I’ve been noodling around with how best to present this info. Still not completely happy with it. The idea is for these to be the ultimate degen’s guide. One day. Enjoy and let me know if you have any feedback.
Launches:
NFT trading live on Uniswap with $5M airdrop to past users of Genie
BNB Chain live on OpenSea
Blur's second airdrop December 5th and is 10x bigger than Airdrop 1
Chainlink Staking v0.1 launching on Ethereum mainnet on December 6th
Ape Staking Update: shortened the pre-deposit period by a week to keep original December 12 launch
Trader Joe DEX launching on Arbitrum - Imminent testnet and expected to launch on mainnet in early 2023
The $ACX token is live and ready to claim. An ERC20 token that controls the Across.to cross-chain bridge
ETH Liquid Staking Product qETH available on Tranchess
Blockchain protocol Komodo launched AtomicDEX Web - a wallet, cross-chain bridge and DEX
BracketX live on Arbitrum One Mainnet
Aboard Exchange, a Central Limit Order Book, goes multichain and launched on Avalanche
Harbor Protocol’s Airdrop - 150M tokens, 15% of the Total supply of $HARBOR
AXL airdrop site is live
The Onomy Network is live
LensPort 2.0 has been released. LensPort is now a marketplace and a complete Lens social app
Governance Proposals:
The MakerDAO community rejected a proposal to use up to 500M USDC to invest in bonds with CoinShares
MakerDAO voted to increase the amount of interest it pays on Dai deposits to 1.00%
Compound to vote on a 100% increase in the WETH supply limit
Fantom dApp Gas Monetization Program - proposes slashing the protocol's current token burn rate from 20% to 5%
Testnets and Mainnets:
Sui Network Testnet Wave 2 coming - Testnet Wave 1 sunsetted
StarkNet Mainnet alpha upgraded to v0.10.2. Expect an improved TPS + Performance Roadmap
nftperp Beta Mainnet is officially live
Theta Metachain goes live - Mainnet 4.0
Lithium Finance launch of its Mainnet Beta on the Polygon blockchain on December 12th
Espresso Sequencer Testnet 1 - Americano - released to the public
Incentives for Aleo Testnet 3 will be activated on December 2nd
Aztec Connect has launched a stable developer testnet - Aztec Connect Testnet v1
Cedro Testnet 1.0 - an Omnichain Lending and Borrowing platform that unifies fragmented liquidity across chains
Listings:
Binance completes the Hooked Protocol subscription launchpad and will open trading for HOOK
Coinbase and Coinbase Pro will list Vulcan Forged PYR
Coinbase added Aavegotchi (GHST) and Litentry (LIT) to its roadmap
Some Upcoming Airdrops:
Arbitrum
StarkWare
zksync
LayerZero
Shardeum
Optimism
Sui
Sei
Berachain
News & Developments:
ConsenSys collects IP addresses and wallet address information of those who access MetaMask via Infura
Apple blocked Coinbase Wallet so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee
Crypto lender BlockFi will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and lay off a large portion of its staff
DEX aggregator 1inch introduced a feature called RabbitHole that's designed to prevent MetaMask users from getting hit by sandwich attack frontrunning
Fantom blockchain is cash-flow positive, earning more than $10M in annual revenue
Aptos partnering with web3 fintech firm MoonPay through an integration with Petra, the crypto wallet built by Aptos Labs
Cardano DeFi project Ardana halts development, citing funding, timeline concerns. Previously closed a $10M round led by now bankrupt crypto hedge fund firm Three Arrows Capital last year
Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom is expanding to Ethereum and Polygon - competing with the market leader, MetaMask
The Open Network (TON) community developed a trading Telegram bot and plans to build crypto wallets and DEXs
Kaiko launches tracking market data for DeFi lending and borrowing protocols: Aave, Compound and MakerDAO
Wemix will be delisted from major South Korean exchanges in December
Coinbase Wallet will stop supporting BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP, citing low usage
WBTC DAO, the community that administers the Wrapped Bitcoin project, is moving to a new smart contract multisig
Aave has temporarily frozen lending markets for 17 tokens due to short position that left $1.6M in bad debt
Compound risk parameters loan limits on WBTC, BAT, UNI, COMP, LINK, SUSHI, ZRX, AAVE, YFI, MKR
Magic Eden launches Solana NFT tool to enforce creator royalties in a similar move to OpenSea
Web3 gaming DAO, Game7, has launched a $100M game developers grant program
Binance partnership with Injective allows Binance Custody clients to stake their $INJ tokens directly
GMX earned $1.15M in trading fees, surpassing Uniswap's $1.06M for the first time on record
Natively issued $FRAX on the BNB chain via the Wombat ecosystem
RNS.id, a digital Web3 identity platform that supports sovereignty-backed IDs, integrating with zkSync for on-chain KYC
SUI Delegation Program - critical step towards decentralization & in supporting the community's participation
Moonbirds now purely “in-chain”, which means no external dependencies
Deadmau5’s Pixelynx unveils augmented reality music metaverse NFT scavenger hunt: ‘Rock Band Meets Pokémon Go’
Prada presents the new Timecapsule NFT Collection. Each drop is linked to both a limited edition physical product
NFT offers are live on the Immutable X protocol
Sony’s latest invention for the metaverse, a wearable motion-tracking system called Mocopi - will cost about $358
Mobile game maker Aeria Canada Studio partnered with Ready Games to migrate its most popular mobile titles to web3
Creators selling NFTs on OpenSea collectively earned $1.1B in royalties this year
Art Basel Miami Beach offered a “generative” NFT mint on Tezos. 2,500 NFTs will be minted
Crypto payments infrastructure firm MoonPay is rolling out what it calls a "soulbound" NFT loyalty program
Timex will make 500 watches for Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club holders, decorated with their NFTs - follows a similar move by Tiffany & Co. for CryptoPunk holders
Pudgy Penguin's 'Snowed In' collection sells out at Sotheby's for an average of $12,900 each
First Web3 project Porsche has planned is a 7,500-piece NFT collection based on the classic Porsche 911 January 2023
This week I wrote out some musings on looking at things from a time based market bottom instead of a price one:
Reach out to me on tweeter
- Time moves differently in crypto. Crypto is an intricate game filled with various players operating across multiple time frames and with varying agendas. Day in, day out, the pieces are moving all across the board. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The following is a look at the crypto landscape during the past week covering various sectors. Use these events like clues - let it tell you the larger overarching story of crypto -
Data:
Bitcoin:
So Bitcoin is up ~ 2-3% on the week which some people seem excited about, however when you look at things from the monthly level, it’s far less impressive. Just ranging and crabbing away. Picobottom for now has been put in at $15,473. We’ll have to see if that holds over the next few weeks and months - I’m not looking at the market bottom as a price but as a time. We still have some more time to go imo.
Ethereum:
ETH is up ~ 7% this week which always sounds good but then the chart looks like this still. This bad boy has been resilient AF in not wanting to break the $1100 level. Still heavily curious as to which large entities out there might become forced sellers as that would probably be the straw that breaks the horse’s back and sends prices lower. Still no notable developments so far. Genesis and DCG gave concerns but it’s been quiet from them so far.
Crypto Market Cap:
Total crypto market cap is still currently ranging in the $850B range. My eye is drawn to that little spike in volume during the selloff during all the FTX bullshit. Most of the little wee volume spikes we’ve had over the past year have been from heavy selling.
Nansen Smart Money:
This gives an idea of how risk on or risk off smart money is feeling. We had a local top on November 9th and since then, smart money has been slowing moving out of stables.
Nansen Hot NFT Contracts:
Highest Volume NFT collections of the past week:
BAYC and MAYC along with Otherdeed towards the top of this week’s volume. Could it be because Timex will make 500 watches for Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club holders, decorated with their NFTs? Follows a similar move by Tiffany & Co. for CryptoPunk holders
DefiLlama DeFi TVL: $42.5B
Yep, looks crummy still. Same drop that coincides with the FTX fuckery. On one hand, some people seem to think that the failure of so many centralized entities will push people towards DeFi, and while we’ve seen increased DEX volumes, capital definitely isn’t being locked in DeFi smart contracts yet.
Top protocols by TVL:
If you look at the top protocols, most of them had a green week! Which is less exciting when you glance to the right and see they’re all still down on the month.
Let’s not be doomers though and check out who rebounded strongly this week. Filtering these by minimum $1M TVL.
Gonna pick on Hashflow. Taking a look, it looks like despite a nuke in October, this has been grinding upwards and is near all time highs. Interesting.
The top blockchains by TVL:
I’ve only got eyes for the monthly change which looks hella bloody.
Picking on Optimism out of that list since it’s down ~ 45% we can see that it’s TVL nearly halved from about a billion. Ouch. Looks like Arbitrum is winning the L2 race for now.
In general, we can see a big spike in November DEX volume that resulted from people fleeing centralized exchanges due to FTX.
And who’s capturing the bulk of DEX volume? Uniswap
Token Terminal Revenue: (7D)
I think this is a neat little leaderboard that Token Terminal has. It’s definitely missing information since this doesn’t give a sense of where other expenses go such as payroll and operational costs, but it does a good job at painting a simplistic picture of the health of a protocol. How much money is taken in in fees, how much of that is captured as revenue and how much the protocol emits in incentives. What’s left over are the “earnings”
We can also compare with those protocols that are issuing way more incentives than they take in in revenue. Interesting names on both ends of the spectrum.
The Block Data: NFTs
Ok, so looking at NFT sales and volumes, we can see how highly unimpressive this sector is right now. Ehh. Markets move in cycles don’t they. One observation is that gaming has been beating out arts and collectibles
Despite Solana making moves in the NFT space, ETH is still the main chain where all the NFT bros hangout. When will the volume return? Will it at all? Will crypto just move on and iterate and those stuck in the last cycle mindset get left behind?
Developer Activity:
Taking a look at developer activity, both weekly commits and weekly active developers have been slumping.
A very curious social metric, Solana got a huge boost in twitter followers during the FTX cuckery.
Out of all the various types of crypto things out there, Bitcoin dominates when it comes to Google search volumes. Worth knowing what the normies are searching for
From: Nansen, DexScreener, CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, DefiLlama, DappRadar, CryptoSlam, TokenTerminal, Tradingview, Dune, Arkham Intelligence, The Block, GokuStats
Now, for those who like detail and sources - this is the week segmented by day:
Crypto News:
Monday:
Ethereum-focused software company ConsenSys collects IP addresses and wallet address information of those who access Ethereum wallet MetaMask via the blockchain infrastructure service Infura. Alternative RPC providers like Ankr, and others don’t collect such data but they may collect such data if they want to. Other RPC providers, such as Alchemy, Moralis and QuickNode, also stated that they are collecting personal information such as IP addresses if you used their services
Binance officially launched the Industry Recovery Initiative with a $1B commitment and intent to commit a further $2B if the need arises. Jump Crypto, Polygon Ventures, Aptos Labs, Animoca Brands, GSR, Kronos and Brooker Group have also committed to participating with an initial aggregate commitment of around $50M
Crypto lender BlockFi will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and lay off a large portion of its staff
Wrapped ether remains perfectly fine, despite jokes on Twitter
Amazon Prime Video started work on an 8 episodes TV series on SBF and the FTX Saga with "Avengers: Endgame" directors the Russo brothers with multiple Marvel actors in talks to star
Blockchain development firm Starkware has open-sourced a new release of its programming language Cairo - the first step in a wider move to make its entire blockchain stack for StarkNet open source
Crypto Twitter influencers converged on the Bahamas in search of SBF
Independent developers from The Open Network (TON) community developed a Telegram bot for trading and transferring cryptocurrency
Crypto users have left $27M of funds unclaimed in the Polygon bridge, potentially due to the two-step withdrawal process
Fantom blockchain is cash-flow positive, earning more than $10M in annual revenue
Taipei blockchain week - December 12–17, 2022. General Admission: $125
$25M Casper Accelerate Grant Program will support learning, development, and innovations in Infrastructure, dApps, DeFi, Gaming & NFTs
Tuesday:
Silvergate Capital has “minimal” exposure to lender BlockFi, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and that BlockFi deposits make up less than $20M of total deposits
After filing for bankruptcy protection, crypto firm BlockFi sued Sam Bankman-Fried over Robinhood shares he allegedly pledged to the lender as collateral
Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom is expanding to Ethereum and Polygon - competing with the market leader, MetaMask
Mastercard filed another crypto/web3 trademark application covering: crypto transaction monitoring software, providing cryptocurrency info, risk assessment services
Fidelity started opening retail crypto trading accounts after announcing a waiting list earlier this month
Starlight, a Brevan Howard-backed web3 payments startup, launched corporate cards that aim to simplify expense payments for crypto businesses
Paradigm is sponsoring Tom Meagher and Jake Moxey to focus full-time on wagmi, a powerful & ergonomic web3 frontend development library - vision is to build open-source libraries to accelerate web3 frontend development
Fintech company Plum has rolled out crypto investing services to customers in France, Belgium, Spain and Ireland in partnership with Bitpanda
Wednesday:
Crypto lender BlockFi has $355M in digital assets frozen on FTX
Genesis creditors organize in bid to forestall bankruptcy move. Law firms Proskauer Rose and Kirkland & Ellis are said to be involved in discussions with creditors
Some investors are trying to acquire CoinDesk, the cryptocurrency news website owned by DCG, at a price of $300M
After community backlash, Jack Dorsey's project TBD backed out of their plan to trademark the term “Web5”
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink specified that the asset management giant had invested $24M in FTX before its collapse
Shipping company Maersk and IBM are withdrawing their blockchain-enabled supply chain offering, TradeLens, and discontinuing the platform. Did not reach the level of commercial viability necessary or meet the financial expectations as an independent business
The developers of Layer 1 blockchain Secret Network resolved a security issue flagged by researchers who highlighted a vulnerability posed by Intel hardware the network used to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts
The Ton Foundation set up a "rescue fund" with a soft commitment of $126M to support projects experiencing liquidity problems as a result of the FTX fallout
Crypto custodian Casa will offer customers the ability to store ETH
Thursday:
SBF apologized or admitted failure at least 12 times during his appearance at the New York Times' DealBook Summit
Telegram has sold more than $50M in usernames via Fragment, a platform that secures name ownership on the blockchain. Plans to expand beyond usernames and build a host of blockchain tools for Telegram including crypto wallets and decentralized exchanges
Russia's Sber bank integrates Metamask into its blockchain platform
The Ethereum Foundation announced that the blockchain’s Ropsten testnet has begun to wind down, with a full shutdown anticipated for sometime between Dec. 15-31
Indexing service The Graph will soon add support for the Polygon blockchain - will allow Polygon developers to find the data they need to improve the efficiency of their dApps
Numbers Protocol: ushering in a new era of digital media trust with Avalanche Subnets
The Near Foundation will be rolling out a loyalty points program for Grupo Nutresa, one of Latin America’s largest processed food companies
Friday:
Solana-based NFT platform Magic Eden, blockchain music streaming platform Audius and wallet provider Argent are among the first partners with fintech unicorn Stripe to integrate its fiat-to-crypto onramp solution
Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital won an auction to buy self-custody platform GK8 from Celsius Network
Alibaba Cloud, the largest cloud service provider in Asia Pacific, has expanded its line of infrastructure technology and intelligence tools to Avalanche
Flipkart, one of India’s leading digital commerce entities, is cementing its commitment to blockchain technology with a strategic partnership with Polygon that will culminate in the foundation of the Blockchain-eCommerce Centre of Excellence
The Red Cross is working on a blockchain project to help distribute tokenized aid to those in conflict zones
WEF denies it asked Shiba Inu to work with them on metaverse global policy
Economic/Government/Regulatory:
Monday:
Quiet news day
Tuesday:
Kraken agreed to a $362,000 settlement with the U.S. Treasury for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and will invest another $100,000 in compliance controls
The Reserve Bank of India to launch a retail CBDC pilot in December. Each bank participating in the trial will test the CBDC among 10,000 to 50,000 users
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has introduced a draft concept for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) candidate digital hryvnia, or e-hryvnia
Wednesday:
South Korean prosecutors have requested arrest warrants for eight people related to Terraform Labs for the alleged fraud. Includes Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin, three Terraform investors, and four engineers
Ex-FTX CEO SBF has been called to a Feb. 2 hearing to answer to claims from a Texas regulator that FTX US offered unregistered securities products through its yield-bearing service
London's High Court ordered six crypto exchanges, which includes Binance, Coinbase, Luno and Kraken, to disclose client information to help trace $10.7M that was stolen from a U.K.-based exchange in 2020
Crypto providers will have to report details of their EU clients’ transactions to national tax authorities under a bill set to be proposed by the European Commission
Thursday:
The Fed is likely to slow its rate increases in December. CME's FedWatch tool says 77% of a 50 basis point increase
Italy’s proposed 2023 budget plans to extend a 26% levy on capital gains to digital assets for profits larger than 2,000 euros
Friday:
The co-founders of Three Arrows Capital, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies have one week to provide key financial documents to help liquidators locate funds and settle claims with creditors
The U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered crypto fraudster "Coin Signals" to pay $2.8M in restitution to victims - sentenced to 42 months jail time in May 2022
U.S. politicians, many of them Democrats, have been very publicly returning or giving away campaign donations from former FTX CEO SBF
Thai VC fund, V Ventures, is looking to purchase a 90% stake in Zipmex crypto exchange for $100M
Initial reports suggest the Indian digital e-rupee has failed to catch on among retail users with low volumes during the trial run
Hacker Nicholas Truglia received an 18-month sentence, 12 months of which he has already served, for his role in a plot to steal millions in crypto and must pay over $20M in restitution
The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) submitted a proposed change in state laws that would allow it to charge licensed crypto companies for regulating them
Exchange News:
Monday:
Binance released its Proof of Reserves (PoR) System. On-Chain Reserve: 582,485.9302 BTC
Wemix will be delisted from major South Korean exchanges in December due to concerns about its token distribution.The Wemix team called the move unreasonable and vowed to fight it
Introducing Bybit's $100M Institution Support Fund. Who is eligible: Market maker and HFT institutions on Bybit or other exchanges
Huobi denies rumors it will merge with Poloniex
Coinsquare, one of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, may have had client data breached, but claims customer assets are secure in cold storage and are not at risk
Japanese messaging giant Line has decided to shut down its cryptocurrency exchange business amid the ongoing crypto winter but will still continue to run its other blockchain ventures, including the Line blockchain ecosystem and Link (LN) token
Coinbase and Coinbase Pro will list Vulcan Forged PYR
Tuesday:
FTX Trading and 101 additional affiliated companies are resuming ordinary course payments of salaries to employees worldwide and ordinary course payments to certain non-U.S. contractors and service providers
As part of the Proof of Reserves (PoR) process, Binance is working with a 3rd party auditor to provide proof of ownership and will result in some large transfers between Binance’s owned wallets
NEXO releases proof of reserves showing no exposure to FTX
Coinbase Wallet will stop supporting BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP, citing low usage
Huobi partnered with Tron Network and DMC Labs to jointly launch the world's first national token DMC (Dominica Coin) under the authorization of the government of the Commonwealth of Dominica
Ankex, a new hybrid crypto exchange incubated by DeFi infrastructure firm Qredo, has launch - aims to embody the benefits of both decentralized and centralized crypto exchanges
Wednesday:
Crypto exchange Kraken intends to cut staff by 30% - amounting to 1,100 people
FTX Group’s solvent unit LedgerX is set to allocate $175M for use in the group’s bankruptcy proceedings - could be used to repay creditors
Huobi will form a "strategic partnership" with Poloniex a week after denying rumors that the two firms were planning to merge
Binance has entered Japan by acquiring the locally licensed exchange Sakura Exchange BitCoin (SEBC) - marks Binance’s first license in East Asia
Gemini reveals $601M GUSD backing and 45+ licenses in a new “Trust Center” to display a breakdown of funds held on the platform
Coinbase has added Aavegotchi (GHST) and Litentry (LIT) to its roadmap
Gemini continues expanding in Europe with new regulatory approvals in Italy and Greece
Thursday:
Binance completes the Hooked Protocol subscription launchpad and will open trading for HOOK
Capital markets firm TP ICAP has received approval from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to register as a cryptoasset exchange provider to institutional clients
Bitmex launched a system that will allow all depositors to self-verify their liabilities in the crypto exchange's total liability balance sheet
Broker-dealer INX has joined Binance in submitting a non-binding letter of intent to buy distressed assets from bankrupt asset manager Voyager Digital
Friday:
The Japanese subsidiary of FTX came out with a roadmap to resume withdrawals, after confirming that its customers’ assets are not part of FTX's bankruptcy proceedings
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) fired almost 200 contractors who were working on incorporating blockchain technology into its CHESS clearing and settlement system
DeFi:
Monday:
DEX aggregator 1inch introduced a feature called RabbitHole that's designed to prevent MetaMask users from getting hit by sandwich attack frontrunning
WBTC DAO, the community that administers the Wrapped Bitcoin project, is moving to a new smart contract multisig, replacing signers that are no longer active. FTX, Airswap, MakerDAO and others have been removed
Aave has temporarily frozen lending markets for 17 tokens and stablecoins on Ethereum after a massive short position on Aave’s CRV market resulted in a bad debt of $1.6M
Ape Staking Update: shortened the pre-deposit period by a week to keep original December 12 launch
The MakerDAO community rejected a proposal to use up to $500M of the stablecoin USDC to invest in bonds with crypto investment firm CoinShares
Cardano DeFi project Ardana halts development, citing funding, timeline concerns. Previously closed a $10M round led by now bankrupt crypto hedge fund firm Three Arrows Capital last year
Tuesday:
Crypto data firm Kaiko launches a product tracking market data for DeFi lending and borrowing protocols on Ethereum - Aave, Compound and MakerDAO
MakerDAO is voting to increase the amount of interest it pays on Dai deposits - from the current yield rate of 0.01% to one of four rates — 1%, 0.75%, 0.5% and 0.25%
Compound will enforce loan limits on 10 crypto tokens to adjust the risk parameters of Compound v2. Tokens include: WBTC, BAT, UNI, COMP, LINK, SUSHI, ZRX, AAVE, YFI, MKR
Solana-based DEX Serum stated on Twitter it was now defunct and now replaced by a community fork called OpenBook
Binance partnership with Injective allows Binance Custody clients to stake their $INJ tokens directly from their Qualified Wallet
Wednesday:
GMX earned $1.15M in trading fees, surpassing Uniswap's $1.06M for the first time on record
Thursday:
Chainlink Staking v0.1 launching on Ethereum mainnet on December 6th
Compound is set to vote to increase the supply cap for WETH supply to $194M in ether on v3 protocol
Friday:
MakerDAO vote concluded: The Dai Savings Rate (DSR) will be increased to 1.00%
Trader Joe DEX is launching on the Ethereum scaling chain Arbitrum - Joe’s first deployment on a new chain. Imminent testnet and expected to launch on mainnet in early 2023
Fantom dApp Gas Monetization Program - an affiliate program for dApp developers with network gas fees. To fund this venture, the Fantom community has proposed slashing the protocol's current FTM token burn rate from 20% to 5%
Introducing the Theta Metachain — The blockchain architecture purpose-built for Media and Entertainment enterprises entering the Web3 space
The Ankr aBNBc contract was attacked and an additional 10 trillion aBNBc was minted. Followed by an exploit on stablecoin issuer Helio Protocol for total of $20M. Ankr will compensate the liquidity providers
Natively issued $FRAX on the BNB chain via the Wombat ecosystem
Aura Finance agreement with key Balancer stakeholders, including the veBAL whale, "Humpy" - will drive growth to more sustainable pools
CroLend, presenting itself as an algorithmic, autonomous lending protocol built on top of the Cronos network, deleted all social media pages, the website doesn’t work, and its TVL has been drained to $0. $600K rugpulled
NFTs/Gaming/Metaverse:
Monday:
nftperp Beta Mainnet is officially live
Moonbirds now purely “in-chain”, which means no external dependencies—the art is generated exclusively by smart contracts. Each bird is now assembled by one contract from image layers stored elsewhere, all on chain
Deadmau5’s Pixelynx unveils augmented reality music metaverse NFT scavenger hunt: ‘Rock Band Meets Pokémon Go’
Prada presents the new Timecapsule NFT Collection. Each drop is linked to both a limited edition physical product and a gifted NFT
Tuesday:
Candy Digital, a sports and entertainment NFT startup founded in 2021 and backed by web3 leaders like Mike Novogratz, Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Rubin and reached a $1.5B valuation, laid off a large part of its staff
Web3 gaming DAO, Game7, has launched a $100M grant program to enable game developers to build the tools needed to make Web3 gaming better and more accessible
BNB Chain is officially live on OpenSea
Sony’s latest invention for the metaverse, a wearable motion-tracking system called Mocopi - will cost about $358 and allow users to move as an avatar in real time
Mobile game maker Aeria Canada Studio has partnered with Ready Games to migrate its most popular mobile titles to web3
Wednesday:
NFT trading goes live on Uniswap with $5M airdrop to past users of Genie. Allows trading across OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, Sudoswap, Larva Labs, Foundation and NFT20 marketplaces using the platform’s NFT aggregator tool
Creators selling NFTs on OpenSea collectively earned $1.1B in royalties this year, with 80% of that amount allocated to collections outside the top 10
Art Basel Miami Beach offered a “generative” NFT mint on the Tezos blockchain. Only 2,500 of the NFTs will be minted during the week
Thursday:
Apple blocked Coinbase Wallet last app release until they disabled the feature of sending NFTs. Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system, so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee
Blur's second airdrop is arriving December 5th and is 10x bigger than Airdrop 1
Crypto payments infrastructure firm MoonPay is rolling out what it calls a "soulbound" NFT loyalty program for its users - Dubbed the "Web3 Passport," the token will grant its owner access to exclusive events
Timex will make 500 watches for Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club holders, decorated with their NFTs - follows a similar move by Tiffany & Co. for CryptoPunk holders
The word “metaverse” has made it through to the top 3 finalists for the Oxford Word of the Year competition. The word will go against other contenders, including “IStandWith” and “Goblin Mode”
Pudgy Penguin's 'Snowed In' collection sells out at Sotheby's for an average of $12,900 each
The first Web3 project Porsche has planned is a 7,500-piece NFT collection based on the classic Porsche 911. The NFTs are scheduled to be released in January 2023
Friday:
Magic Eden launches Solana NFT tool to enforce creator royalties in a similar move to OpenSea. The Open Creator Protocol lets creators of new NFT collections block marketplaces that refuse to honor royalties on OCP-enabled assets
Crown Ribbon - a fully-regulated NFT platform lets users buy NFT shares of a racehorse syndicate that maps to one horse, or a collection of horses. Aims to tap into $300B horse racing industry
Offers are live on the Immutable X protocol, allowing NFT buyers to make an offer for an asset and sellers to agree upon a price proposed by a buyer
Fundraises:
Monday:
Web3 game publisher Fenix Games raised $150M in funding to acquire, invest and distribute blockchain games. Saw participation from investors: Phoenix Group and Dubai-based venture capital firm Cypher Capital
Crypto lending firm Matrixport, led by Jihan Wu, is looking to raise $100M at a $1.5B valuation
XanPool—a cross-border payments infrastructure provider—is accelerating expansion plans across Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Latin America after raising $41M
Kiln, an Ethereum Staking-as-a Service startup, raised $17.6M in a Series A funding round from a group of investors including Consensys, GSR Ventures and Kraken's venture capital arm
Blockchain research and development firm Proximity Labs and three DEXs on the Near Protocol blockchain - Orderly Network, Spin, and Tonic - announced a $10M developer fund
Hack VC, Placeholder, and Blockchain Capital have invested $10M in Across Protocol at a $200M valuation
Midnight emerged from stealth to announce $7.5M in seed funding earmarked to build a studio and platform to create Web3 games
t3rn, a Polkadot-based blockchain interoperability protocol that aims to facilitate cross-chain transactions, raised $6.5M in a strategic funding round led by Polychain Capital with Huobi Ventures, Figment Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Lemniscap and others participating
XDao, a multichain DAO builder, raised $2.3M in a seed round at a $50M valuation from DWF Labs, Telos Foundation and Grizzly Capital
nftperp raised a total of $1.7M at the valuation of $17M from funds and angels include: Dialectic, Maven 11, Flow Ventures, DCV Capital, Gagra Ventures, AscendEX Ventures and more
Tuesday:
Roboto Games, a new game studio aiming to bridge Web2 experience and accessible Web3 in-game elements, raised $15M in a Series A funding round led by a16z. Others participating: Ancient8, Animoca Brands, Gumi Cryptos Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Makers Fund, Merit Circle, Transcend
Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, raised $8M in Series A investment led by Anthemis and Dragonfly
Burn Ghost, a startup focused on casual games that reward NFT prizes to players, has raised $3.1M in funding led by Drive by DraftKings, Bitkraft Ventures. With Pillar VC participating
Wanderers, the sci-fi media brand behind the Wanderers NFT collection, raises $2M Seed Round led by Animoca Brands and GameFi Ventures
Wednesday:
Web3 gaming and software giant Animoca Brands is set to debut a fund of up to $2B to invest in metaverse companies
Introducing Algorand Ventures
Digital asset market maker Keyrock raised $72M in a Series B funding round led by Ripple. Six Fintech Ventures and Middlegame Ventures also participated in the round
Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, raised $18M to its Series A, bringing its valuation to $300M. Includes funding from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. Blockchange Ventures, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund and C2 Ventures also participated in the round
FrankieOne, a Melbourne-based startup that provides an API platform for identity verification and fraud detection, closed its $15.4M Series A+ investment round led by AirTree Ventures and Greycroft
Finery Markets, a leading multi-dealer electronic marketplace for institutional participants and a trading solutions provider for crypto markets, raised a $5.5M seed funding round co-led by G1 Ventures, gumi Cryptos and Shima Capital
Catapult raised $5M in a seed round to improve DAO coordination led by Blockchain Capital. Investors in the round also include Eden Block, Orange DAO and Reverie
Lyra, a protocol for options liquidity built on Ethereum, raises $3M strategic round led by Framework Ventures & GSR
Daylight, a software solution for aggregating web3 perks, raised $3M in a seed round co-led by Framework Ventures and Chapter One. Other backers in the round include 6th Man Ventures, Spice Capital and OpenSea
India-based startup with global web3 game discovery & wallet app, Glip, raised $2.5M in a funding round led by Hashed Emergent
Thursday:
Web 3 developer platform Fleek has raised $25M in a Series A round led by crypto-focused venture capital firm Polychain Capital. Other investors in the round included Protocol Labs, Arweave, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO and Argonautic Ventures
Cybersecurity startup Cyvers raised $8M in a seed round led by Elron Ventures. Other backers include Crescendo Venture Partners, Differential Ventures and HDI
Liqwid Labs, the DeFi startup building the Liqwid algorithmic lending & borrowing protocol raised $2.7M in a seed round led by cFund
UnUniFi Protocol raised $1.5M in Seed Round led by gumi Cryptos Capital to build the first Decentralized Cross-Chain NFTFi Platform / Marketplace with Auto DeFi Yield
Cypherock, a hardware wallet startup with a mission to accelerate web3 adoption, raised $1M from an array of reputed industry leaders including Consensys Mesh, Infinite Capital, Gnosis
Friday:
Ngrave, a crypto hardware wallet manufacturer, is aiming to raise $15M in a Series A funding round led by Binance Labs at $60M pre-money valuation
Wildxyz, a residency for genre-bending artists and a marketplace for collecting original digital works, debuts with $7M in seed funding to fuel the creator economy through immersive hyperreality experiences. Led by Matrix Partners with participation from A-list crypto and NFT investors
Binance Labs has made a $4.5M strategic investment in Ambit Finance to accelerate the development of trustless DeFi within the BNB Chain ecosystem
The Web3 Working Group, a nonprofit dedicated to education around crypto infrastructure, raised $2M from blockchain companies Arweave, The Graph, Livepeer, and Akash to fund its official launch
Early Stage Projects:
Monday:
The $ACX token is live and ready to claim. An ERC20 token that controls the Across.to cross-chain bridge
Tuesday:
Aptos partnering with web3 fintech firm MoonPay through an integration with Petra, the crypto wallet built by Aptos Labs
AdaSwap launch of DEX in mainnet
ETH Liquid Staking Product qETH available on Tranchess
Wednesday:
BitDAO, which has a treasury worth over $1.7B, launched a modular Ethereum Layer 2 chain called Mantle
RNS.id, a digital Web3 identity platform developed to support the application and issuance of sovereignty-backed IDs, is integrating with zkSync for on-chain KYC
Blockchain protocol Komodo has launched AtomicDEX Web – a wallet, cross-chain bridge and DEX
StarkNet Mainnet alpha upgraded to v0.10.2. Expect an improved TPS + Performance Roadmap
BracketX is now live on Arbitrum One Mainnet
Espresso Sequencer Testnet 1 - Americano - released to the public
Thursday:
AXL airdrop site is live
The Onomy Network is live
SUI Delegation Program - critical step towards decentralization & in supporting the community's participation
LensPort 2.0 has been released. LensPort is now a marketplace AND a complete Lens social app
Incentives for Aleo Testnet 3 will be activated on December 2nd
Aztec Connect has launched a stable developer testnet - Aztec Connect Testnet v1
Cedro Testnet 1.0 is here - an Omnichain Lending and Borrowing platform that unifies fragmented liquidity across multiple chains
Friday:
Sui Network Testnet Wave 2 coming - Testnet Wave 1 sunsetted
Lithium Finance has announced the launch of its Mainnet Beta on the Polygon blockchain on December 12th
Aboard is now multi-chain. Aboard Exchange, a Central Limit Order Book that aims to provide a simple, smooth, and low cost perpetual trading experience, has launched on Avalanche
Dogecoin-Ethereum Bridge expected to go live in 2022
Harbor Protocol’s Mainnet and Airdrop - 150M tokens, 15% of the Total supply of $HARBOR
Research/Reads:
A Grand Unified Theory of the FTX Disaster - source
The Future of MEV is SUAVE - source
The Uniswap Airdrop - Lessons for the Industry - source
Why Nobody Really Uses Web3… Yet - source
Arthur Hayes - White Man - source
The Grayscale (GBTC) Effect - Part Three: 3AC, Grayscale, Genesis, and DCG - source
Is CZ Too Powerful? - Binance's post-FTX market dominance is impressive -- and concerning - source
WuBlockchain - Competition in the NFT market around royalties is heating up - source
Web3 deserves better rewards - source
QCP - Crypto Circular #8: 50 Shades of Gray - source
Hedging Sanctions Risk: Cryptocurrency in Central Bank Reserves - source
Under-used DefiLlama Features - source
Web3’s Wallet Opportunity - source
Part 1: Can We Kill Moloch? ZK Basics and Virtual Machines - source
Bankless - Is Solana Dead? - source
DeFi Options: Mapping Hype to Reality - source
Why RWAs Are Important to DeFi - source
Venture Capital Is Ripe for Disruption - A world where a billion is a drop in the bucket - source
Building Game Studios as Venture Capital Runs Dry - source
WSJ & CO: The Hypocrisy of Mainstream Media, Asleep at the Wheel of Information - source
M6 Research - Hashflow Overview - source
Easier framing for blockchain nodes - source
Part 2: DeFi Options — Mapping Hype to Reality - source
The state of scaling solutions for non-financial applications - source
Augmenting Culture: The Emerging Field of Digital Fashion - source
Twitter:
Consensys co-founder on privacy policy - source
The biggest ponzi game of 2021 let SBF build an empire on what can be described as FDV - Faulty Designed Valuations - source
Su Zhu reveals the launch of a “long-form video podcast series” - source
Reasons for Tornado Cash dev staying in jail - source
Major changes coming to the crypto industry in 2023 - source
Frequent batch auctions (FBAs) - source
Bitcoin's 3 problems - source
Stolen FTX funds being sent OKX after withdrawing from ChipMixer - source
Why GMX will fail - source
Debunking GMX FUD - source
December in terms of macro economic announcements, conferences, and other crypto related events - source
Leverage the YouTube algorithm to create a free crypto alpha machine - source
Crypto Security 101 - source
Intern notes from SBF interview - source
Vitalik against governance tokens - source
ECB - Bitcoin’s last stand - source
Extreme rate differences among lending markets. Why that happens + how you can use this - source
10 positive (adoption) charts from crypto apps/protocols - source
pro & cons list of the major bridge designs - source
9 figures in MEV liquidations...then lost it all - source
SBF interview call notes - source
Intern notes from SBF’s interview Dealbook Summit - source
The top early stage venture funds in crypto - source
Key issue hindering DeFi adoption and how we get to DeFi > CeFi - source
The Block November summary - source
Learn DuneAnalytics and build dashboards in just 2 months - source
On the Uniswap NFT aggregator launch and USDC airdrop - source
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