Crypto Market Weekly Recap - April Week3

Hello guys.

Another weekend! This week's market is not particularly good. Bitcoin went from $43k down to below $40k and Ethereum fell below $3k. Midweek the market saw the release of US CPI data, which again broke history, and Bitcoin followed suit with a small rally, but then fell quickly and is now hovering above and below $40k.

Following last week's Terra bought more Bitcoin, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor claims that the company's strategy of buying Bitcoins has been a huge success, bringing great benefits to shareholders and setting us apart from their competitors. "Adopting bitcoin as our primary treasury reserve asset set us apart from conventional competitors and elevated our brand." MicroStrategy spent a total of $3.97 billion on 129,218 Bitcoins, at an average cost of $30,700 each.

More data on Bitcoin purchases, CryptoQuant's data shows that on the 13th of this week, about 30,000 bitcoins were transferred from Coinbase exchange, which CQ analyst Ki Young Ju feels is a sign that institutions will be buying a lot of Bitcoin, and that will likely continue to be demand for large institutional buys Bitcoin in the future.

Messari released its 2022 Q1 Web3 protocol revenue report. And until 2022 Q1, many protocols have seen some increase in revenue from 2021 Q4. The top three protocols in terms of growth are Arweave ($740K, up 49% YoY), Akash ($20K, up 25% YoY), and Storj ($134K, 15% YoY.) Arweave is supposedly benefiting from the NFT boom. But Akash doesn't seem to be on fire, and after looking at the token unlock times and price trends, it seems like the team has been selling coins as well.

In March-April 2021, the ecological first increase in issuance smashed; In September 2021, the highest point investors and development team unlocked smashed; In February-March 2022, smashed. If AKT's market adoption doesn't skyrocket, there could still be a wave of crashes in August-September. But since this is the last round, it is not known what the attitude of investors and development teams will be.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet went up for auction last year and sold for nearly $3 million. This week, the buyer, Sina Estavi conducted a second auction for this NFT, and the final auction price was less than $300. Yes, Three Hundred Dollars. The seller chose to cancel the deal. Once again, it was verified that most of the NFTs are just FOMO and are Ponzi games. Although NFTs are a novel thing and determining the face value is still relatively similar to traditional art, the common consent behind it is different. The source of valuation of some protocols and projects is the innovation brought by Crypto/blockchain technology. For some others is only from the expectation that some projects will perform well, similar to previous hyped projects. Hence their prices will go up in secondary markets.

Market Dynamics

Some of the major events in Crypto in the past few days.

• The first shadow fork test of the Ethereum mainnet will take place on the 21st. Shadow fork is a fork that adds merge-related fields to the network to simulate a stress test in the existing network environment.

• Coinbase announces suspension of UPI payments to India. The retail banking alliance was unable to resist the government's iron fist after all, but it's normal, India is also heavily developing CBDC. It's still difficult for Coinbase to come in and share the market.

• The ERC721R token standard was released. It allows users to return NFTs minted at a cost within a given period, but the SlowMist team has found a vulnerability where the owner has too much authority and RugPull can still happen.

• Terra Bridge added support for multiple networks such as Avalanche, Solana, Fantom, etc. Terra Bridge's Cross-chain function is getting better and better, how can the coin price not go up.

• Uniswap Labs announced the launch of its venture capital arm, Uniswap Labs Ventures, which will invest in teams at various stages and levels of the Web3 stack, with Uniswap having already invested in 11 companies and several native protocols.

• Cosmos builder Ignite launches $150m Web3 accelerator. The program will support up to 20 projects per year. Has a luxurious lineup of investment partners: Alameda Research, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Hashkey Capital, etc.

• The FBI has linked North Korea's Lazarus Group to the Ronin attack. It is a veteran North Korean hacking group that has been working on crypto attacks since the early 17's and they were the first to deploy the PowerRatankba attack.

• Axie Infinity development team Sky Mavis launched a $1 million vulnerability bounty program. It's great to learn from mistakes and spend a little money to brainstorm ways to prevent attacks before they happen.

• Voting aggregator Redacted Cartel announces the release of V2 version. Hidden Hand launch the mainnet, with partners Ribbon Finance, Frax Finance, and Balancer Labs.

• Stablecoin $USDC issuer Circle to receive $400 million in funding from BlackRock and four other firms. The market cap of $USDC on Ethereum has already surpassed that of its big brother $USDT, which is a very impressive growth rate.

• Former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith was sentenced to 63 months in prison. Virgil Griffith was sentenced to 63 months in prison for trying to help expand the influence of the blockchain. Incidentally, his contribution to Ethereum is still very significant.

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

• Crypto Daily Digest - April 11th
• Crypto Daily Digest - April 12th
• Crypto Daily Digest - April 13th
• Crypto Daily Digest - April 14th
• Crypto Daily Digest - April 15th

Thanks for the contribution of Ryan and Hani.