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This Week in Crypto - UK a Crypto Leader?

Covering the UK's new embrace of crypto innovation, a deep-dive into ImmutableX, the top news of the week, and two upcoming DeFi webinars

April 06, 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.

In This Week’s Issue:

This Week in Crypto

  1. 🗞️ Top Weekly Crypto News - UK, SEC, CME Group, Singapore

    1. 💵 Weekly Fundraises - Lightning Labs, Boba Network, Hivemapper

    2. 📊 Key Stats - Ethereum, Bitcoin, DeFi

    3. 📝 Report Highlights - The Crypto Intelligence Report: ImmutableX

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

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

  2. Upcoming HeartRithm Institutional Investor Webinars: DeFi for Family Offices

  3. Featured NFT of the Week - LuvMonster #113 - Owlpaca

  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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📺 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. ​​🇬🇧 U.K. Embraces Stablecoins and Positions Itself as Leader In Digital Assets - On April 4, the U.K. Treasury recognized stablecoins as a valid form of payment and announced plans to make Britain a global hub for crypto asset technology and investment, separating itself from the EU’s innovation-strangling proposed regulation on self-hosted wallets. (Source)

  2. ⚡ SEC Chair Gensler Calls for More Oversight on Stablecoins and Crypto Firms’ Custody, Market-Making Arms - The Securities and Exchange Commission is considering new firewalls for custody and market-making businesses at crypto firms and pushing for more SEC oversight of stablecoins. (Source)

  3. 😮 CME Group Is Considering Futures on Solana and Cardano - After launching futures contracts tied to bitcoin and ether in recent years, CME Group is looking at whether it can introduce futures based on cryptocurrencies with smaller market caps. (Source)

  4. 🏧 Singapore Crypto Firms Operating Abroad Must Now Be Licensed Under New Law - The Parliament of Singapore passed new measures on Tuesday that force domestically registered companies operating abroad to obtain a license. (Source)

  5. 💰 More Than 80% of Central Banks Are Considering Launching a CBDC - Central bank digital currencies will greatly benefit cross-border transactions and economies, PWC says. (Source)

💬 Tweet of the Week

🧵 Thread of the Week - Coinbase NFTs Coming

1/10) Coinbase NFT has 3.7M+ users signed up on the waitlist.

This number is nearly 3X the amount of wallets having 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 interacted with non fungible tokens.

However, there is still a lot of info people aren’t talking about.

Let take a look at why this is such a big deal… (1/x)

2/10) NFTs are still in their early days of adoption.

If you look at some on-chain data, you may see stuff that surprises you.

Only ~1.5M users have ever made a trade on Opensea. Even so, this number is likely an overestimate as many have 2+ wallets…

3/10) It’s obvious the NFT market is a lot smaller than we realize.

This is why we are lacking some of the key infrastructure to get wider use of NFTs…

Things like security, low gas fees, and good UX.

So, how does Coinbase play into this?

4/9) A few months ago, Coinbase came out with a wallet extension for ETH on their platform. It let users browse dApps, trade on DEXs, and collect NFTs as part of a standalone service. Most importantly, it let users self custody their crypto assets (own their private keys).

5/10) Why is this notable?

Just take a look at the Coinbase NFT demo video shared by the dev team.

“You can either sign in with a self custody wallet like Metamask or Coinbase wallet, or you can sign in using your Coinbase credentials, buy any NFT, and then custody it with Coinbase”

6/10) That’s right, users will be able to keep or trade NFTs on Coinbase just like any other asset. This was largely a feature only fungible tokens could benefit from, until now. For the most part, the average user does not want to deal with private keys.

(~15% BTC is on exchanges)

7/10) Now, NFTs are coming into the mix here.

This isn’t about how many users will custody their assets with the exchange, either.

It’s about how many people will move on to self-custody once they feel comfortable.

This is massive.

8/10) A spokesperson has also reported that Coinbase plans to integrate MPC technology into its retail and institutional products. This came just after Coinbase acquired a cryptographic security firm called ‘Unbound’ It will be very interesting to see what’s created with this. 👀

9/10) Furthermore, Coinbase NFT isn’t just any marketplace.

It offers characteristics of typical web2 social media apps, but with the blockchain.

I could see this acting as a hosting service for NFT creators.

Especially those who want to get their feet wet.

10/10) TLDR? No problem! Coinbase has made a series of announcements & “alpha leaks” about their NFT platform. It appears to offer zero-knowledge proof capabilities, & will let users custody their NFTs with Coinbase, or do self-custody. This could change the market as we know it. 🥐

💵 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. Jamie Coutts’ DCF Model Gives Ethereum a Price Target of $6,100-$7000

2. Over the Course of March ‘22, Over 96k BTC Flowed Out of the Exchanges Signaling a Potentially Bullish Price Movement for BTC

3. The DeFi Sector Was the Best Performer of the Week, Bringing In a Return of 13.91%

4. ETH Is Currently Doing 39x the Revenues of BTC

5. Top TVL Gainers in Terra Ecosystem Last 7D

📝 Highlights From Crypto Reports

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

The Crypto Intelligence Report: ImmutableX

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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Introducing ImmutableX - The Future of NFTs on Ethereum

ImmutableX is the first layer two (L2) scaling solution for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum, with instant trading, massive scalability and zero gas fees for minting and trading, all without compromising user or asset security. ImmutableX is the most technically advanced solution for NFT scaling ever built, developed with StarkWare’s powerful STARK prover and rollup technology. The IMX token is the native ERC20 utility token of the Immutable X protocol, which users will be able to earn by conducting pro-network activities such as trading, and which can be used to pay fees, and will be used to perform governance or stake on the protocol.

Growth Narrative

Immutable started as a company called Fuel Games in 2018, founded by two brothers, Robbie and James Ferguson who believed that gaming economies could do so much more for players and traders. They saw an opportunity to bring value to the players through the blockchain.

Immutable offers multiple services and is established at several levels in gaming. Immutable first was a development studio and launched the world's first blockchain-based eSports title in 2018 called Gods Unchained. With more than 320,000 monthly active players, Gods Unchained was one of the first online card game and one of the biggest games making wise use of NFTs and succeeding in innovating and appealing in the long term. Immutable’s founders saw that Ethereum fees were getting out of hand and along with congestion and lack of scalability it would be a problem for gaming and NFTs. Indeed, if we take Gods Unchained as a case study, minting or trading a card as an NFT with fees being up to $200+ and having to wait possibly multiple minutes for transactions was not conceivable. Therefore, Immutable created its Layer2 scaling solution ImmutableX that offers 9,000+ transactions per second, zero gas fees and Carbon Neutral NFTs.

Focusing on NFTs, Immutable decided to create an NFT marketplace to trade NFTs from their games and other collections. in addition to creating their own marketplace, immutable has partnered with OpenSea, the largest NFT trading platform, to integrate Immutable to OpenSea. This would allow Immutable to attract new users and be promoted to a large portion of the market's collectors and NFT traders who trade on Ethereum. However, while this kind of integration takes time, the partnership announcement dates back to April 2021, and it is hard to believe that the integration has been in progress for all that time. Even without taking the partnership into account, ImmutableX has become an important platform for NFT trading and the Layer2 is increasingly used. Immutable's growth potential is also enhanced by the API and SDK that allow developers to port their projects to Immutable and build applications on Immutable easily.

One of the aspects that has not been neglected by the Immutable team is the environmental aspect. Indeed, it is necessary to limit the impact of NFTs on the planet. The accusation that has been made a lot was that NFTs (to understand, on Ethereum) consumed too much energy; and this led to slow down a lot the popular adoption. Immutable has made a priority to make the NFTs carbon neutral. In addition to consuming, according to them, 70% less than Ethereum even if they handled more transactions, Immutable will buy carbon credits needed to offset the energy footprint of any NFT created or traded on ImmutableX to zero.

It is for all these reasons that Immutable has become the fastest Australian startup to hit unicorn status (a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion).

Features in Immutable X

Team & Partners

Immutable has a team of over 200 people working mainly in Sydney, Australia. Immutable’s goal is to foster a thriving office environment where employees feel good and can work in the best conditions. This is one of the reasons why the team is growing rapidly, and they have no problem to find and recruit talents.

Robbie Ferguson

Robbie Ferguson: is a co-founder and President at Immutable. Robbie is a young entrepreneur in the blockchain field and selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He worked as a Data Analyst for the Blockchain for 1 year, creating a client-facing CapitalGainTax analysis platform for cryptocurrency exchanges. It was licensed to Independent Reserve, Australia's largest exchange. Robbie does not have much work experience as he decided early on to go into entrepreneurship with his brother James.

James Ferguson

James Ferguson: is a co-founder and CEO at Immutable. James is a young entrepreneur that founded a few projects before founding Immutable with his brother Robbie and has also been nominated for Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The projects he founded before Immutable had a modest success and are no longer active. Rivlr was an esports tournament platform and Shopyak was an e-commerce builder for single page stores. James is versatile as he has also been Business Development Manager for Nulux Inc, a company manufacturing lighting fixtures for the architectural design community, and Lead Frontend Developer for Appliances Online, an appliance retailer.

Immutable raised a seed round in 2018 and a $15 million Series A in September 2019 from investors including:

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Later, in September 2021, Immutable raised $60 million in Series B funding, co-led by BITKRAFT Ventures and King River Capital.

Other participants including Prosus Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Fabric Ventures, Alameda Research, AirTree Ventures, Reinventure, Apex Capital, and VaynerFund participated.

The latest funding of $200 million in Series C funding in March 2022 was led by Singapore's Temasek along with Mirae Asset, ParaFi Capital, Declaration Partners, Tencent Holdings and others.

Immutable was valued at $2.5 billion after this round.

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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.

🎨 NFT of the Week - LuvMonster #113 - Owlpaca

Wow these LuvMonsters are magical and fun! Take a look at them below. We are getting close to selecting our first stuffed animal manufacturer, so this will be a fun Summer as we work on building these these creatures into home collectibles for children and adults-alike.

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. We now have 317 unique LuvMonster owners.

This week’s featured is LuvMonster #113 - Owlpaca, shown below. Just 7 of him are available in the pre-sale this week for 0.002 ETH (about $6.50).

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. ⛽

Recents NFTs This Week - Limited Pre-Sale Available Starting At $7 on OpenSea

Here are 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 21,481 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, LUNA, 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:

Please share with your friends and colleagues.