The Week In Crypto In Five Graphs (12/22/19)
For those who love Crypto & graphs that tell a compelling story
For those who love Crypto & graphs that tell a compelling story
The march to mainstream adoption continues with progress being made all over the place. Even if that progress is two steps forward and one step back (e.g. the PlusToken scam).
#1 Libra Core Roadmap #2
Libra Engineering Team, December 17
Libra’s Roadmap #2, focuses on three areas: 1) delivering mainnet features in priority order, 2) defining launch criteria for going from Libra pre-mainnet to mainnet, and 3) beginning to build a Libra community so that they can be valuable contributors to the Libra project.
While no timelines were given in the roadmap, there was note of significant progress made to date, most notably finalizing the design for all major features for mainnet launch.
While I believe that Libra will continue to face insurmountable headwinds from the major regulators, Libra remains a global focal point for the industry.
#2 Stable Coins In 2019
Decentralised.co, December 4
Not surprisingly, the data shows that Tether (USDT) dominates in terms of share of stable coin volume, with about 80%. That level of centralization is worrisome for all who are here for the advantages of decentralization. Circle’s USDC has 45% of the remaining share, which is a good starting point for their new stable coin focus. The remaining share is largely divided between DAI and Paxos, at around 20% each, with True USD At 10%. It seems that power laws apply to stable coins as well.
#3 PlusToken Scammers Didn’t Just Steal $2+ Billion Worth of Cryptocurrency. They May Also Be Driving Down the Price of Bitcoin
Chainalysis, December 16
There is a broad held belief that the liquidation of some of the $2 billion in BTC and ETH from the PlusToken scam hammered the price of crypto this week. In a super interesting piece, Chainalysis looks at the path to liquidity that the tokens are taking, as they go from wallet to wallet until they eventually get to an offramp (e.g. Chinese exchange Huobi in the graph above).
Other transactions were conducted through mixers like Wasabi Wallet, which utilizes the CoinJoin protocol to make it more difficult to trace the path of funds. Here, we see that the funds are split off into large groups of new unique addresses, and re-consolidated later, which is activity typical of a mixer.
#4 DappRadar 2019 dapp Industry Review
DappRadar, December 18·
There was lots of great data in the report relative to who’s using decentralized apps. Ethereum dApps had steady growth daily active wallets, but major competitors EOS (down almost 50%) and Tron (down 75%) both saw dramatic declines in transaction volume.
While DeFi accounted for only 6% of daily active unique wallets but generated 45% of total dApp volume.
#5 Decade of Quantitative Easing Has Paved the Way for the Age of Digital Currency
Michael Casey via CoinDesk, December 20th
In his year end piece for Coindesk, MIT Media Lab Advisor Michael Casey opined that we are facing a paradigm shift in which no single currency enjoys global hegemonic dominance like the U.S. currently enjoys. He goes on to write that “When they come to write about this period, my guess is that historians will look upon the 2010s as the decade that set up that shift. Explaining it, they’ll point to two main developments: that QE exposed the limitations of the existing, bank-centric system and that cryptocurrencies emerged to posit an alternative model”.
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