crypto OG and Founder/CEO of Kraken, Jesse Powell, has stepped down as CEO after 11 years building and operating the crypto exchange. He will remain on as the company’s first Chairman of the Board.
• Russia’s largest stock exchange, the Moscow Exchange, is preparing a bill on digital financial assets and securities trading, which if passed would permit it to become a licensed crypto exchange.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Thorchain, a messaging and liquidity protocol that allows users to transact across supported blockchains, launched support for the Avalanche blockchain. Users can now transact AVAX, the Avalanche blockchain’s native token, with Bitcoin, Ether, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, RUNE, BNB, and ATOM.
• Aptos, has received a big vote of confidence from Jump after Wormhole and Pyth (Jump-backed infrastructure projects) launch on the new layer 1 blockchain. Worm-hole is a custodial cross chain asset bridge and Pyth is a price oracle.
• After several months of delays, Cardano’s Vasil upgrade has gone live via a successful hard fork. The upgrade is touted as bringing “significant performance and capability” enhancements to the smart contract protocol.

The Weekly Deal Room

• 3Commas raised $37m in Series B funding from Alameda and Jump to develop an automated crypto trading platform.
• Popular crypto analytics firm, Messari, raised $35m in a Series B led by Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from Morgan Creek Digital, Samsung Next, FTX Ventures, Galaxy and Coinbase Ventures.
• Crypto security platform Immunifi has raised $24m in a Series A led by Framework Ventures.
• Hyperlane has raised $18.5m in a seed funding round led by Variant to build a platform that helps developers connect applications across blockchains.
• Immortal Game, a web3 chess gaming experience with collectable NFTs, raised $15.5m from TCG crypto, Kraken Ventures, Kima Ventures and others.
• Web3 accounting tool, Integral, raised $8.5m from Electric Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, Elad Gil, and others.
• Web3 play-to-earn gaming platform, Vulcan, raised $8m in Series A funding from Skybridge Capital and others.
• Tres, an aggregator of both on- and off-chain crypto data for web3 companies, raised $7.6m in seed funding led by boldstart ventures.
• Pan-African crypto exchange Yellow Card raised $40m in Series B funding from Polychain Capital, Castle Island and others. 
• Icebreaker Finance and DeFi lending platform Maple have launched a $300 million lending “pool” for bitcoin miners.

Metric of the Week

Since the Ethereum merge, block time consistency has improved drastically. One of the key design features of proof of stake is pre-defined block times. By contrast, in proof of work blockchains, the randomness of the 'work' being conducted results in inconsistent block times.

In the case of Etheruem:

• Under PoW, a block was solved on average every 13.5 seconds (but generally between 0 and 100 seconds).
• Under PoS, a validator is selected to produce a block every 12 seconds. If a validator is offline and doesn't produce the block, another validator is selected 12 seconds later (resulting in 24 seconds between blocks).

The results of Ethereum block intervals (the time between blocks) under both PoW and PoS is visually depicted below.

Source: Coin Metrics