Round Tripping
a weekly recap of the crypto ecosystem
as always, thanks for reading and follow me here
tl;dr: sellers finally exhausted, Maker RWAs (real world assets), sudoswap & NFT liquidity, AAVE stablecoin GHO, Sepolia testnet merge success, and news galore
BTC dominance 42% | ETH dominance 15% | DeFi TVL $104B |
Total Crypto Market Cap $997B | Stablecoin Supply $153.5B |
funding:
Konvoy Ventures launches $150M web3 gaming focused fund
Hidden Road, crypto credit and prime brokerage platform, raises $50M
Mask Network, crypto payments and messaging platform, raises $42M
Planetarium Labs, web3 gaming technology firm , raises $32M series A
Oasys, blockchain purpose built for web3 gaming/developers, raises $20M
Ondo Finance, DeFi structured products, raises $10M in public token sale
Thalex, options and futures exchange, raises $7.6M seed
Cauldron, storytelling focused crypto gaming firm, raises $6.6M seed
Bitmark raises $5.6M and releases Autonomy NFT wallet
Tenderize, staking derivatives DeFi protocol, raises $3M seed
news:
Reddit launches NFT avatar marketplace and new “blockchain-based avatars”
Ledger partners with FTX to enable 120+ assets swaps through Ledger Live
Jito Labs announces the launch of first MEV dashboard for Solana
Jason Choi launches Tangent Ventures, angel syndicate for crypto founders
Binance announces zero fee BTC trading
Voyager files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid $650M outstanding claim to 3AC
Uprise lost 99% of customer funds ($20M) shorting LUNA as it crashed
BlockFi & FTX US reach $680M deal
Virtu Financial, legacy market maker, hiring a weekend crypto trader
Vincenzo Sospiri to use NFTs to certify and authenticate factory parts
Nexo signs indicative term sheet to acquire troubled crypto lender Vauld
0xb1, confirmed to be Jason Stone, managed billions for Celsius, calls them a ponzi and files lawsuit alleging mismanagement of user funds and fraud
His Excellency Justin Sun says ready to deploy $5B on acquisitions
Blockchain.com prepared to lose $270M on loans to 3AC
Robinhood enables send/receive for all listed crypto assets
Axie Infinity $540M hack done through social engineering and a fake job post
thoughts & notes:
Selling Pressure Abated
Has the chaos of LUNA and 3AC been absorbed and digested? I’d say largely yes. June, and Q2 in general, was one of the worst recorded for crypto markets but it’s becoming increasingly clear the forced selling, liquidations, and capitulation as a result of LUNA and subsequently 3AC’s collapse is over. While legacy indexes rallying this week certainly pushed crypto up, market participants and narratives are slowly shifting as data, both anecdotal and empirical, reveal the selling pressure recently.
The market bottomed around 18.8k and 900 for BTC/ETH respectively as Celsius, 3AC, Voyager, BlockFI, BTC miners and others became forced sellers and offloaded billions of assets into the market. We’ve since learned that Celsius fully paid down their entire Maker debt and performed ~$1B in on-chain sales, BlockFi has sold ~$900M in BTC below $30k, Core Scientific sold 7,202 BTC in June generating $167M, CleanSpark sold nearly all 339 BTC mined in June, Argo sold 637 BTC in June, along with the obvious combination of LFG and 3AC, and their affected affiliates, selling billions worth of crypto assets.
While it’s obviously impossible to know (and likely macro driven) if the previous levels of ~19k and ~900 hold for cyclical lows, it’s abundantly clear that the market has absorbed capitulation and responded accordingly with beautiful, green numbers this week. I mean, how much worse could it really get?
MakerDAO & RWAs (real world assets)
One of the most interesting developments in crypto over the past few weeks has been surrounding MakerDAO’s (MKR) diversification and collateral addition strategies. MIP65 was a Maker Improvement Proposal voting on how to allocate 500 million DAI for diversifying the protocol’s balance sheet. The winning vote, ending on June 27th, will result in Maker using $500M to purchase U.S. short term treasuries (80%) and investment grade (IG) corporate bonds (20%).
While MIP65 is extremely interesting, Maker Governance also voted to add RWA-009 as a new vault which could be looked back on as a ground breaking achievement and milestone for DeFi and crypto. RWA-009 will create a DAI vault for Huntingdon Valley Bank consisting of RWAs with an initial $100M debt ceiling which will be eventually raised to $1B. The establishment of this vault will allow Huntingdon to borrow DAI after depositing off-chain loans that are on its balance sheet as collateral.
Sudoswap & NFT liquidity
Sudoswap is live! Covered ad nauseam in previous editions of Round Tripping, improvements to NFT liquidity and the financialization of NFTs as assets are rapidly being developed just as the mainstream declares the asset class dead. Sudoswap is an AMM for NFTs that is rolling out with three core functionalities improving NFT liquidity. Users can “create pools that gradually buy or sell NFTs along price curves, provide liquidity to pools that and sell NFTs to earn fees, and directly list their NFTs at fixed prices.”
As I’ve previously outlined, observing the mechanisms that improve NFT liquidity and financialization will be necessary to profit, interact with, and observe the asset class as NFTs continue expanding their impact. This can be easily evidenced through the market’s response to sudoswap’s announcement within the DexGuru XMON token profile shown below. XMON was launched by the team behind sudoswap and ties together their expanding vision of an NFT ecosystem.
tokens:
AAVE proposes over collateralized stablecoin GHO
Aztec Connect, ZKR enabled private DeFi transactions, now live on mainnet
ATOM ecosystem getting first price oracle for IBC through Umee
STEPN expanding to ETH ecosystem through NFT mint Ape Realm
TFM, DEX and NFT aggregator on Cosmos’ JUNO, is now live
ZigZag (ZZ), L2 ZKR DEX, announces InvisibL3 — an L3 ZKR powered by StarkWare that enables private transactions
ETH testnet Sepolia undergoes successful merge simulation, Goerli next
Polygon (MATIC) to bring NFTs to new Android-based Nothing smartphone
Optimism (OP) proposal using Celestia for data availability, ETH for settlement
Rage Trade, a liquid, composable, omnichain perp protocol, is announced
AURA Finance draft proposal to form a partnership with OHM is now live
0x (ZRX) API will power GameStop’s mobile wallet DEX swaps
Looks Rare (LOOKS) launches discord integrated notifications
Cosmostation Wallet supporting 40+ ATOM networks & EVM compatible L1/L2s
around the ecosystem:
Volt Capital’s deep dive on modular blockchains and their architecture
ChainLinkGod with a good thread around RWA (real world assets) on chain
Qaio Wang from AllianceDAO lists 100+ Web3 Startup Ideas
OnChainWizard outlines The Crypto Gaming Opportunity
tweets:
