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Bitcoin Cycles Rhyme, Have You Stacked Enough?

We're less than 5 months away from the next halving, the historical start of each of the past three bull markets. Time to get ready. Here are the top news, stats, and reports from this week in crypto.

Author

Ryan Allis
November 29, 2023

Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We review the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 180k weekly subscribers. This week, we cover CZ’s $175M bond and being stuck in the US, the court denying SBF's latest request for release, and big new venture rounds for Matr1x ($10M) and CGV ($5M).

The countdown to one of the key historical catalysts for the the start of each four year bull market cycle

Price performance since we began writing Coinstack in January 2021

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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…

📊 Key Stats of the Week

Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...

1. Have you stacked enough Bitcoin?

Source: @DanHeld

2. Users pay on the order of $10M per day to access Ethereum block space

Source: @willnuelle

3. Despite a +76% rally in crypto prices this year (based on total crypto mcap), the number of monthly active devs in crypto is down -23%.

Source: @RyanRasmussen

4. Solana recently handled over 51.6M daily transactions, easily the most network activity all year and the most since December 2021. This represents a 155% increase from the prior week.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

5. The market pays a lower “Fee Multiple” for Ethereum than for Avalanche. That is, the market gives 600x credit for every $1 of transaction fees that Avalanche receives, 100x credit for every $1 that Ethereum receives. 

Source: @willnuelle

📊 Top 10 Performers of the Week

Here are the top 10 performing tokens of the past seven days, out of the top 100 by market capitalization.

🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories

Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week… 

  1. ⚖️ Binance Ex-CEO CZ released on $175 million bond after U.S. criminal charges: Changpeng Zhao, who stepped down as CEO of Binance today, will pay a $175 million personal recognizance bond after pleading guilty to criminal charges in the U.S.

  1. ⚖️ Binance Founder CZ Stuck in U.S. for the Moment: Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao must remain in the U.S., at least for the moment, as a federal judge considers a U.S. Department of Justice motion that would require him to remain in the country until he is sentenced early next year.

  1. ⚖️ Court Denies Sam Bankman-Fried's latest request for release: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the latest attempt for release by Sam Bankman-Fried, and he'll have to stay in jail as his lawyers try to appeal his case. "We have reviewed the Defendant-Appellant's additional arguments and find them unpersuasive," Clerk of Court Catherine O’Hagan Wolfe wrote in a letter dated Nov. 21.

  1. ⚖️ Do Kwon's extradition to South Korea and US approved by Montenegro court: The Higher Court in Podgorica, the capital city of Montenegro, has approved the extradition of Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon based on requests from South Korea and the United States.

  1. ⚖️ SEC Having Difficulty Locating Hex founder Richard Heart to Serve With its Lawsuit: The SEC is having trouble serving Richard Schueler, the Hex and PulseChain founder best known as Richard Heart, with its lawsuit for allegedly selling unregistered securities.

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💬 Tweet of the Week

Source: @pythianism

📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports

Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…

About the Author: Paul Veradittakit, is a Managing Partner at Pantera Capital, one of the oldest and largest institutional investors focused on investing into blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.

Introduction

Arcade is a NFT-centric peer-to-peer lending platform [1]. Since its early 2022 launch, Arcade has facilitated ~$150M in NFT-backed loans, $27M in TVL, and $14M in active borrowings [2] [3]. Recently, Arcade has introduced V3 of its protocol, and launched ArcadeDAO as a decentralized governance body for the protocol [4]. Within this article, we will provide a brief overview of Arcade’s history, as well as its future potential within the broader NFTFi space.

Development and History

Just as NFTs began to take off in early 2021, Arcade founders Gabe Frank and Robert Masiello recognized the vast potential of providing a new financial infrastructure for this emergent NFT asset class. Despite seeming to appear as nothing more than a few profile pictures at the time, Frank and Masiello recognized that NFTs potentially represented the next evolution of digital assets – not only for digital art and collectibles, but also for real-world assets and goods.

After closing its second round of funding in December 2021, led by Pantera [5], v1 of Arcade Protocol launched in January 2022 [6]. Since then, Arcade has been a pioneer in NFT financialization, including facilitating the first on-chain digital-art bundle loan – an NFT-backed loan of $1.25M USDC in February 2022, with Genesis as the lender [7].

By August 2022, when Arcade Protocol launched Version 2, the protocol had already originated over $15M in total volume [4]. Version 2 introduced more sophisticated features, including the ability for lenders to make loan offers on entire collections [4].

In Q3 of 2023, Arcade had over $100M in total volume processed, and introduced two major upgrades: first, Version 3 of Arcade Protocol was introduced in September 2023, and shortly after in October 2023, the project launched ArcadeDAO, its decentralized on-chain governance body, alongside its governance token [4] [8].

Today, as of November 1, 2023, total volume of the protocol is around $150M. Of this, there has been around $33M in CryptoPunk total loan volume, $14.5 in digital art loan volume, and $2M in real world assets (RWA) and real world goods (RWG) loan volume [3] [9]. For lenders of the platform, they’ve earned around ~$2M in interest with an average APR of 16%. Defaults across the platform also remain low at around ~8% across 3500 loans [3].

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...

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📰 The Coinstack Newsletter:

Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. Published and written weekly by Ryan Allis and Mike Gavela. 

Coinstack is a news and analysis newsletter for the digital asset industry. None of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities or other types of investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Any historical returns, expected returns, or probability projections may not reflect actual future performance. All investments involve risk and may result in loss.

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