Crypto Market Weekly Recap - May Week2

Have a great weekend, everyone.

This week's market was very bad. Bitcoin was already at around $40k, but still fell fast along with the US stocks. Most market analyses blame it on the worsening of the war in Europe. But l won't talk too much about that. Just focus on the Crypto market itself.

Let's look at the NFT market first. Last week's NFT market was still hot, mainly due to BAYC and The Otherside. According to Coindesk, the BAYC team raised a total of $285 million from the Otherside NFT sale, and the Otherside NFT traded at near "crazy" levels in the first a few days, with ETH Gas spiking to near five figures at one point during the Mint phase. The floor price of BAYC rose to 167 ETH last week, and is currently around 100 ETH, dropping about 40%. The team behind BAYC, Yuga Labs, also revealed on Twitter saying they would probably develop their own chain and transfer ApeCoin to there.

This week the Coinbase NFT marketplace was officially open for all to use, while another US exchange Kraken, also announced its own NFT marketplace, Kraken NFT. But the Coinbase NFT numbers were far below expectations. Zora Labs, also an NFT trading marketplace, closed a $50 million round of funding from Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others.

BTW, Haun's founder is Katie Haun, who previously worked at a16z. She announced her own venture, Haun Ventures, last December. One of Haun's career highlights was leading OpenSea's Series B round at a16z, which brought her a seat at the board.

The hotter OpenSea gets, the more projects will aim to beat OpenSea. Unless OpenSea is defeated, there will probably always be people raising money and doing similar things under the banner of defeating OpenSea.

For more NFT related content, check out this link.

For more on NFT lending, we recommend reading: https://metaversal.banklesshq.com/p/nft-lending-?s=r

DeFi

With the exception of the top DeFi projects at Uniswap level, most DeFi projects have probably fallen below the price at which they were funded in the primary market. But there are still primary market projects doing derivatives type projects valued above $50m. Here's a snippet from Poly Pulse.

In short, the next DeFi Summer explosion we expect will require

• New hotspots, such as structured products, options markets

• Smarter Scam

• A more transparent DeFi market with a better compliance framework

Arbitrum & Game

• GMX has generated $36.4 million in fees, with a total volume of about $27.5 billion

• TreasureDAO trading marketplace has a volume of over $268 million and is currently the largest NFT trading platform on Arbitrum

• Tracer has a trading volume of over $625 million and Tracer V2 will be launched soon

• GuildFi has partnered with PlayAsenders, which is a partnership between a game guild and a game, sort of a competition where the winner splits the $AGG prize

• Illuvium, one of the most famous games at IMX, will sell a total of 20,000 NFTs (Virtual plots) on June 2nd. Once sold, there will be no more Mint opportunities in the future

• Ancient8, the largest gaming guild in Vietnam, has released a study of STEPN, CyBall, Summoners Arena and Skyweaver

Market Dynamics

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

• Curve integrates with the Aurora Network. Now you can connect to Aurora Network through the Ethereum wallets and access the dApp's liquidity pool.
• On the first day Coinbase NFT Marketplace fully opened its beta to the public, the number of registrations was fewer than 150. Coinbase's embarrassing record continues. As of the evening of the day, the total number of users in the Coinbase NFT Marketplace was only 1,112. I think the reason why users are so limited may be the price. The NFT floor price in it is generally higher than that of OpenSea. I hope the official version will not be so embarrassing anymore.
• LootRush closed a $12 million seed round, led by Paradigm. a16z also participated in the investment. It offers a quick-start platform for blockchain games, and also provides NFT rental services for games, but currently only Axie Infinity can be played on the platform.
• Binance contributed $500m to Musk's Twitter acquisition. I didn't expect so many crypto venture capital institutions behind him. $500 million commitment from Binance, $800 million from Sequoia Capital, and $400 million from a16z.
• Degis has launched the function to stake $veDEG to get share of the platform's revenue. The $DEG staking function was launched more than a month ago. This time, the function of depositing $veDEG into the revenue sharing pool has been updated, and users can share the platform revenue.
• Multichain will launch the veMULTI mainnet on May 9. You can pay attention to it this weekend. Multichain Bridge fees for this year's Quarter 1 will also be distributed over the next 9 weeks.
• Azuki airdrop project Beanz is about to be Revealed. At present, it has been revealed, and the attention is slightly higher than expected. Now the floor price is 3.95 $ETH, and looks like it has no pressure to rush to 5 $ETH.
• Crypto hedge fund Pangea Fund closed $85 million in funding, with participation from Alameda Research and others. The team is founded by former analysts at Messari with great quality. No wonder they'll do well in business.
• Aurora CEO: The attack on the cross-chain bridge Rainbow Bridge was blocked. This thing is quite interesting. The project did not lose money, but the hacker lost 2.5 $ETH.
• Yuga Labs is refunding gas fees to Otherdeed miners whose transactions failed. Yuga Labs is quite conscientious. It publicly boycotted the Dutch auction before, and now it also refunds the gas fee. There is indeed a reason why the project can be so big.
• Yearn announced the V3 of Vaults. The new version includes enabling higher-risk, high-reward Vaults; combining with projects using ERC-4626 format tokens; gas optimization; automated management through Keep3r Network, and more.
• Goldman's first bitcoin-backed loan service was backed by Coinbase. It's Goldman's first Bitcoin loan, and the loan-to-value ratio is about 40% to 60%. The collateral is held by a qualified custodian, but it is unclear what the annualized interest rate will be.

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

• Crypto Daily Digest - April 29th
• Crypto Daily Digest - May 5th
• Crypto Daily Digest - May 6th