Round Tripping
a weekly recap of the crypto ecosystem
as always, thanks for reading and follow me here
tl;dr: tokens continue rally, SYN chain & app chains, thoughts on metaverse money & singularity, SOL fee priority is live, UNI implementing fees, and ETH narratives/merge
BTC dominance 40% | ETH dominance 18% | DeFi TVL $89B |
Total Crypto Market Cap $1.16T | Stablecoin Supply $153B |
funding:
Variant raises $450M; $150M seed fund & $300M opportunity fund
Ex-Facebook devs behind Aptos Labs raise $150M series A for new L1 chain
Unstoppable Domains, digital identity as NFTs, raises $65M @ $1B valuation to amplify and reward user on-chain reputations & reduce payment friction
Core Scientific, BTC miner, expands operations signing $50M/yr hosting deal
a16z leads $50M fund raising round for Gary V’s Veefriends
Crypto Snack, crypto payments platform, raises $50M
Sweat Economy, developers of StepN like Sweatcoin health app, raises $13M
Aurigami, lending protocol on Aurora, raises $12M from token sale
Naoris, EVM compatible proof-of-security L2/L3, raises $11.5M
Center, cross-chain NFT indexing company, raises $11M seed
NY based fund and incubator Interplay, raises $10M for crypto fund
Space and Time, decentralized blockchain data provider, raises $10M seed
Mighty Bear Games, web3 gaming company, raises $10M through token sale
Quasar, DeFi yield vaults on Cosmos, raises $6M
Cardinal, NFT lending & financialization protocol on SOL, raises $4.4M seed
news:
Investment bank Moelis & Co. launches group for crypto based investments
Bitfinex and Tether partner with Hypercore to launch p2p video calling app Keet; Tether also says it holds no Chinese commercial paper
Penn’s Wharton School launches “Business in the Metaverse Economy” class
Mirror, web3 publishing, launches wallet enabled subscriptions
Coinbase — now under SEC probe regarding the listing of securities; Cathie’s Ark Invest capitulates their Coinbase stock position
Schwab launches Crypto Thematic ETF; no direct crypto exposure
Jump Crypto launching their custody solution Silo
Wallet Security — MetaMask launches version 10.18.0 with improved emphasis on when a transaction is suggesting the costly “Set Approval For All” function; Revoke.cash releases browser extension with warnings for signing allowances
FTX launches stock trading for US users across all 50 states
Babel Finance lost $280M+ in prop trading with customer funds during selloff
Top Hong Kong university to launch parallel virtual campus in metaverse with the ability to generate tokens, avatars, NFTs and receive diplomas as NFTs
thoughts & notes:
Synapse & Appchains
One of the most significant developments this week occurred surrounding one of CT’s favorite coins, Synapse. Synapse was first introduced as a cross chain messaging protocol and bridge that facilitated ETH and stablecoin transfers across chains. On Thursday, Synapse took the next step in their development as the protocol announced Synapse Chain and V2. Upon implementation, Synapse Chain will be “an Ethereum-based optimistic rollup designed to serve as a sovereign execution environment for cross-chain use cases.”
As you can see below, according to DexGuru’s token chart of SYN, the market was buying the development as SYN rallied 42.5% in a single hour candle visualized below.
In their announcement post, Synapse outlined three core protocol developments within V2: generalized cross-chain messaging, optimistic verification, and economic security through delegated proof-of-stake. With risk back on and the combined narratives of growing L2 excitement, Optimism (OP) rallying, and cross chain bridge excitement led to several large buys of SYN after the announcement. The below screenshot from DexGuru’s SYN token profile shows the buying that occurred and created the god candle displayed above.
The most interesting conversation of SYN’s announcement surrounds the value accrual to the token and protocol. In their post linked above, under Synapse Chain Construction, states, “upon launch of Synapse Chain, gas will be paid to the sequencer in ETH…shortly after launch, Synapse DAO could explore a number if mechanisms to tie use of Synapse Chain to SYN in order to fortify the symbiotic relationship between Synapse Chain and the messaging system.” App chains and rollups are increasingly optimizing their structure to utilize a base chain’s security while accruing the most value to their token, protocol, and holders through staking and fee revenue.
We’ve seen this rational before, most recently with dYdX announcing their move to the Cosmos ecosystem primarily to decentralize and provide maximum value to token holders. The app chain trend increasing token value accrual will only increase in the coming months to years, something I previously wrote about when discussing dYdX’s move a few weeks ago.
Metaverse Money & Singularity
Sometimes ideas, frameworks, and theses, once entered, rarely leave your consciousness. For the first time in a few months, this applied to me and was the result of a tweet from a human cosplaying and talking online as a cat in a hazmat suit. Of course I’m talking about the famed crypto personality CL. One of his tweets, and subsequent threads, this week inspired deep thought around network effects and singularity. From the original article titled “Metaverse Money” and posted to egirl capital, the striking quote, in my opinion, is below.
“similar to how majority of the world reads music on staves, measure things in metric, and publish scientific literature in english, cat is skeptical that the digital society will be of dozens of base money, notice these previous examples are all something like social-information-norms, we need to understand them to operate in that specific field or domain, and their network effects tend to be very dominating, and can only be stopped via segregation, via eg. nations, religions, distance - these are what allowed alternative systems to exist“
While I’ll never do the words of a gigabrain cat justice, the point he was trying to make can be essentially boiled down to (currently) longing the metaverse and subsequently ETH as the best crypto investments. In the above linked thread, CL says,
“in order for hoomans to communicate with each other at scale, they need to agree on a system…the reason hoomans won’t see multi-currency base money on the internet is simply because the internet is the least segregating and powerful social network hoomans ever seen…every hooman - regardless of race, background, age, apperance, etc, is a click away from each other and they all understand the same memes.”
Crypto, and more broadly the internet, is so powerful because of the global connectivity it enables. Global participants, in order to maximize outcomes and efficiency, usually trend towards coalescing around singular outcomes such as the current leaders English and the dollar. Cat’s example of the publication of scientific research exploding when English became the primary language studies were written in is a good example of the convergence of network effects compounded through singularity.
This thesis, as @nosleepjon said to me, is one of the most compelling arguments for “the metaverse” and ETH as the underlying money. Most “metaverse” transactions are currently denominated in ETH (NFTs, DeFi, etc.), so that network effect combined with demographic/cultural shifts surrounding global time and wealth spent online would likely consolidate into a singular base money.
tokens & protocols:
SOL implements long awaited fee-based execution priority; data & thread here
Synapse (SYN) launches Synapse Chain, an Optimistic Rollup on ETH
Uniswap (UNI) proposal to take a massive step towards enabling protocol fee generation for USDC/ETH and USDC/USDT pools; good thread here
Cosmos (ATOM) ecosystem now able to access THORChain (RUNE) liquidity
AAVE DAO voting (and surely passing) on enabling GHO stablecoin creation
Arbitrum, token soon, launching Nitro upgrade on testnet, mainnet “few weeks”
Final ETH testnet merge, Goerli, to take place between August 6th-12th
Oasis Labs (ROSE) partners with Meta to “asses fairness for its AI models”
IMX launches trade to earn incentives program & teases “major games” coming
DOT’s Moonbeam partners with Cosmos based OSMO to enable direct swaps and interoperability between Cosmos and Polkadot ecosystems
APE shares an update on ongoing developments, staking soon
Star Atlas (ATLAS/POLIS) announces launch of DAO & new marketplace
DefiLlama has an “open source, privacy conscious portfolio tracker soon”
Portecc out of stealth, adds to growing number of NFT liquidity protocols
around the ecosystem:
path’s thoughts on the future in Pandemic to Contagion: a Cycle in Review
Qiao Wang with some thoughts on crypto cycles and where we stand
drnick provides an amazing recap of the most ridiculous moments of this cycle
Nic Carter with a great post on the growing physical aspects of NFTs
tweets:
