Crypto Market Weekly Recap - April Week1

April 2, 2022

Runner crowds, running in.

Hi everyone,

Weekend again! And also a holiday in China is upon us, but many of you should be quarantined in your city/house and unable to get out. I hope everyone had a great holiday and stayed strong.

The market has been very hot this week 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥. A lot of people starting to say "Bull is back, coming back asap". One of the hottest is Move to Earn --- StepN, which has gone from IEO on Binance to what can only be described as crazy. Behind the upsurge, of course, there are many joys and tears. We all have our ups and downs in the cryptocurrency world, and we might share the same vision, but different sadness and happiness.

StepN has gone up like crazy in the last week and has nearly tripled. The first thing that makes this project attractive is the concept of Move to Earn, which is very interesting, fitness, and money. The price of running shoes NFT is not as expensive as BAYC out of the galaxy, but rather takes the line of the people. Especially the people who love sports will better understand and try it.

For most of the upgrades and daily maintenance of shoes with $GST tokens and then different quality of shoes with different properties, the return is not the same. The interesting part is that the shoes can be rented out, as long as your shoe level reaches 10, you can rent them out, and StepN pumps 8% from the middle.

The total amount of $GMT tokens is 6,000,000,000, which can be used for governance, minting, and upgrading high-end shoes. It will also be burned in the following activities: ordering shoes, gem upgrades for Level 4~9, and shoe attribute reset. It can be seen as a kind of deflationary mechanism, which brings the effect that the water rises. In addition it $GMT holders will decide how much of the profit will be used for carbon neutral, and then paid to them as a reward. I have to say, their dual token economic model system is still very well developed, both in terms of token role and gameplay are quite detailed.

To sum up, the concept is simple, easy to get started, and there is still room for development.

BAYC is a top-down orgy, while StepN is a bottom-up orgy.

The other kinda out of everybody's understanding was the hack of Ronin, worth $620 million (ETH went up, now it's more). No one noticed it for close to a week, which is quite ... outrageous. We recommend reading rekt's article for the details of what happened. In short, the private key was attacked and the signature was forged. 5/9 of the multi-signatures, 5 of them were stolen.

Another noteworthy security incident is a vulnerability in one of Discord's third-party plugins, and many Discord communities in NFT projects (including BAYC) have been attacked. We recommend that everyone deauthorize this third-party plugin first.

The other hot topic is NFT, Azuki announced an airdrop, the price of airdrop NFT was around 2 ETH. The current floor price is close to 5 ETH. Please look forward to our weekly NFT Weekly Recap on the first day of the week for more details about NFT.

Don't forget to download TokenInsight to be the first to get the latest Crypto news and research, as well as potential Alpha.

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Finally, I would like to talk about the market sentiment in the last few days. Many people are indeed discussing whether the bull market is back.

Crypto industry is like this, three positive lines change your belief. The first thing that can be confirmed is that in the short term, this is certainly not a bull market phase. The most typical characteristics of a bull market are the retail investors are crazy, the funding rate is very high (money is very expensive), the Alts are flying and rampant, and at the same time, there should be one or two main lines leading the market in the right direction.

But if we look at the long term, the Crypto industry has been in a bullish phase all the time. The long-term mainline is the change brought by blockchain technology to the Internet/finance/life.

Looking more realistically within the Crypto industry, the main driver is still Bitcoin as the core asset class. The next key question is whether bitcoin is recognized by the market as a risk asset or a hedge asset. If it is a risk asset then bitcoin will be treated as one of the technology stocks in the US and will not have too much of an exaggerated rise.

But if Bitcoin is slowly and truly recognized as a hedge asset, in line with, or even better than, gold, then Bitcoin must still have a long way to go. From this perspective, it is not an exaggeration to say that bitcoin is the largest asset in the world in terms of total market capitalization.

Another short- to medium-term driver is ETH 2.0. Pow has been increasingly discussed and seems to have been labeled as "politically incorrect". If Ethereum moves smoothly to PoS, it will certainly solve this problem. Yesterday, BitMEX's founder Author posted an article saying that Ether will rise to five figures, that is, $10,000. Although I don't know if it was an April Fool's joke, the market generally feels that Ether has more room for imagination in the long run.

It is assumed that the future is dominated by Ethereum and Layer 2 as a derivative of Ethereum to form a big ecosystem together. There is no telling what opportunities this Narrative will give rise to. If you want to believe in such a future, then just extrapolate back to see what is missing now as your long-term value investment philosophy.

With the high frequency of security incidents this week, you need to be aware of the safety of your funds.

Some of the major events that happened in Crypto in the past few days：

BNB Chain will launch an application-specific Sidechain to reduce network pressure. The main purpose is to let developers migrate data and assets from BNB Chain. PS: Sidechain can be understood as a realistic third-party payment network (Alipay/WeChat), you can imagine the banking network as the main chain, and the third party payment is a kind of Sidechain.

a16z launched an airdrop pickup tool. Related to zero-knowledge proof and Merkle tree, specific peeps can find it by yourselves.

LayerZero Labs closed $135 million Series A+ funding led by Sequoia Capital, FTX, and a16z. The recent Stargate was made by this team, and now the money is better for development.

BAYC Discord was hacked and MAYC #8662 was stolen. The source of the attack was an updated vulnerability in the Discord bot Ticket Tool add command, which was caught by hackers performing some type of privilege attack.

Axie Infinity Sidechain Ronin was attacked and has lost 173,600 $ETH and 25.5 million $USDC. The good news is that all $AXS, $RON, and $SLP on Ronin are currently safe; the bad news is that not only is this a big loss, but it has also hurt the brand.

A poll on the proposed SushiSwap integration with Stargate has been launched on Snapshot. The vote ends on the 4th, so if you're interested, you can participate, I personally support it.

Visa has launched a creator program to help creators do business through NFT, and Visa has been associated with the crypto industry for a long time and has invested in some payment projects in the early days.

This week's daily news roundup is here, in English and Chinese.