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This Week in Crypto - Janet Yellen's New Stance

The top news from the digital asset ecosystem, covering Circle's $400M, Janet Yellen's commentary, and a deep-dive on Audius

April 13, 2022

Issue Summary: 

Welcome back to Coinstack, your favorite weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors, where we review the top news and reports in the digital asset ecosystem.

Quote of the Week

“Digital assets may be relatively new, but they are part of a larger trend – the digitization of finance – that has been in the making for decades.”- U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on April 7, 2022

In This Week’s Issue:

  1. This Week in Crypto

    1. 🗞️ Top Weekly Crypto News - EU, Luna, Binance

    2. 💵 Weekly Fundraises - Circle, SoftBank, Genies

    3. 📊 Key Stats - Ethereum, Boba, Luna

    4. 📝 Deep Dive - The Crypto Intelligence Report: Audius

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

    6. 📈 Top 10 Tokens of the Week - GMT, APE, ZIL

  2. Upcoming HeartRithm Institutional Investor Webinars: DeFi for Corporate Treasury

  3. NFTs: LuvMonsters Collection

  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 Sponsors…

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HeartRithm is a crypto DeFi fund that invests in DeFi, margin lending, and algorithmic trading to generate monthly yield for institutional allocators and qualified clients in a market-neutral manner, without a single down month since inception. They also have a major social impact mission and are giving away a portion of their performance fee to fund philanthropic efforts. Learn more at www.heartrithm.com.

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.

📺 Upcoming Webinar: DeFi for Corporate Treasuries

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 10 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. 🇺🇸 U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Shares Encouraging Stance on Digital Assets - In a speech she shared an updated and balanced tone on the crypto ecosystem, discussing many of the benefits of the emerging ecosystem and its potential to improve financial access and markets. (Source)

  2. 🇷🇺 EU Bans Providing High-Value Crypto Services to Russia - European Union member states agreed to ban the provision of high-value crypto-asset services to Russia as part of a fifth package of sanctions imposed in response to the Ukraine war. (Source)

  3. ₿ Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) Added $173 Million More in Bitcoin to Its Wallet - The LFG is a newly formed nonprofit that aims to maintain the Terra ecosystem by building a $10 billion reserve in bitcoin for backing the UST, a stablecoin issued by Terra, one of LFG’s main backers. (Source)

  4. 🇦🇪 Binance Approved in Principle by Abu Dhabi As Digital Asset Broker-Dealer - The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume must now complete the application process, according to Richard Teng, Binance’s head for the Middle East and North Africa and a former ADGM executive. (Source)

  1. 🎮 Sony and Lego Are Investing $2 Billion in Epic Games to Build in Metaverse - Epic Games, creators of the wildly popular video game Fortnite, just got a $2 billion investment to build in the metaverse from legacy entertainment giants Sony Group Corp. and Kirkbi, the family-owned company behind The Lego Group. (Source)

  1. 💵 Crypto-Like Digital Dollar at Least Several Years Away, Yellen Says - Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the design and development of a digital dollar would likely take years if the U.S. chose to create one while outlining the various questions the Biden administration is weighing as it considers ways to make payments faster in the U.S. (Source)

  2. 🇭🇳 Bitcoin Now Legal Tender in Special Economic Zone of Honduras - In the special economic zone located on the island of Roatan, known as Prospera, bitcoin and other cryptos can now be used as a form of payment for individuals and businesses. (Source)

  3. ⚡ SEC Approves Bitcoin Futures ETF Filed Under the ’33 Act - The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved Teucrium’s bitcoin futures ETF, which Grayscale Investments’ CEO said weakens the agency’s argument to deny spot bitcoin ETFs. (Source)

  4. 💰 FDIC Asks Banks to Report Crypto Activity - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued a financial institution letter – a letter sent to CEOs of FDIC-insured banks – requesting that banks notify their regional FDIC director of their crypto activities. (Source)

  5. 🇺🇸 GOP Policy Arm Releases Paper Exploring Benefits, Risks of Crypto - The policy arm of U.S. Senate Republicans issued a policy paper on crypto, signaling the GOP is making its way toward a more unified approach to crypto regulation. (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. Bloomberg Estimates 9% ETH Staking Yield and -2% Annual Issuance Reduction Post-merge

2. Ethereum Has Held Steady at ~1.17M Transactions per Day, With Avalanche Reaching ~74% of Ethereum’s Average Daily Transactions

3. In Total, Boba Has Seen 457,223 Transactions From Just Over 5000 Unique Users

4. UST’s Growth of $6.5B in Supply YTD Has Resulted in a Continuous Burn of LUNA Supply

5. The Arbitrum Network Is Also Steadily Approaching 1M Unique Addresses

📝 Highlights From Crypto Reports

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

The Crypto Intelligence Report: Audius

About the Author: Stratmont Brothers is a European 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. Their mission is to create a better world for our next generations. They are known for challenging long-standing assumptions, predicting macro trends, and identifying early-stage technologies that will reshape the world.

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In 202 The music industry generates $43 billion in revenue but only 12% goes to content artists. Furthermore, artists have minimal control over how their music is distributed and little visibility into who is streaming it. “[…]Audius allows artists to distribute to and get paid directly from their fans, and is comprised of the following components: 1. An efficient token economy powered by the Audius platform token ($AUDIO), 3rd-party stablecoins, and artist tokens 2. A decentralized storage solution and ledger for sharing audio and metadata 3. A unique track encryption scheme paired with a programmable mechanism to unlock user-specific proxy re-encryption keys for content 4. A discovery protocol for users to efficiently query metadata 5. A decentralized governance protocol, whereby artists, node operators, and fans are individually and collectively enfranchised in decision making about protocol changes and upgrades” https://audius.org/home

Founded in 2018, Audius is a music platform on the border of Spotify and Souncloud. The company operates a decentralized music streaming service with a social networking component. It allows artists to share their tracks on the app and connects fans directly with artists. From a technical perspective, it is a blockchain protocol that allows artists to produce immutable, time-stamped records of their work, secured by a decentralized network. Initially, Audius was based on a sidechain of Ethereum, but migrated to Solana to take advantage of the network's performance. Audius launched its private alpha in 2019, followed by its testnet in August of the same year. Then, the company opened its platform to the public in September 2019. Finally, Audius created iOS and Android apps in early 2020. These considerations (follow the rights of authors, to distribute income, to facilitate the transactions) even concerns the revenues, since 90% of the platform's profits will go directly to the artists.

Audius aims to address a variety of issues:

  • Lack of transparency regarding artists' payment processes.

  • Incomplete data on the ownership of rights often prevents artists from being properly compensated.

  • Several intermediary parties that slow down the payment process for artists.

  • Publishing rights are complex, with no incentive for the industry to produce reliable and accurate data.

  • Remixes, covers and other derivative content are censored due to rights management issues.

  • Licensing issues prevent PSDs and content from being accessible worldwide.

Audius tries to solve these problems by:

  • Paying users in proportion to how much value they add to the project

  • Making artists engage directly with their fans.

  • Through governance, which must be earned by adding value to Audius, and shared consistently among the user groups contributing to the protocol.

  • Prices and revenues for participants must be consistent, predictable, and transparent.

  • Access should be democratized; anyone can contribute to Audius if they follow the protocol rules, and all information is publicly available.

  • Intermediaries should be eliminated where possible; if necessary, they should be algorithmic, transparent, and verifiable.

  • It should be noted that some of their solutions do not precisely address the point in question, such as the issue of intermediaries and democratized access to the protocol.

Team and Partners:

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RONEIL RUMBURG

Co-Founder & Chief Executive OfficerRoneil most recently co-founded Kleiner Perkins' early-stage seed fund. At KP, he was responsible for seed investments into Blockchain and AI companies, including Lightning Labs. Roneil attended Stanford University and previously co-founded a Bitcoin peer to peer payment company called Backslash.

FORREST BROWNING

Co-Founder & Chief Product OfficerForrest is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, and most recently was a Co-Founder of StacksWare, an enterprise datacenter management platform started from a Stanford University research project. The company provides analytics at scale for Fortune 500 customers, and was successfully acquired in late 2017.

Investors

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Audius, announced a major partnership with video-sharing app TikTok on Monday, allowing its artists to upload their music to TikTok to be used in videos.

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🎧 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: Stepn is a Web3 Dapp, ApeCoin is a Governance token, Zilliqa is an L1, Skale is an L2.

🎨 NFTs of the Week: Our Featured Collection

This week we have ordered our first 5 prototypes from our stuffed animal manufacturer finalists. We are excited to bring these characters into the real world and see what magic happens.

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

These NFTs are individually hand painted and then digitized for some added magic — with special sound added.

This week’s featured is LuvMonster #116 - WallyPoly.

Hello world. I'm WallyPoly. My super powers are giving radical permission to the world to fully love and accept things as they are giving absolute freedom to live. I help people build bodacious lives, selves, and families. When I don't like something I make a quizzical scoffing noise and roll up into a roly poly body and am wayward off toward something my heart does desire.

I am a part of Team Collabo, supporting the most epic teams of alignment coming together who are all in with their codes -- updating daily their blueprint for more epic fun with themselves and each other.

I am part Walrus, part unicorn, part Roly Poly bug, and part dragonfly. Some love my style -- others not so much. That's cool.

I live in Amsterdam and find life enjoyable in places that are slightly cooler. No tropics for me!

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

New NFTs This Week

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

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🎧 Latest Episodes of The Coinstack Podcast

We have a new Coinstack podcast. So far we’re at 21,935 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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