Crypto Market Weekly Recap - March Week4

What A Week!

The market has picked up a lot in the last seven days. Bitcoin is up to $45,000 while Ethereum broke $3,100. Bitcoin perps’ volatility has dropped to an exaggeratedly low level. In other words, the market is particularly inactive and the funding rate in perpetuals is negligible right now. It's hard to rally retail sentiment with such a small uptick, which is why most of us still prefer NFT and altcoins to the mainstream coins.

Stargate reached $3.5 today, up 66% in 24 hours, which is too much. Stargate is a cross-chain protocol built on LayerZero. If you don’t know much about cross-chain, just remember that Stargate is similar to Anyswap in the way you might use it in the future. Their designs may be different, but they both have cross-chain abilities. Side note: Anyswap has also gone up by 50%, supposedly driven by Stargate.

Stargate's FDV is currently ~$3.5 billion, Anyswap's market cap is ~$1.5 billion, and Synapse's is ~$500 million. Stargate's FDV has surpassed all other projects in total in cross-chain projects, with a TVL of $2+ billion.

One of the reasons why it has pumped so much is that a very limited number of tokens are in circulation, and the first batch of tokens to be auctioned were all bought by Alameda Research. What’s left in circulation are the tokens mined by users. However, because the TVL is so high, each user gets fewer tokens. I saw a demo of LayerZero a few months ago, and it was very smooth, but the market cap of $3.5 billion is overestimated given the current market conditions. It's therefore hard to predict whether cross-chain will be developed and implemented as a core feature of future blockchains.

Another topic I want to talk about is NFT games. I'm not talking about games such as Axie Infinity– after all, the market has been flooded with games like these copied from others. Most of them are truly terrible. My personal preference is for dungeon-style games. As I mentioned previously in my game guild article, this is where most of the games originated.

For example, I tweeted a long time ago that I bought a Founder's Map NFT. There weren't many similar games at the time, so there was nothing to buy (take note that this is not investment advice – the price now is much lower than when I bought it). But recently I have seen many projects of this type, such as Realm and Lostworld.

The reason I like this kind of project is that it is more open and more in line with crypto’s community-driven philosophy. It's not the kind of game that you design, ship and then let the users play. Rather, users give feedback as they play, and then developers make updates as they go. Moreover, the performance requirements of this type of game for blockchain are not that high.

Here I would like to add one more thing: games that declare themselves to be 3A masterpieces are not particularly realistic on the blockchain, in my opinion. And besides, a game doesn't need to be a 3A masterpiece to be fun. The most important thing about games is that they are enjoyable, a little unpredictable and so on. Beautiful graphics can be an important factor for a game to catch fire, but it is certainly not the deciding factor in their success.

There are also plenty of other small stories catching our attention now too. Here’s a quick summary:

• Vitalik Buterin shared his thoughts on EIP-4844. He solved part of the rationale, mainly regarding data validation scenarios for blob-carrying transactions that EVM can't perform, and Proto-danksharding will replace danksharding.
• The parent company of BAYC Yuga Labs closed a $450 million funding round led by a16z. Incidentally, a16z has changed its Twitter avatar to an ape head.
• The NFT hacker of DeFiance Capital’s founder has transferred 588 $ETH to Tornado. Cash. It most likely won't be recovered, so you should all be careful not to click on phishing emails at work right now.
• Curve will be deployed to Celo soon, mainly to provide more liquidity.
• The a16z team is proposing a new economic model for MakerDAO tokens. If you are interested, you can find more about it on our website.
• Lido gave DeFiance Capital founder’s a new mint of 3.7M $LIDO, which is to destroy/permanently lock the coins of the hacker's account, and then mint 3.7M $LIDO for his new wallet.

Market Dynamics

• Coinbase Cloud Launches Avalanche Developer Tool Suite
• Ribbon Finance Closed $8.75 Million Series B Funding Round Led by Paradigm
• Aave Community Launches Proposal to Add $sAVAX to Aave v3
• Polygon Announced the Ethereum Adoption DAO
• Anchor Protocol Adds $sAVAX as Collateral
• Couple Suspected of Bitfinex Theft and $4.5 Billion in Crypto Laundering Request Hearing in Case Be Postponed
• Solana NFT Trading Marketplace Solanat About to Release Launchpad
• Metis Launches NFT Cross-Chain Bridge NFT Hub

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

• DailyFi - 3.21 | Vitalik Buterin Shares Thoughts on EIP-4844
• DailyFi - 3.22 | Ribbon Finance Launches $APE Call Option Vault
• DailyFi - 3.23 | Mysten Labs Launches Layer 1 Blockchain Network Sui
• DailyFi - 3.24 | Yield Guild Games Launches subDAO YGG Japan

Lastly, a few projects that we / our community are interested in

• Garbage Friends, a derivative trading platform of the Invisible Friend project – that so far only has a well-followed Twitter account – has caught our colleague’s attention.
• Upshot NFT + DeFi
• The LetMeSpeak app for learning English in the Metaverse
• RSS3, Web3