January 5, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • The Yearn Finance community passed a proposal to tweak its tokenomics.

  • Illuvium drained a Uniswap pool to prevent an exploit.

  • Aave released a mobile wallet.

  • Goldman Sachs thinks Bitcoin is set to take a larger market share away from gold.

  • Digital asset investment products saw an inflow of $9.3 billion in 2021, up from $6.8 billion in 2020.

  • El Salvador plans to move forward with plans to issue Bitcoin bonds.

  • Metaversal, an NFT-focused investment firm, raised $50 million in a Series A.

  • Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong bought a home in LA for $133 million.

  • China’s digital yuan wallet is live on iOS and Android app stores in China.

  • Kosovo declared a ban on mining cryptocurrencies after its December energy crisis.

  • WonderFi, a DeFi platform backed by Shark Tank “Shark” Kevin O’Leary, agreed to purchase Bitbuy for $162 million.

  • Nvidia’s metaverse software is now free for creators and artists.

  • Members of Parliament in the UK are lobbying for a stricter stance on crypto.

  • The SEC delayed its decision on the NYDIG bitcoin ETF.

  • NEAR, a smart contract L1, hit an all-time high in price on Tuesday.

  • Tether recently blacklisted a new wallet holding over $1 million worth of USDT.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

NFTs Start 2022 on Fire

NFT sales are soaring to start the new year.

Historically speaking, daily NFT sales volume has only crossed$200 million 10 times. Data from Richard Chen’s Dune Analytics page shows that the NFT marketplace OpenSea alone has done over $200 million in volume for the past three days straight. (Speaking of OpenSea, the NFT marketplace announced a raise of $300 million at a valuation of $13.3 billion. The latest funding round would come a year after it raised at a valuation of $1.5 billion.)

In addition to sales volume peaking to begin the year, it also appears that the term NFT is fully catching on in the mainstream, as Google search volume for NFTs ended 2021 with a distinct upward trend.

The recent uptick in volume and attention could have something to do with the mainstream nature of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT line, which accounted for roughly $180 million in sales volume over the past seven days, according to CryptoSlam ($94 million for Mutant Apes, $89 million for Bored Apes). CryptoSlam shows that the entire NFT market has seen $838 million in sales over the past seven days, meaning that Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT sales took up 15% of all NFT sales during the same time period. (While no other project even topped $60 million.)

Notably, as of yesterday, the Bored Ape NFT collection has generated more than $1 billion in total sales since the 10,000-piece collection launched. In the past week alone, the Bored Ape NFT collection has garnered headlines by…

  • welcoming the rapper Eminem as a hodler
  • seeing a rare Serum (which essentially acts as an upgrade for a BAYC NFT) sell for $5.8 million in ETH
  • having $1.9 million worth of Bored Ape NFTs frozen on OpenSea after an owner had his private keys stolen

Recommended Reads

  • Redphonecrypto on crypto theses: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jxmTpPE-XXUCDkJwez87FA9Fi-xlaXqr/view
  • FTX US CEO Brett Harrison on blockchains: https://twitter.com/Brett_FTXUS/status/1478440589142249477
  • Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan on NFTs: https://twitter.com/Matt_Hougan/status/1478380737170747393

On The Pod…

Crypto 2022 Outlook: Where Will the Markets Go This Year? Plus DeFi and NFTs

Larry Cermak, VP of research at The Block, and Igor Igamberdiev, director of research and data at The Block, recap the most significant trends of 2021 (BTC mining, L1s, NFTs, DeFi, venture funding) and discuss what might happen in 2022. Show topics:

  • why 2021 was so significant for the crypto industry

  • why the crypto markets didn’t see a blow-off top at the end of the calendar year the way they typically do about a year after a Bitcoin halving

  • what Larry thinks about whether the crypto market is in a supercycle

  • how the state of BTC and ETH mining changed in the past year

  • why Igor thinks multichain technology was key to a record-breaking year for venture capital entering the crypto space in 2021

  • how the layer 1 (L1) ecosystem wars played out in 2021 and what it could look like in 2022

  • what Larry and Igor think of Ethereum layer 2s (L2s)

  • how Ethereum’s shift to 2.0 could affect the L1 race

  • what Larry thinks about DeFi tokens going into 2022

  • how DeFi trends, like decentralized exchange volume and lending, played out in 2021

  • why Igor thinks KYC-DeFi (know-your-customer decentralized finance) is inevitable

  • what Larry thinks about NFTs going in 2022 and why he thinks PFPs are dead

  • Larry and Igor’s outlook on the metaverse going into the new year

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Feb. 22. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians