Welcome to this 7th issue of the Chain Reaction newsletter for the first week of the new year (3rd January 2022). Hopefully you've enjoyed your holiday and new year break if you got one.
Last week we saw a few year in review type articles from various crypto news teams and we even released our own as well. There was a bunch of local AFR articles talking about DeFi, the metaverse and more, perhaps showing further signs of how mainstream media is getting interested in DeFi. In our videos section we saw more year in reviews as well as a deep dive into ImmutableX and finally, we highlight research techniques from the team at Whiteboard Crypto.
Also, if you're interested, join us on our Discord: https://discord.gg/XPbnkFNC
What you can expect in this newsletter
In the News
Videos of the week
Charts and Data
Around the world of social media
Education
In the news
Australian DeFi Association - DeFi Year In Review 2021 - With the end of 2021 last week we wrote up a review of some of the key events and insights we saw from the past 12 months. Covering things like the growth of blockchain platforms, rise of play-to-earn gaming, and the data behind all of this we provide links to articles and videos in this DeFi recap.
CoinDesk - Volatility Ruled Crypto Markets in 2021, From $69K Bitcoin to Elon Musk’s ‘Dogecoin to the Moooonn’ - From Elon Musk tweets to US regulation talks and volatility in bitcoin prices, 2021 was an amazing year for cryptocurrency. This lengthy article from the CoinDesk team goes through those highlights and more.
CoinDesk - Shiba Inu Launches Beta Version of DAO to Give Users More Authority Over Crypto Projects - GIving users more control over their crypto projects is the reason why Shiba management have created a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). They mention in a blog post they will be "providing immediate power to the community to decide which crypto projects and pairs on the ShibaSwap WOOF Pools will be, and how the $BONE rewards (Allocation Points) are to be distributed amongst them". Let's see how this plays out.
Bitcoin.com - Robinhood’s Crypto Wallets to Launch in Beta This Month - After announcing its crypto wallet project in September, brokerage free trading platform Robinhood announced that 1.6 million users have signed up for its crypto platform which will launch later this month.
Bitcoin.com - Tether Market Cap is Less Than $2 Billion Away From Reaching $80 Billion - This week saw the biggest stablecoin get to 46% of the total stabelcoin market with $78.2 billion in market cap (which is 17,327,227% higher than its $451k market cap in September 2015 and can be seen in the article and chart below.
AFR - Frontiers in finance: new adventures in DeFi - Great piece from James Eyers at the AFR going through the world of DeFi. In it he highlights the various areas it has been innovating the traditional finance space from assets management and lending as well as explaining how innovations in the space like stablecoins and commonly used terms like TVL (total value locked) and DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations). It highlights firms making their mark in this space as well like Mycelium and Maple Finance.
AFR - What the metaverse means for you (and why you don’t get it) - Great piece about the metaverse in this article from The Australian Financial Review. Whether its buying digital land, owning NFTs or how this will grow in terms of capturing user attention, there's certainly a lot to unpack. From investors to technology futurists and users, this looks at it from a whole lot of different angles. One things for sure, it's going to make 2022 very interesting.
CoinDesk - DeFi Traders Push Terra’s UST Stablecoin to $10B Market Cap - Details on Terra which we have seen seize its place in the top 10 amongst cryptocurrencies in terms of market cap has reached $10 billion recently and surpasses MakerDAO and its $9.4 billion market cap and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as well.
Stockhead - Crypto catch-up: ‘The number of new P2E games launching will be staggering’ – Polemos CEO Sascha Zehe - Highlighting the Polemos gaming guild and release of their whitepaperl. In an intervie with Polemos CEO, this article highlights the emergence of crypto/blockchain gaming and how Polemos is taking the gaming guild concept further by focusing on metaverse adoption, community engagement and esports dominance.
Magazine by CoinTelegraph - Concerts in the Metaverse could lead to a new wave of adoption - Future, Travis Scott and Zara Larsson are just a few of the music superstars who are getting into the metaverse with their virtual concerts on platform like Roblox. Animal Concerts, launching this monthj, is bringing these types of concerts to the masses even more in 2022 with Alicia Keys and others signed up. Animal Concerts will have their own token to use to buy tickets cheaper than without the token and this will also act as a governance token to dictate what songs will be sung and what outfits the performers will wear.
Videos of the week
CoinBureau - Immutable X: IMX Ready To ROLL?? Complete Overview!! - Details on the tokenomics, team and technology behind this layer 2 protocol. If you've wondered about how it validates proofs more efficiently than other models (and thus reduce gas fees), Immutable's marketplace, partners and more then this is the video for you. 27mins
The Defiant - Top DeFi News of 2021 - Robin Schmidt from The Defiant going through their top DeFi news highlights this year as well as poking fun at himself (especially his impressions of folks like Charles Hoskinson and Kain Warwick). 7mins
The Defiant - Olympus DAO ($OHM) What is it and where is it going next? (with JaLa) - Per the show notes "In 2021 no DeFi protocol has quite caught the eye like OlympusDAO. Inspiring a devoted following of Ohmies you’ll have seen the (3,3) meme everywhere. Then there were the forks, sooooo soooo many forks. Single-handedly responsible for DeFi2.0 and its promise of Protocol Owned Liquidity it seemed the project’s gamified model of a reserve currency would rise and rise forever. But after peaking at the end of November critics have begun to pile on declaring the bubble has burst, that the ponzi’s true colours have been revealed." 34mins
Additionally, since it is the end of the year, The Defiant also put together a few videos reviewing things from 2021 - as of the time of writing here are a few they have on their channel:
Charts and Data
Glass Node
We have a pause in the analysis we've been sharing from Justin Arzadon of BetaShares in his weekly newsletter - click on this link to see historical insights from the newsletter which we hope will be picked up again later this month. More details available at Glass Node.
Additionally, each week this year, the folks at Glassnode also shared their own Onchain analysis. In this last episode for the year they look at price action, supply and demand dynamics as well as exchange balances and futures markets. In this review they see that the market has seen a 78% price increase since beginning of year (24% lower than the all-time highs in November though).
CoinGecko
Top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap as at the 2nd Januuary 2021 8:20pm AEST on CoinGecko. After a week when all the top 10 had a positive price movement week last week, it was back to more red recently (apart from the stablecoins).
Social post of the week
Release of the Polemos.io gaming guild white paper earlier this week was a welcome Xmas present for those in the play-to-earn gaming space - https://twitter.com/polemos_io/status/1475966805088907269
Education
Whiteboard Crypto - How to do RESEARCH on a Cryptocurrency Coin or Token (DYOR) - Great video from Whiteboard Crypto with ideas on what users should look at in order to do analysis in this space. From looking at the price movements (technical analysis) to details about the token goals and management (fundamentals) as well as other features like tokenomics, what problem they are trying to solve, their whitepaper and more. 16mins
Thanks again to our contributors for the newsletter including:
Jordan Franklin (aka The Happy Spender)
Arturo Rodriguez (see LinkedIn)
Mark Monfort (see LinkedIn)