Welcome to this 8th issue of the Chain Reaction newsletter for the first week of the new year (10th January 2022). We've completed our first week of 2022 and the news and reviews just keep coming.
In the news we saw crypto predictions for this year as well as crypto going even more mainstream, from record levels of NFT volume to presidential candidates accepting crypto. In reviews we had a look at the all-in-one Vader protocol as well as a review of ImmutableX.
In our videos section we see the first weeks news and movements as well as on-chain metrics and an interview with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Diving into data, we see 2 interesting charts similar to periodic tables, one which is based on categories and the other on performance.
Finally, we end with our chart of the week (a Walmart focused one) and some education on the statistic of crypto losses as provided by ImmuneFi.
If you like what you see and you're interested in continuing these awesome DeFi conversations, 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
Immutable X: Jan 2022 Snapshot - This review comes from one of our contributors (Camxeth) and in it he reviews Immutable X, the scaling solution for the ever-popular (and growing) NFT marketplace. From what it does to the team backing it as well as notable partnerships and projects using Immutable X, this review has it all (including some noted drawbacks but also opportunities). A well rounded review (even in our own biased opinion). Worth a look if you're interested in this protocol or NFTs or both.
AFR - The new get-rich-faster job in Silicon Valley: crypto start-ups - Beginning with a story of a rush of people applying to jobs at Unstoppable Domains, the move of many people from TradFi (traditional finance) to DeFi is being seen as a perfect storm given the early stage nature of the industry and the potential for large rewards. Parallels to other once-in-a-lifetime opportunities are drawn 1like the dawn of the personal computer and the rise of the internet. Traditional tech companies are now in a battle for talent not just amongst themselves but also against crypto companies too.
Crypto Briefing - Aave Has Launched Permissioned DeFi Pools for Institutions - Details about the launch of Aave Arc which whitelists 30 institutions (via KYC, CDD, EDD principles and guidelines) meaning they can now access the type of services that have been inaccessible until now. This includes flash-loans and high-yield deposit accounts. Compound, another DeFi protocol also plans to bring institutional producfts to market.
CoinDesk - 2022 Is the Year of Ethereum - opinion piece looking at the 3 trends that will affect Ethereum this year including DAOs become the preferred way of organising new organisations (and how their governance structures mature), how DeFi will integrate with CeFi and Ethereums shift to proof of stake and increase interaction with other layer 2 networks. More details in the article.
CoinTelegraph - Arcane Research releases its crypto predictions for 2022 - Blockchain research firm Arcana Research released their predictions for 2022 which includes the following (with more details in the article)
Bitcoin will outperform the S&P 500 in 2022
XRP and Cardano will fall out of the top 10
Alternate layer ones will continue to outperform ETH (see image below)
Traditional gaming companies will increasingly add NFTs
Bitcoin ETFs will hold more than 1M BTC by end of 2022
Hashrate will become even more geographically distributed
CoinDesk - CoinDesk Joins Court Case Seeking Access to NYAG Tether Documents - It appears CoinDesk has joined the proceedings between the New York Attorney General (NYAG) office and Tether (and their USDT stablecoin) after it requested documents in relation to the case. Tether is trying to get this blocked and it calsl into question public vs private interest in cases like this. Tether is being looked at by NYAG to shed light on the reserves backing its $78.4 billion of stablecoins.
CoinDesk - Binance Invests $12M in Liquidity Platform WOO Network - The venture capital arm of Binance announced a $12 million strategic investment in WOO Network, a liquidity platform that connects users to exchanges, institutions and decentralized finance (DeFi) networks. This follows on from WOO's $30m Series A round which included Three Arrows Capital, Crypto.com Capital, Avalanche and BitTorrent.
CoinGape - OpenSea trading volume reaches record high at $240 million on day 2 of 2022 - In this bit of NFT news it shows that Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) led the way as OpenSea volumes reach all time highs. Tying in the play-to-earn / GameFi space, the article also shows that the token with the 3rd biggest volume is Axie Infinity, the wildly popular Pokemon-like blockchain game.
CoinGape - Solana (SOL) faces another potential DDoS attack; network goes down - Details of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. From the article "The growing number of DDoS attacks on the SOL network is believed to originate from fundamental flaws in its blockchain. A Grayscale security report from December 2021 highlighted that SOL uses a new blockchain technology that is not widely used, and may not function as intended." More in the article.
Micky - South Korean presidential candidate accepts crypto donations - In a move that sees crypto becoming more mainstream, Lee Jae-Myung, a presidential hopeful in South Korea will accept cryptocurrency (BTC or ETH plus a few more) to support the parties campaign and those who donate will get NFTs in exchange.
Vader Protocol - A Force To Be Reckoned With - this article is more of a summary of a video review done by The Defiant on the Vader protocol which is a bit of an all-in-one DeFi project. Bringing together stablecoins, AMMs and protocol owned liquidity, this certainly looks interesting.
Videos of the week
Glassnode - New Year Opens Sideways - Glassnode Bitcoin Onchain Analysis (Week 1, 2022) - among the topics discussed in this first weekly review of the year from Glassnode we see Assessment of lacklustre onchain activity, Supply dynamics from 2021 onward, Movement of coins from Liquid to Illiquid wallets, Cohort analysis of Long- and Short-Term Holders. 24mins
Coin Bureau - CryptoNews: BTC, Polygon, OpenDAO, AAVE & more - Discussion of various bits of news from the week from OpenSea controversy after the recent hacking incident and its lack of a governance token (which Open DAO was built to take care of with its SOS token). It also talks about other DAOs such as Gas DAO and Blockbuster DAO but with all of this, users need to do their homework. Polygon also had negative news with the hack of its Matic token late last year and more recently and management delaying the reporting of this news to not attract further hackers. Aave and its ability to tokenise real world assets was also mentioned and there were further regulation talks this time with what Estonia is doing to regulate crypto companies and banning of play-to-earn games on Apple and Google stores in South Korea. All this and more in the video. 22mins
ausbiz - Defi, gaming to provide "endless technical and investment opportunities" - per the ausbiz show notes "Want to know how stablecoins generate such high returns for those willing to lend their tokens, or where the some of the best investment opportunities in the crypto space will be found this year? Our chat with Adam Stokes, CEO of the Crypto Land, may be exactly what you're looking for. Defi and gaming are areas you should consider, providing what he believes will be endless technical and investment opportunities." 11mins
Bankless - 99 - Endgame | Vitalik Buterin - In this episode, the Bankless team chat with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin about the future of the platform and the roadmap which includes The Merge, The Surge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge. A long episode but what a way to kick off 2022. 2hrs
Charts and Data
Periodic tables of Crypto
Provided by the investment group Fidelity is this periodic table of returns over the last few years and you can see the dominance that Bitcoin has had over the more recent timeframe.
Additionally, there's this creation from The Pleb Investor which shows a different take on the periodic elements (of crypto). They have some other amazing charts on their Instagram too.
CoinGecko
Top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap as at the 9th Januuary 2021 10:02pm AEST on CoinGecko. Back to a sea of red for most cryptocurrencies over the past 7 days.
Dune Analytics
With news about OpenSea's record volumes this past week, it's a good idea to highlight the OpenSea dashboard built on Dune Analytics by user @rchen8. This is available below and as you can see from the first chart (top left), the volume in just 4 days of January (when this snap was taken) is already a third of the total volume in December. Keen to see where this gets to by month end. https://dune.xyz/rchen8/opensea
Social post of the week
In this post from user Homo Digitalis showcasing a video created back in 2017 by another group called Mutual Mobile of how Walmart shopping experiences could be on the metaverse https://twitter.com/DigitalisHomo/status/1478094074909540354?s=09&fbclid=IwAR0Ote4Rg_-ASHkUGUw5ls0U93NUEhjXpGN3f2DfO6HmR1VnoyZpDmvBgOs
Education
Was not sure whether to put this as a tweet of the week or not but it also makes sense as an educational piece too (and allows us to kepe the Walmart post). Anyway, it's from the team at ImmuneFi (a bug bounty platformf for webe3) and they have released a 3 page report showing the total losses in DeFi for 2021. It's short (3 pages) but full of interesting info so check it out.
Thanks again to our contributors for the newsletter including:
Cam Crossley (see LinkedIn)
Jordan Franklin (aka The Happy Spender on TikTok/Instagram)
Tung Nguyen (see LinkedIn and check out Facebook group, Savvy Investor)
David Gikandi (see LinkedIn)
Nicholas Bishop (see LinkedIn)
Arturo Rodriguez (see LinkedIn)
Mark Monfort (see LinkedIn)
If you're interested in contributing to these newsletters in future - please reach out to us on info@defi.org.au