There’s something happening here, what it is …
The march to mainstream adoption of crypto technology is accelerating across the world.
1. Are DeFi Tokens Worth Buying?
February 12, Bankless, by Lucas Campbell of Fitzner Blockchain Consulting & DeFi Rate
Data from Token Terminal
Per the thoughtful piece b Lucas Campbell, Synthetix is the leading DeFi protocol in terms of generating cash flows, with an estimated $32 million in annualized fees generated from its 0.30% fee on all Synth trades. Those fees are distributed to SNX stakers, pro-rata, for providing collateral to the underlying Synths.
MakerDAO is #2, generating an estimated $6.7 million in annualized earnings, mostly via the spread between the Dai Savings Rate and the Maker Stability Fee. Maker also makes a small amount from penalty fees. The cash flows are used to purchase and burn MKR, providing a dividend to MKR holders for governing the ecosystem.
2. Almost $200,000 in Digital Land Sold Last Week as VR City Opens Gates
February 21, The Defiant, Camila Russo
Decentraland had it’s public launch last week after three years of beta testing and development. During that time, users have been trading their digital land and building out this city, making everything from art galleries that display digital art, to dance clubs, to volcanoes with amphitheaters. castles and casinos. Decentraland is now open to the general public, so anyone can create an avatar and check it out. Just last week, more than $180,000 of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) representing land on Decentraland were sold bringing the total sold in the past month to $550,000 across 467 parcels.An impressive start!
There are other emerging crypto powered virtual worlds, like Cryptovoxels, which generated almost $400,000 in sales the past month. Cryptovoxels is a lower-fidelity version of Decentraland, that’s easier to build. Upland is also generating significant revenue in beta as it blurs the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds by selling real world addresses (e.g. the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco) in it’s virtual replication of the real world.
Not only can the NFTs representing ownership of the virtual real estate by traded, via Rocket, they can now be used as collateral for “mortgages” (aka loans).
3. Investment Trends in Crypto: The Rise of Venture Capital
February 13, Saxon Advisors, Camron Miraftab
Traditional venture capital is now the dominant source of finance for early and growth-stage crypto businesses, accounting for >70% of early-stage funding across all financing types (ex Bitfinex’s $1Bn crypto-asset sale).
While there was early hope for IEOs in 2019, as crypto-asset exchanges coordinated the sales of project’s tokens directly to its users. Unfortunately, the benefits (i.e. the liquidity and due diligence provided through the host exchange we’re not enough to overcome the lack of rights, and the regulatory uncertainty. The result was mortality rates akin to ICOs.
4. Mentions of the Halving Hit An All Time High
February 22, The TIE
Interesting work by The TIE, a provider of alternative data for digital assets, highlighting the correlation between mentions of the halving in crypto publications and Bitcoin’s price. I was initially skeptical of the impact of the halving. However, given all the other positive developments in crypto, I now believe that the halving will add fuel to the Bitcoin fire. Hard to know how much, but the market is looking for catalysts.
5. Is CryptoMondays NYC Attendance A Leading Indicator Of Crypto Prices?
2/23/20, CryptoMondays NYC, Lou Kerner
We’ve hosted more than 100 CryptoMondays NYC since we started the weekly Meetup group on January 8th, 2018 (THE peak day of crypto market cap). We had 400 RSVPs at our first event, 433 at the 2nd, and 473 at the third. Over the 2+ years we’ve hosted CryptoMondays, attendance appeared to reflect the near term price movements of crypto.
To date, in 2020, we’ve experienced surging attendance, up almost 50%, on average, quarter to date, vs. Q4 last year. Interestingly, crypto market cap is up almost the exact same amount ear to date. That appears to indicate that our Meetup attendance is correlated to crypto prices, but neither a leading or lagging indicator of crypto prices, That said, the surging attendance and excitement at the events certainly feels like a massively positive trend for the industry. And, most importantly, as opposed to early 2018, when the talk was largely about crypto prices, now the dialogue is its about crypto products.
I couldn’t be more excited about 2020.
Added Bonus: My favorite tweet of the week:
If you got .00001 BTC of value from this post please “Clap” below (up to 50 times). Thx!