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This Week in Crypto (Puerto Rico Edition)

The top news, stats, and reports in the digital assets market. Reporting from Puerto Rico Blockchain week at the CoinAgenda conference.

December 08, 2021

Issue Summary: This week we are writing from Puerto Rico Blockchain Week. Significant events include CoinAgenda, Metaversa, Uncommon Sovereignty, Limitless, and HODL Here. Check out the calendar and the Telegram group for more. Below, we cover the top weekly news, stats, and reports in crypto.

In This Week’s Issue:

  1. This Week in Crypto… 

    1. 🗞️ Top Weekly News 

    2. 💵 Weekly Fundraises

    3. 📊 Key Stats

    4. 📝 Report Highlight

    5. 🎧 Best Podcasts 

    6. 📈 Top 10 Performers

  2. Coinstack Podcast Episodes

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

  4. Join Our Telegram Group

  5. Who We’re Following on Crypto Twitter

  6. How to Get Started in Crypto Learning

❤️ HeartRithm Meet Up & Community Event Thursday in Puerto Rico

Meetup Thursday: For our community members in Puerto Rico this week for Blockchain Week come meet our team and learn more about HeartRithm, the crypto quant fund we work with. Join us this Thursday 4-7 pm for the HeartRithm Happy Hour (RSVP here). HeartRithm is a crypto quant fund specializing in DeFi, and also is building a regenerative engine to fund social impact projects. We are also attending and presenting at CoinAgenda.

🗞️ 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 10 stories of the week...

  1. ​​⚡ SEC Chair Says He Does Not Support Bitcoin’s “Off-the-Grid” Approach To Finance - SEC Chair Gary Gensler finally reveals his stance on Bitcoin by saying he does not support its “off-the-grid” approach to finance. (Source)

  2. 😮 Was Celsius the ‘Biggest Victim’ in the Recent BadgerDAO Exploit? - Bitcoin DeFi tool BadgerDAO suffered a significant attack earlier this week, and according to the current speculation, one of the most affected addresses that lost nearly 900 Bitcoin could be owned by Celsius. (Source)

  3. 🏧 BNB Bulls Rejoice As Binance Smart Chain Activates Automatic Burning Mechanism - Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has finally activated its BEP-95 upgrade, leading to the old manual burning method's phase-out an automatic burning mechanism. (Source)

  4. 💰 Crypto CEOs To Testify Before House Financial Services Committee  - CEOs from six major cryptocurrency companies will testify at a Dec. 8 hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). (Source)

  5. 🤑 Grayscale: 77% of US Investors Are ’More Likely To Tap Into Crypto if SEC Approves Bitcoin ETF - While more than a quarter of American retail investors already have Bitcoin (BTC) in their portfolios, this number would likely be much higher if the SEC approves a spot-based Bitcoin ETF, according to Grayscale Investments. (Source)Share Coinstack

💬 Tweet of the Week

😂 Meme of the Week

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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. NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Users Transact ~6 Times per Day, on Average, Versus ~2 Times per Day on OpenSea

2. Daily Net Emissions for Ethereum Continue To Trend Lower in November

3. Bitcoin Fell -5.4% on the Month, an Underperformance Compared to the +11.5% Median Return Historically Seen in November

4. The Derivatives Market Now Represents 54.8% of the Total Crypto Market

5. ~$500B Wiped Off the Crypto Markets Since Last Friday, Printing an Overall Market Drawdown of -20%

📝 Highlights From Crypto Reports

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

Crypto Theses for 2022

Messari helps investors, regulators, and the public makes sense of this revolutionary new crypto asset class and build data tools that will drive informed decision-making and investment. Messari's founder Ryan Selkis writes an annual report outlining all of the major themes and events in the crypto space over the last year.

1. The Collapse in Institutional Trust

"Whether you're here as a missionary or a mercenary, you'll find that one of the primary unifying forces behind this movement is the belief that decentralized technologies with embedded financial incentives (a good shorthand for Web3) offer a compelling, often lucrative, alternative to our decaying legacy institutions.

That brings me to my first prediction for 2022: things will worsen before they get better in the "real" world. Inflation will remain above 5% throughout 2022 (70% confidence), while late-year interest rate hikes stall the stock market's momentum and hurt growth stocks (60% confidence the S&P dips next year). That will be good for crypto short-term, but risky in the medium-term, as more crypto companies and their users get de-platformed, and censorship from western tech and banking platforms accelerates amidst the Biden administration's crypto crackdown."

2. Copy-Trading: We Like the Coins (Disclosures, Not Financial Advice) 

“Our analyst team discloses their holdings monthly. The team is getting bigger, so this section is getting longer, but all analysts below have outlined: 1) their current 5%+ portfolio holdings, 2) top picks from 2021 and how they’ve performed (if applicable), and 3) their highest conviction ideas for 2022.

This is not financial advice, so don’t sue us for trying to be transparent about potential conflicts. Also, don’t take portfolio advice from a two-bit idiot. Past performance is not indicative of future results, yada, yada, yada…”

3. Net Inflows Were Positive in November for the Third Month in a Row

"The biggest difference in v3 is that liquidity providers are active. Instead of depositing assets into a pool that passively provides liquidity along a deterministic price curve, liquidity providers actively adjust their ranges of buy-sell liquidity, which the Uniswap AMM then aggregates. Dubbed "concentrated liquidity", these tighter ranges help improve capital efficiency by orders of magnitude through better concentration of liquidity around current market prices. They also reward professionals and punish retail LPs.

V3 allows for what are essentially limits orders by market makers and introduces customizable trading fees (30bps, 10bps, 5bps, 1bps) that incentivize liquidity providers to make new markets on otherwise illiquid pairs. These upgrades should combine to attract more professional market makers who actively monitor shorter-term liquidity positions (lazy liquidity provisioning will no longer be profitable), and help Uniswap better compete against other centralized and decentralized exchanges where it had previously struggled to keep pace due to low expected spreads (e.g. like-to-like pairs on Curve).

Concentrated liquidity is clearly the future of AMMs, and V3's early success speaks to that. Uniswap has increased its DEX market share to 70%+ since launch."

🎧 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. Some of our favorites like LUNA, MATIC, and ALGO had an especially great week.

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: Gala is a game, Sandbox is a metaverse, Loopring is a zkRollup, Crypto.com is an exchange. 

🎧 Latest Episodes of The Coinstack Podcast

We have a new Coinstack podcast. So far we’re at 12,970 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 1700 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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