🍄 Vitalik, Unicorns, Usain Bolt & Optimism 🦄
2y ago•
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Market Overview
GM and welcome to another week of CoinStats Scoop! ☀ Wow, is it another week of green charts and rallying tokens? We’re not claiming that the beginning of these weekly articles marked the very bottom of the markets but we also don’t believe in coincidences 🤷♂️
As you can see from the above screenshot of protocols added to the favorites tab, many of the tokens and sectors we previously touched on have enjoyed another green week. MATIC, AAVE, ATOM, LDO, CRV, APE, SOL, and many others have followed ETH and BTC upwards. ETH is one of the largest gainers of the week: It climbed 30%+ as market participants anticipate the upcoming merge to POS which is roughly two months away from today. Furthermore, ETH scaling solutions are rapidly advancing and giving investors multiple catalysts to get excited about. We'll discuss this in more detail down below.
News & Developments
Below are some of the most impactful announcements over the week that indicate crypto’s rising demand across a broad swath of institutions, protocols, corporations, and legacy companies. Announcements, interest, and product developments continue, planting seeds for the next bull run and wider crypto adoption.
Dubai outlines their metaverse strategy, hopes to support 40k metaverse jobs and add $4 billion to their economy within the next 5 years
BNP Paribas, France’s largest custodian bank ($13.4 trillion), enters crypto custody space
Historical art house giant Christie’s is launching a venture arm for crypto-based art investments
Tesla paperhands their BTC and sells 75% of it. The market digests and recovers the news
Usain Bolt becomes the face of step.app and their token $FITFI
SkyBridge and Modular Capital both announce new funds investing in crypto & Web3
CurveDAO ($CRV) implies that a new over collateralized stablecoin is on its way
Rollups Scaling Crypto
While our tokens have enjoyed another prosperous week, it’s important to continue thinking about the future and being aware of what’s coming next. As such, the main focus this week will be on Rollups! Rollups are what crypto needs to scale to hundreds of millions to billions of users as the ecosystem continues to push forward and impact society over the coming years. We had several announcements from protocols building rollup scaling solutions this week so it’s an apt time to discuss them and put them on your radar moving forward. For a high-level view of rollups see the below screenshot from L2beat.com.
Optimistic & Zero Knowledge
There are two main types of rollups, optimistic rollups (ORs) and zero-knowledge rollups (ZKRs). You’re likely familiar with optimistic rollups as they are in use across the Ethereum ecosystem today, with the biggest players being Optimism and Arbitrum. Optimism has completed the early steps of their protocol decentralization by releasing their token $OP. Arbitrum is on a similar path and is confirmed to be airdropping their token to users who complete steps outlined in their Arbitrum Odyssey. The Odyssey is currently paused as Arbitrum works through technical details, but should be live again soon.
Zero-knowledge rollups and scaling solutions are more complex technically, more difficult to scale. Teams, companies, and protocols have been working at solving ZK scaling solutions for years, and we’re approaching the rollout of their tireless work. There were several announcements regarding ZKRs this week including:
$MATIC launching their Polygon zkEVM L2 on testnet
Scroll, a ZKR scaling company, releasing the pre-alpha version of Scroll zkEVM for testing
zkSYNC announcing their zkEVM rollup will be live on mainnet in 100 days
As previously mentioned, scaling solutions are extremely complex. Thankfully, there are many resources to learn more about them, such as the excellent thread from 0xfoobar above. While the details of rollup scaling solutions' implementation are complicated, users and speculators shouldn’t worry and instead focus on the core takeaway: That there's ongoing effort to scale ETH in the short and long term, providing consistently cheaper fees for users.
It’s important to note the recent market recovery, mostly led by ETH, is in large part, it was due to the aforementioned merge and rollup scaling catalysts. What’s also important is the realization that rollups are not ETH-specific, they’re blockchain agnostic and can/will be implemented on other base L1 chains, such as ATOM and SOL. This fact emphasizes their importance, and users and market participants alike should keep track of scaling developments. Crypto absolutely needs successful scaling solutions to achieve its long term goals of disrupting finance and empowering people across the globe.
Read of the Week
Our previous two Reads of the Week were timely and beneficial: The first “It’s All a DeFi Thesis” corresponded with the entire DeFi sector beginning to recover, while the second “Is Forced Selling Behind Us?” held up well as markets continued to rally off the lows. This week, we’re highlighting an excellent thread by guleid:
The thread is shorter and more direct than any long-form analysis of things to keep an eye on over the coming months. It should encourage readers to dive deeper into the protocols and trends that will be developing over the coming months, likely providing significant economic returns. We largely agree with everything said, and recommend readers monitor the following:
The long-awaited Ethereum merge likely occurring in September
Cosmos ($ATOM) rolling out Interchain Security in the months to come
Scaling solutions we outlined above, including zkSync, MATIC, StarkNet, and Scroll
The developments around new blockchain protocols Sui & Aptos
$NEAR blockchain continuing it’s rollout and advancing in Q4
Thorchain ($RUNE) adding $ATOM and $AVAX integrations
Solana — launch of Solana phone early next year and the protocol implementing a functioning fee market and ongoing scaling issues being solved
These are the key trends unraveling in crypto right now.
Tweets & Memes
Hilarious video demonstrating the need to always be conscious of token distribution and fully diluted values or you’ll end up like the kids in the end of this video!
Jona’s amazing 9-minute video depiction of LUNA & UST
Vitalik rocking his usual standout clothes. Pants tucked into Unisocks is a definite highlight!
Wrapping Up
As usual, we’re closing the third installment of CoinStats Scoop on a high note! Our tokens have continued rallying and builders have continued to build. Scaling solutions, specifically ZKRs, are rapidly approaching their moment in the spotlight just as ETH readies itself for the merge. What a beautiful confluence of events!
Other key takeaways from this week include DeFi’s lasting resurgence, and the number of protocols and developments we highlighted to monitor in the Read of the Week. It includes ETH, RUNE, SOL, Aptos/Sui, StarkNet/zkSync/MATIC scaling solutions, and ATOM’s soon-to-be-released Interchain Security. Readers should have a plethora of things to explore, so thanks for reading and we’ll see you next week.
Let’s hear your thoughts, comments, and feedback as we work together to improve CoinStats Scoop!
2y ago•
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