This Week in Crypto

Ukraine, Citadel, Polkadot, Helium, Uniswap, DeFi for Institutions -- and other top news, reports, and stats from the week in crypto

March 02, 2022

Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, your favorite weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors, where we review the top news, stats, and reports.

In This Week’s Issue:

  1. This Week in Crypto

    1. 🗞️ Top Weekly Crypto News - Ukraine, Citadel, Polkadot, Uniswap

    2. 💵 Weekly Fundraises - VALR, Aligned, BitsCrunch

    3. 📊 Key Stats - Arbitrum, Ethereum, Solidex

    4. 📝 Report Highlights - Helium Crypto Intelligence Report

    5. 🎧 Best Crypto Podcasts - Coinstack, Bankless, RealVision

    6. 📈 Top 10 Tokens of the Week - UMA, WAVES, LUNA

  2. Upcoming HeartRithm Institutional Investor Webinars: DeFi for Institutions: Generating Above-Market Yield

  3. Featured NFTs: LuvMonsters Collection on OpenSea

  4. Coinstack Podcast Episodes

  5. Top 30: A Good Long-Term Crypto Portfolio

  6. Join Our Telegram Group

  7. Who We’re Following on Crypto Twitter

  8. How to Get Started in Crypto Learning

Thanks to Our 2022 Coinstack Headline Sponsors…

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📺 Upcoming Webinars for Institutional Investors

HeartRithm Managing Partner and Coinstack publisher Ryan Allis is hosting an upcoming 55-minute webinar on crypto investing for family offices, wealth managers, and financial advisors covering our thoughts on crypto investing in 2022, how to invest in DeFi, which smart contract platforms are growing, and mapping out the crypto hedge fund ecosystem. Register for free below.

🗞️ 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. ​​⚡ Polkadot Founder Gavin Wood Donates $5.8 Million to Ukraine - Polkadot founder Gavin Wood has followed through on his promise to donate $5 million to Ukraine to support its efforts in its war with Russia. (Source)

  2. 😮 Cambridge University Launches Crypto Research Project With IMF, BIS - Cambridge University has announced a collaboration with several key financial institutions to conduct crypto research. (Source)

  3. 🏧 Crypto Exchanges Choose ‘Financial Freedom’ and Refuse to Block Russian Users - Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, says it has no plans for a unilateral freeze, though it said it would block the accounts of specific individuals who are affected by the sanctions. (Source)

  1. 💰 Uniswap Adds Tool to Facilitate Crypto Donations to Ukraine - Decentralized exchange Uniswap has built an interface that allows users to swap ‘any token’ for Ethereum and send it to the Ukrainian government. (Source)

  1. 🤑 Griffin Says ‘Fair to Assume’ That Citadel Will Be Market Making in Crypto in ’Months to Come' - Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, told Bloomberg in a new interview that his firm is on the path to market-making in the cryptocurrency sector in the coming months. (Source)

💬 Tweet of the Week

💵 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. In the Last 7 Days, All but Arbitrum’s (+12.7%) On-Chain Activities Have Slowed Down

2. $17M Has Now Been Raised for Ukraine Through Ethereum L1 Donations

3. Solidex Rockets to $2.18B in TVL Within Days of Launch

4. The Fear and Greed Index Suddenly Entered Neutral Territory As Investors Seem to Have Changed Their Opinions on How Increased Geopolitical Uncertainty and Conflicts May Affect the Crypto Market

5. There Are Now Over 300,000 Validators on the Ethereum Beacon Chain

📝 Highlights From Crypto Reports

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

The Crypto Intelligence Report: Helium

About the Report Authors: Stratmont Brothers is a crypto investment fund that invests in meaningful disruptive innovations, with an emphasis on Web 3.0, De-Fi, cryptocurrencies, tokens, and blockchain companies reshaping trillion-dollar markets. They are known for challenging long-standing assumptions, predicting macro trends, and identifying early-stage technologies that will reshape the world.

Short Introduction

“Helium is a global, distributed network of Hotspots that create public, long-range wireless coverage for LoRaWAN-enabled IoT devices. Hotspots produce and are compensated in $HNT, the native cryptocurrency of the Helium blockchain. The Helium blockchain is a new, open source, public blockchain created entirely to incentivize the creation of physical, decentralized wireless networks. Today, the Helium blockchain, and its hundreds of thousands of Hotspots, provide access to the largest LoRaWAN Network in the world.”

(source: Helium.com)

Hotspots: They are electronic devices that provide miles of wireless network coverage for millions of devices around them. Hotspots earn $HNT for this.

IoT: The Internet of things (IoT) describes physical objects (or groups of such objects) that are embedded with sensors, processing ability, software, and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communications networks.

LoRaWAN: It is a radio communication protocol based on LoRa technology. In the context of the Internet of Things, it enables the structuring of a low-power wide-area network, integrating low-power terminal equipment via hotspots. LoRaWAN means Long-Range Wide-Area Network.

Growth Narrative

“Helium shows that crypto incentives can be leveraged to deploy real-world infrastructure,” said Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of Alameda Research and FTX. “Helium has a tremendous opportunity to bring 5G to the masses around the world and greatly enrich the quality of their lives.” he added.

It has long been criticized that crypto as a whole had no real use in the world, only uses within its own ecosystem. Helium arrived with a project that is all about real-world utility, positioning itself as a people-powered network to start a wireless revolution. This is the narrative behind Helium.

A very enthusiastic group of about 100,000 people around the world are working to build the world’s largest and best Internet of Things as well as 5G global network via crowdsourcing. They call this The People’s Network. This group has already deployed 570,000+ hotspots across 44,000+ cities, 163 countries and is adding about 2,700 hotspots per day globally. In fact, there are 25+ hardware manufacturers producing Helium hotspots. The equipment cost for each hotspot is about $750 including the hotspot, antennas and other hardware people are purchasing to optimize rewards performance. This group of individuals has collectively invested over $1B in hardware to build this network. There is a strong community of about 150,000 people who collaborate on the Discord app in building this global mesh network.

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This network is mainly useful for the Internet Of Things; IoT devices don’t need much bandwidth because they are basically transmitting location data with some supporting information. However, there are a lot of app providers that are excited about the potential of high bandwidth apps with the use of 5G.

Team

Helium is a big tech company with over 150 employees mostly in engineering and computer science, but also in marketing, communication, and other areas of expertise required to successfully conduct this project.

The project was founded in 2013 by Shawn Fanning, Amir Haleem, and Sean Carey.

Shawn Fanning is the founder of the well-known Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing platforms.

Amir Haleem is the CEO of Helium; prior to Helium he served a long career in the videogame industry as CTO at gaming startup Diversion, and member of the original team behind Battlefield 1942 at DICE in Stockholm, Sweden.

Marc Nijdam is the CTO of Helium. He has over 25 years of experience in technology leadership. He worked a total of 7+ years at Hewlett-Packard, focusing on the design, scalability, and resilience of product, software, and development teams and worked at Qualcomm and Yahoo!, successfully leading projects.

Frank Mong is the COO of Helium, where he is responsible for sales, marketing and business development for the company. Prior to Helium he was the Vice President and General Manager at HP Security. He also worked at Symantec, Trend Micro, and Palo Alto Networks, among others.

In addition to the team, Helium has a wide palette of advisors from different fields, from venture capital firms like Khosla Ventures’ founder Vinod Khosla to tech companies like former Chief Legal Officer at Uber, Salle Yoo, or former Vice President Engineering at Twitter, Alex Roetter.

Market Capitalization Growth Potential

Helium’s growth has been tremendous for the past year.

The number of hotspots on the network has increased from 14,000 to over 400,000 in one year

Partnerships with cities are being made, for example, San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, has demonstrated how it can create a more connected city while also leveraging helium’s incentive model to pay internet costs for over 1,300 low-income residents who lack access.

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This is one of the biggest projects in the crypto space, and Helium goes much further than that by being one of the biggest projects in tech and wireless networks in general.

The increasing use of Helium as well as the decreasing number of $HNT mined will make the token more useful and rarer. As a result, the price of $HNT will increase.

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

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

📈 Top Performers This Week

Here are the top 10 performing digital assets this week, out of the top 100 by market cap.

And here are the top 15 performers in the last week from all tokens with a market cap of $20M+.

The Top Performers This Month from the Top 100: Anchor is a Yield protocol, Waves is an L1, Terra is an L1, Uma is a Synthetic protocol.

🎨 NFTs of the Week: Our Featured Collection

🎨LuvMonster NFTs - Collect Them Now

Here are the new LuvMonster NFTs from our official Coinstack featured artist Mrs. Bubble that you can buy at special pre-sale prices.

These NFTs are individually hand painted and then digitized for some added magic — with special sound added. We now have 284 unique LuvMonster owners — and the community is growing weekly.

Once we reach 1,000 unique owners we are planning to launch our next phase including our trading card game, stuffed animal line, and animation studio.

For early notification on drops, so you can get them daily at the earliest possible pre-sale prices, join the Discord and the Telegram Channel.

We will continue to feature these joyous NFTs here in Coinstack, building the community and collector-base each week.

Many of our early collectors are buying up the initial supply each day and then earning a profit by reselling the NFTs in the secondary markets. We love shared prosperity!

These are on the Polygon network on OpenSea, so there are no gas fees.

New NFTs This Week - Limited Pre-Sale Available Starting At 0.003 ETH on OpenSea

Here are the new NFTs launching this week. All of these have been handpainted by the artist and then digitized, with sound and motion added.

You can also join our Telegram group here and Discord group here for early NFT drop announcements.

Additional Coinstack Sponsors

Celo, the mobile-first blockchain that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone number, is a proud sponsor of Coinstack. Connect, transact, and store your crypto assets on the Celo blockchain using only an SMS interface. Learn more about Celo at www.celo.org.

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.

🎧 Latest Episodes of The Coinstack Podcast

We have a new Coinstack podcast. So far we’re at 19,146 listens and growing!

Here are the episodes we’ve released so far...

You can listen and subscribe on:

We really appreciate you listening and sharing the link with your friends.

📈 Our Top 30: A Long-Term Crypto Portfolio

Each week we include our top 30 list. If we were creating a portfolio from scratch right now that we didn’t want to touch for 5-10 years, we would be sure to include our top 5: ETH, DOT, SOL, AVAX, & FTM. Here’s our current top 30 for a well-rounded long-term crypto portfolio…

To see which exchanges to buy these on, use Coinmarketcap or Coingecko. We recommend using dollar-cost averaging and holding for a 5-10 year time horizon for any crypto investor as prices can fluctuate a lot in the short term.

💬 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. We now have over 1800 members on our Telegram.

💬 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 be long on many 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.

The information above does not constitute an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Further, none of the information here is a recommendation to invest in any securities. 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 welcome on our Telegram channel:

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