This Week in Crypto #3
ECB declares Bitcoin dead, General TVL increases & more funding for the Metaverse
Welcome back to This Week In Crypto. Let’s get into it!
ARTICLE OUTLINE:
General market update
DeFi updates
Product launches and fundraises
Interesting reads
General market update
General Market Update
Jerome Powell's recent dovish talk has led investors to expect fewer rate increases in December. The 2-year yield dropped slightly from 4.5% to 4.3%. Markets are now expecting a 50 basis point hike in December 2022 and a 50 basis point hike to 4.75% to 5.0% in February 2023. Overall, the markets still expect a recession to come, in what is currently the most anticipated recession ever.
Meanwhile, Eurozone inflation declined to 10% in November, its first monthly drop in nearly a year and a half. With Eurozone inflation still at extremely unacceptable levels, it was particularly interesting to see the ECB publishing an article where they declare Bitcoin dead, yet another publication that can be added to the Bitcoin Obituaries, a website that keeps track of how many times Bitcoin has been declared dead (currently at 467).
On the crypto markets we can see that Bitcoin is currently in a bearish phase, but with slow progress towards a potential bullish shift. The price has remained stable below $17,000 and reached a new three-week high of $17,300. However, its performance compared to US stocks has been disappointing.
The accumulation trend score suggests that larger entities are accumulating Bitcoin, and the supply held by entities with 10-100 BTC has seen its biggest increase since 2017. On top of this, the strong conviction of HODLers, as indicated by the high percentage of Bitcoin's supply that has not moved in over a year, remains unchanged.
Upcoming events:
Next US CPI release: 13/12/2022
Next FOMC meeting: 14/12/2022
Developer Activity:
We can notice a true battle between Polkadot and Ethereum in terms of developer activity, as both chains have been alternating the number one and number two spot in terms of weekly commits. This week we can see Polkadot taking over the number one spot from Ethereum again. In terms of weekly active developers, Ethereum is still king with more than twice as much active developers as Polkadot.
DeFi updates (TVL and Protocol Revenue)
General DeFi data points for major chains:
This week we are basically seeing the opposite of last week: a general increase in TVL amongst every single chain except for Binance Smart Chain who sees a reduction of almost 10%. The biggest TVL increases can be seen across Arbitrum and Avalanche, with a 7.39% and a 8.33% increase respectively. When looking at protocols deployed on each chain, we can see an increase of:
5 protocols on: Ethereum
4 protocols on: Polygon
3 protocols on: Arbitrum
2 protocols on: Binance Smart Chain
1 protocol on: Avalanche, Optimism and Solana
When it comes to fees, we see Ethereum in first place as expected with more than $13.9 million in fees & Binance on the second spot with $4.9 million. If we compare the sum of the fees over the last 7 days, we notice an increase in Ethereum, Binance, Avalanche and Solana fees & a decrease amongst all others.
Biggest TVL increase amongst protocols with +$1M in TVL:
Top performers of the week amongst fee-generating protocols:
Worst performers of the week amongst fee-generating protocols:
Blockchains with the most revenue last 7 days:
Protocols/dApps with most revenue last 7 days:
Product launches and funding rounds
Crypto market maker Keyrock raises $72M in a Series B round led by Ripple
Staking startup Kiln Finance closes a $17.6 million round to expand its product offerings
FrankieOne, an identity and fraud detection platform, raises $15.4M in series A+
Cyvers raises $8 million to bring security solutions to web3 companies
Interesting reads for the week
My piece about Curve Finance
Thanks for reading - see you next week!