Issue #5

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US1.0T, flat from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• Japan’s regulator, the Financial Services Agency, is proposing a corporate crypto tax break to entice innovators and start-ups to stay local. The proposal will exempt crypto startups from paying tax on unrealised gains from issuance of a token.
• Ticketmaster has partnered with web3 company Dapper Labs to enable customers (event planners/organisers) to issue NFTs to fans before, after or during an event.
• Ex-executives from Galaxy and Genesis are aiming to raise a new US$500m crypto fund, called DBA Crypto,  according to SEC filings.
• State Street, who has US$42.6 trillion assets under custody, has cited the tokenization of assets as an opportunity they are considering pursuing, citing continued interest from institutional clients as the core driver.
• Michael Saylor, ex-CEO of MicroStrategy and very notable Bitcoin bull and investor, is facing a tax fraud lawsuit in Washington DC. Despite claiming to reside in Florida, which has no state taxes, Saylor is accused of spending most of his time in various DC residencies.
• Meta is now allowing its 2.9 billion users to add digital wallets and add virtual assets (digital art/NFTs) to their facebook profiles. Prior to this, Meta had only allowed for this capability on Instagram.
• The VC firm lead by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Seven Seven Six, is planning to raise US$177.6m for a new crypto asset focused fund, named Kryptos.
• The Australian Federal Police has set up a dedicated cryptocurrency unit targeting criminals attempting to use crypto to launder money.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• One year to the day from its launch, Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer 2 protocol, has completed its Nitro upgrade. The migration from Arbitrum One to Arbitrum Nitro was designed to reduce fees, increase transaction throughput, and simplify the process to build applications for developers.
• Sudoswap, an increasingly popular decentralised NFT marketplace, has announced the launch of its governance token, SUDO. As part of the launch, holders of the XMON token, the native token of the 0xmon NFT collection, will receive 42% of SUDO via airdrop.
• Helium blockchain, who raised US$200m in March, are proposing to  shift their network from Ethereum to Solana, citing higher throughput and faster transactions amongst reasons.
• dYdX, a decentralised derivatives platform, implemented a controversial "liveness check" face scan as part of their verification process.

The Weekly Deal Room

• Limit Break raised US$200m from Buckley Ventures, Paradigm, Standard Crypto and others to build blockchain-based games. 
• NFT brand and collective, Proof, announced at their annual conference they had raised US$50m from a16z, Collab+Currency, Seven Seven Six and others.
• NFT and metaverse investor Animoca Brands has raised $100m from Singapore’s state investment fund, Temasek.
• tokenproof, an NFT safety and security start-up, raised US$5m in seed funding from Penny Jar Capital and others.
• Xterio has raised €40m from FunPlus, FTX Ventures, Makers Fund and XPLA to build high end web3 mobile games.
• NFT-powered protocol, Koop, raised $5m from 1Confirmation, Variant Fund, and Balaji Srinivasan, in a bid to build a platform that aims to allow consumers to engage more with brands through NFTs.
• Sei, a layer 1 blockchain being designed to optimise for decentralised finance, raised $5m in a round led by Multicoin Capital.
• Stacked, a web3 streaming platform (like a decentralised Twitch), raised 12.9m Series A led by Pantera.
• Decentralised oracle company Redstone raised a ~$7m seed round led by Lemniscap to develop a faster and more cost efficient method of communicating real world data to blockchains.

Metric of the Week

There's now more than 13.5 million ETH being staked in the deposit contract, or ~11.3% of all circulating ETH. Ethereum’s Proof of Stake Beacon chain is now secured by more than 422,000 validators. 

Source: Dune Analytics