Magnet Crypto Review | The weekly roundup of all things blockchain

Issue #8

Written by Magnet Capital | Sep 27, 2022 5:00:00 AM

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

 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