Crypto Alpha Recap
Boy, oh boy, FED hikes by 75 basis points as expected. But the “ultimate level of rates will be higher than previously expected” comment from Powell crashed the market. Over $860 billion was wiped out from the US stock market yesterday. Bitcoin is holding on for dear life at the famous 20k range. Flat since June, although you could argue monthly October closing was neutral-bullish. Macro stays utter crap, while sentiment inside the spaces is getting better by the day. Watch out for the NFT sector: Meta, Reddit… something is brewing.
Catalysts to watch in November:
Macro: Non-farm payrolls (NFP) / Unemployment rate on the 4th, OPEC on the 5th, mid-term elections on the 8th, CPI on the 10th.
ATOM 2.0 vote results and implementation details.
LINK: staking details on the collection/distribution tokens paid to the protocol.
Stablecoin wars: CRV Stablecoin is expected to launch soon. Further FTX & AAVE news eventually.
GNS launch on Arbitrum. GMX fork, likely sell the news event. Currently riding the wave of actual yield, L2 season, and zkseason narrative.
Potential NFT surge and marketplace wars: Reddit’s digital collectibles, BLUR marketplace, including updates on XMON/SUDO. y00ts reveal (SOL), Art Gobblers doing absolute poggers volume (26.5k ETH in 2 days). Instagram enters the NFT game with Polygon.
Ongoing momentum of CANTO, Synapse integration will offer a better bridging experience.
LayerZero potential airdrop fueling: STG + SUSHI.
Revival of meme coins and retail traders? Speculation is ongoing that Twitter will integrate DOGE as a crypto payment solution. DOGE surged over 160% after a Twitter takeover. Open interest, also in SHIB, is rising.
Arbirum’s potential resumption of Odyssey & token airdrop.
zkSync’s ongoing rollout of it's zkEVM & tokenomics outline.
CHZ strength & fan token ecosystem ahead of World Cup. National team tokens such as ARG (Messi) and POR (Ronaldo) were made by Chilliz, a possible Binance listing?
Solana Breakpoint conference 4th-7th. The biggest conference likely sell the news event, but exciting announcements are expected to happen.
GM! Sharing is caring. Be a chad and share this newsletter with your colleagues.
Crypto News:
Matter Labs, developer of zkSync, is working on a Layer 3 chain called Opportunity - plans to release a proof of concept in the first quarter of 2023.
A judicial report has reportedly revealed that crypto lender Hodlnaut lost around $189.7m due to its exposure to the Terra crash.
Digital bank Revolut partnered with DEX aggregator 1inch to introduce its joint crypto “Learn & Earn” course focused on DeFi.
FTX staff has been encouraged to relocate to the new Miami headquarters, which is home to FTX Arena, by mid-November.
Galaxy Digital, founded by Michael Novogratz, plans to cut at least 20% of its workforce. In August, Galaxy reported a Q2 loss of $554m.
Alameda had $14.6 billion of assets as of June 30, primarily held in FTT, SOL and SRM.
DeFi landscape:
The attacker behind last week’s $14.5 million exploit of crypto launchpad Team Finance has returned some $7 million worth of tokens to four projects over the weekend.
Matter Labs releases the first phase of zkSync 2.0 mainnet called 'baby alpha'.
44 exploits (53 protocols affected) did happen in October. Around $760m was stolen ~$100M had returned the exploited protocols.
Nikolai Mushegian, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency lending platform MakerDAO and the decentralized Dai stablecoin, died in Puerto Rico last week.
NFT & Metaverse:
Art Gobblers, an NFT project co-created by Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland, nabbed more than $13 million just two hours after launch.
Opensea launching a new copymint detection system today that can identify exact matches, flips, and fuzzy copies within seconds of a mint.
Find Satoshi Lab (FSL), the company behind STEPN is launching MOOAR. A Multi-chain NFT marketplace and launchpad going against the creator royalty trend set by others. with a zero-fee, compulsory royalty structure. Payments to artists will default to 2%, or within a 0.5% to 10% range, depending on what the creator chooses to set. No service fees but it adopts a membership model, which costs $29.99 per month.
Goblin Sax, a decentralized autonomous organization for NFT finance, is launching an instant loans service. It acquired instant loans app Fluid, which it will rebrand as Goblin Lend, to build out the product alongside its existing peer-to-peer NFT lending service.
Funding Highlights:
Tharsis, the developers of Evmos, raised $27 million at an undisclosed valuation in a token sale round led by Polychain Capital. Galaxy, Huobi, and HashKey also participated.
Crypto-focused investment firm CoinFund is looking to raise $250M for seed investments. Less than three months ago, the firm already announced a $300m venture capital fund.
Crypto wallet Braavos has raised a $10 million in a funding round led by crypto-focused investment giant Pantera Capital.
Lingfeng Innovation Fund (LIF), a new venture capital fund led by former Binance Labs executive Nicole Zhang, landed $20M to invest in crypto startups. The vehicle is a sister fund to Lingfeng Capital, the Beijing-based fintech investment firm with over $400M in AUM.
Podcasts / Reads / Research:
Since the merge: How are things changing?
State of Polygon Q3 2022 - messari
Do DeFi protocols really need a token to work? - ignas
Introducing a low-Latency oracle solution for the DeFi derivatives market - Chainlink
Crypto Twitter:
Meme of the Day:
