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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

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

1. GFO-X, a crypto derivatives venue regulated in the UK, has raised $30M in a Series B round, led by M&G Investments 

2. Babylon, a bitcoin staking protocol under development, has raised $18M in a Series A funding round, co-led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC.

3. Mocaverse, a metaverse project, has raised $11.88M, led by Animoca Brands

4. Nonco, a digital asset brokerage firm, has raised $10M in seed capital, led by  Brian Brooks of Valor Capital Group

5. OurSky, a Southern California-based technology company, has raised $9.5M in a seed round led by Upfront Ventures 

🗞️ 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. 💎 Coinbase to Bring TradFi Assets On-Chain With New Platform Built on Base: "Project Diamond" lets institutions create and trade digital native versions of financial instruments such as debt using Base in a regulated manner.

2. 🇸🇻 World’s First Bitcoin Bonds Receive Regulatory Approval in El Salvador:El Salvador’s long-planned Bitcoin bonds have inched closer to reality after apparently receiving regulatory approval for an early 2024 issuance, the country’s Bitcoin-focused office posted on Tuesday.

3. 🏦 Fidelity held meeting with SEC about spot bitcoin fund, submitted presentation about ETF workflows:Asset management giant Fidelity held a meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Dec. 7 about its proposed spot bitcoin ETF, according to a memo on the regulator's website. 

4. ⚖️ Tether freezes all OFAC-sanctioned wallets in 'proactive' security measure: Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin, has frozen the wallets of individuals sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC), the company announced today. 

5. 💰 Layer 2 Starknet Unveils Plan To Distribute $3.5M in Fees To Developers: Dubbed Devonomics, the pilot program will allocate roughly 8% of all transaction fees recollected, which is 1,600 ETH, or $3.5 million, to Starknet’s community of builders. It will distribute all fees accumulated from launch to Nov. 30.

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💬 Tweet of the Week

📊 Key Stats of the Week

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

1. Franklin Templeton has tokenized $327 million in T-Bills, and critics claim that crypto has no actual use cases.

2. Yesterday we experienced the highest daily volume of long liquidations seen over the last 3 months. Overall, more than $343M of long positions were liquidated, including $95M in Bitcoin, $73M in Ethereum, and $18M in Solana.

3. According to the Dune Dashboard by @ilemi, Metaplex Studios generated ~8K SOL (~$480K) on fees in November (~2k sol/week). 

4. Synthetix Perps Open Interest crosses $200M with $120M in Non-ETH/BTC OI

5. MakerDAO crosses $200M of annualized revenues

📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports

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

DePIN: Decentralized Hardware Meets the New Data Economy - VeradiVerdict - Issue #274

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.

TLDR: DePIN is the gradual merging of a decentralized hardware layer with a community-owned new data economy.

Introduction

DePIN, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, has been one of the rising trends over this past year [1]. The core promise of DePIN is to bring the principles of blockchain applications – as community owned, publicly verifiable, and incentive-aligned – to the world of physical “things” and infrastructure, whether that is WiFi stations, security cameras, or computation servers. Within this article, we will look at some of the core principles of DePIN, before exploring some of the most representative DePIN projects, and finally discussing some of DePIN’s wider implications on the blockchain space.

Conceptualizing DePIN

DePIN encompasses a broad variety of projects. From decentralized storage networks such as Arweave and Filecoin to decentralized WiFi connectivity such as Helium, to community-sourced software applications such as Hivemapper, all of these have been characterized as “DePIN”. Messari makes this observation in their seminal DePIN report in January 2023, which categorizes DePIN into 4 primary sectors: decentralized server, wireless, sensor, and energy networks [2].

Source: Messari [2]. Retrieved Nov 11, 2023.

From the projects and sectors that Messari delineates, we can see that the original definition of DePIN leans heavily into the “physical” nature of projects – the physical use of sensors, servers, and routers to create a decentralized Internet stack from the hardware layer upwards. Since then, however, this common notion of DePIN has gradually broadened to include more consumer-facing applications, such as TRIP which aims to build a “decentralized Uber” [3]. This therefore raises the question: how do we begin to conceptualize what “DePIN” refers to?

Our first task, therefore, is to notice the conceptual similarities between these broad range of projects, in both the original Messari report as well as how this term has gradually evolved. Many of these projects share several similarities, including collective ownership, distributed infrastructure cost, gradually expanding economies of scale as more users enter the ecosystem [4]. Indeed, this can be summarized in Messari’s DePIN flywheel, explaining how this is facilitated through token incentives.

Source: Messari [2]. Retrieved Nov 11, 2023.

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

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

1. Bankless - Welcome To The Bull Market

2. The Defiant - Crypto Markets Rally, More Airdrops, Bitcoin Has 'SPAM', & "Code = Law"

3. Coin Bureau - Bitcoin’s Biggest LIE EXPOSED!! Here’s The Truth!!

4. Nathaniel Whittemore: Bitcoin Soars as Jamie Dimon Says "Close it Down!"

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💬 Join The Coinstack Telegram Community

Join our Telegram Channel here to chat with our community, ask questions, and learn more about the future of money as we move to a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone.

💬 The People We’re Following Closely on Twitter

1. Vitalik Buterin

2. Justin Drake

3. Hayden Adams

4. Hasu

5. Ryan Adams

6. Vance Spencer

7. Camila Russo

8. Ryan Selkis

9. Anthony Sassano

10. Lyn Alden

11. Gavin Wood

12. Cathy Wood

13. Beniamin Mincu

14. Barry Silbert

15. David Hoffman

16. Preston Pysh

17. Willy Woo

18. Ultra Sound Money List

19. Polkadot Ecosystem List

📚 How To Get Started With Crypto Learning

1. Crypto: Explain It Like I’m 5 (Article)

2. The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo (Book) 

3. Crypto Theses for 2021 by Messari (PDF)

4. Bankless - The DeFi community (Substack + Podcast + Discord)

5. Understanding Polkadot - The Next Generation Blockchain Tech (Website)

6. The Ethereum 2.0 Report from Messari (PDF)

7. Blockgeeks Video Tutorials (Video)

8. The Coinstack Website (Website)

9. 2008 Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF)

10. 2013 Ethereum Whitepaper (PDF)

📰 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.

Comments and thoughts are welcome on our Telegram channel:

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