DeFi Gaming Gets Ugly ⚔️

A legal dispute among Gala Games execs casts uncertainty over the blockchain gaming company’s future ---- plus the top news, stats, and reports of the week in crypto.

Author

Ryan Allis
September 06, 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 150k weekly subscribers.

Price performance since we began writing Coinstack in January 2021

Published By Coinstack Partners

Coinstack Partners helps crypto/web3 companies raise funding from crypto venture capital firms and family offices for Series Seed/A/B/C rounds of $1M to $50M. The firm has relationships and access to all of the top 300 crypto venture capital firms across North America, Asia, and Europe. To discuss venture capital fundraising services for your company, please review our deck and schedule a free consultation.

Join our Daily Crypto News Roundup

We’re launching a new daily edition Coinstack that covers all the day’s news. If you’d like to join our daily edition, subscribe here.

Become a Coinstack Sponsor

To reach our weekly audience of 150,000 crypto insiders, view our sponsor deck and schedule a call to discuss sponsoring Coinstack.

Thanks to Our 2023 Coinstack Sponsors…

Amphibian Capital is a market/delta neutral fund for the world’s leading crypto funds, they returned approximately 5.35% net in Q1 ‘23, 186.33% net (pro-forma) since '19* and aim to deeply mitigate downside. They have USD and ETH share classes, soon BTC. Deck here: www.amphibiancapital.com.

Bumper is a superior alternative to crypto options for traders looking to hedge risk. Bumper leverages the power of DeFi to make risk management easier, 30% cheaper and more efficient than traditional tools. And liquidity providers assuming a portion of the risk get a 3-18% real yield on USDC. Try Bumper and get a share in $250,000 of BUMP rewards for Early Adopters - bumper.fi.

💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

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

🗞️ 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. ⚖️ Gala Games Co-Founders Sue Each Other Alleging Corporate Waste, $130 Million Theft - Two co-founders of blockchain games developer Gala Games are currently suing each other in Utah district court. Both lawsuits were filed on Thursday.

  1. ⚖️ Robinhood Buys Back Sam Bankman-Fried’s Seized Shares Worth $600 Million - Robinhood completed on Thursday a buyback of $606 million in seized shares that were once in the hands of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, according to an SEC filing, following a court’s approval earlier in the week.

  1. ⚖️ Ripple Says Court Should Deny SEC request For Appeal- Ripple Labs pushed back against the Securities and Exchange Commission's request for appeal in an ongoing dispute in a new filing on Friday. The SEC is looking to appeal part of a landmark decision from July as to whether some of Ripple's sales of XRP violated securities laws.

  1. ⚖️ SEC Delays Spot Bitcoin ETF Decision for All Applicants Including BlackRock, Fidelity - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has delayed until October making a decision on all of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications filed by applicants including BlackRock, WisdomTree, Invesco Galaxy, Wise Origin, VanEck, Bitwise and Valkyrie Digital Assets earlier this year, according to agency filings on Thursday.

  1. 🚀PancakeSwap Expands to Coinbase-Incubated Base Network- PancakeSwap, the leading decentralized exchange on BNB Chain, is expanding to the Coinbase-incubated Ethereum layer-2 network Base.

💬 Tweet of the Week

Source: @DeFi_Made_Here

📊 Key Stats of the Week

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

1. Most recently, Friends.tech generated $200k in daily fees. This ranks it 12th overall in terms of daily fees, slightly behind zkSync ($215k) and Binance's BNB chain ($258k).

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

2. The value of real world assets (RWAs) on-chain crossed the $3 billion mark on August 14 (now at $3.1 billion). This exceeds the value of their previous all-time high of $2.75 billion (set in April 2022) by 13%.

Source: @glxyresearch

3. Total adjusted on-chain volume decreased by 6.3% to $176B (BTC: -6.7%, ETH -5.7%)

Source: @lars0x

4. A total of 72,117 ETH, equivalent to $126.5M, was burned in August.

Source: @lars0x

5. Aave v3 loans quietly hit a new record high for the year, and a record $100mm in new loans issuance.

Source: @twobitidiot

📝 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

In 2017, a group of MIT Media Lab researchers claimed in Wired that decentralized social networks “will never work”. In their piece, they cited three impossible challenges: (1) the question of onboarding (and retaining) users from scratch, (2) the (mis)handling of personal information of users, and (3) lucrative user-targeted user advertisements. In all three cases, they argued, incumbent tech giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, simply had too far-reaching economies of scale to make room for any significant competition.

Fast forward half a decade later, what was once hailed as “impossible” seems no longer so far-fetched, and we seem to be on the dawn of a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualize social media networks. In this three-part series, we will examine how new ideas in decentralized social (DeSo) seem to address these “age-old” questions, specifically, (1) the use of open social graphs in solving the cold start problem, (2) using proof-of-personhood and cryptographic techniques to solve the userhood problem, and (3) leveraging tokenomics models and incentive structures to solve the revenue problem.

Creating the “Killer App”

The ultimate question of whether web3 social as a vertical will succeed or not is if it can produce a new “killer app,” one like TikTok or Instagram before it, providing a truly novel social experience that onboards users on a mass scale. Without this “killer app,” all the development in the underlying infrastructure (such as decentralized social graphs and proof-of-humanhood identity protocols) lose much of their intended purpose.

However, the problem with these “new social experiences” is that they are almost impossible to predict. Although people repeat the mantra of “building a killer app” over and over again, no one quite knows in what form this app will take place – after all, you are quite literally trying to predict the course of human behavior. In this article, instead of trying to do the impossible and concretely predict what the next “killer app” in social will be, I will try and explore two high level strategies – augmenting existing social experiences with web3 features and the creation of a web3-first social community – and describe some of projects following these potential routes of innovation.

Augmenting Existing Social Experiences with Tokenization

The low-hanging fruit approach in building a web3 “killer app” is simply to add some new features to an already existing “killer app,” a mainstream social platform which users are already familiar with. Most commonly, this “additional web3 feature” is an element of tokenization in the form of an X-to-Earn project.

From Reddit Community Points Program: https://www.reddit.com/community-points/ 

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

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

Additional Coinstack Sponsors

Hive Digital is a leader in providing SEO and PPC services for blockchain, DeFi, Web3, and crypto companies. If you want to expand your organic presence and paid leads from Google and Facebook, get a proposal from Hive Digital at www.hivedigital.com.

💬 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

📚 How To Get Started With Crypto Learning

📰 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:

Please share with your friends and colleagues.