Welcome back to the Flarnchain Newsletter! Brought to your inbox each and every week (except sometimes), like an atomic clock (that might be broken).

Last week I didn't get around to writing this newsletter. But at least I didn't take 35 weeks off like during the dark times, from June 19, 2024 to February 12, 2024, I did not publish a single Flarnchain Newsletter. I probably talked about this a couple weeks ago, and I'll probably talk about it again in the future.

This is a newsletter, so let's talk about the news...

THE NEWS

You know what? On second thought. Let's not talk about the news. Let's instead talk about the markets.

THE MARKETS

Yikes. I'm not so certain I'm interested in talking about those either. That said, I think it's always good to get a dose of perspective when writing this (and for the 3 to 5 of you who read this, perhaps you haven't been following the timeless mantra of "when in doubt.... zoom out").

The current crypto market capitalization resides at about $2.8 trillion, up by about $150 billion from its local low of $2.65 trillion just a couple days ago, but deeply down from its local high of $3.9 trillion back on December 16, 2024. That high of $3.9 trillion also happens to be the all time high for the crypto markets. I'm not super interested in talking too much about my opinions of why crypto markets are down, but in general, risk-on assets (like stocks and crypto) don't do super well during periods of uncertainty, and we are currently in a period of uncertainty.

Bitcoin $BTC is currently at $83,537, which is up from the past 3 days, but not by much. I have posted the yearly chart below, and intend to work on an updated weekly chart update, similar to the one I used to publish about a year or so ago. Yearly chart is nice because it shows what happened in the past 12 months.

Ethereum $ETH is currently at $1,899, which is down in the past several weeks, by a lot. Yikes.

Ethereum has not performed nearly as well as Bitcoin

For good measure, here's the Cosmos Hub $ATOM yearly chart. I'm still an ATOM bull. I'm actually more bullish on ATOM now because of various reasons associated with its organization structure, and because the token itself is more distributed across more chains than ever. It's just been through a really rough patch. The thing about ATOM is that it never really had a use case... but now with efforts to use the Cosmos Hub as a router for other IBC enabled chains, things could be looking up for this project. In the short term, nothing in crypto looks good. But I'm not really in this for the short term.

Let's recap... In the past 12 months:

Bitcoin is up by 16.9%
Ethereum is down by 52.6%
Cosmos Hub is down by 71.4% ⚰

Moving on to our new weekly feature, the 52 weeks of Coreum.

52 WEEKS OF COREUM

Coreum is a layer 1 blockchain connected to both the XRP (Ripple) ecosystem and the Cosmos ecosystem. It's a multipurpose blockchain that can do a lot of the same things that most modern Layer 1s can do. I became interested in Coreum because some of the people who I came across in my Cosmos adventures are Coreum natives (shoutout bibby, co-founder of The Cosmic Gumball Machine).

Here's some facts about Coreum:

Its biggest exchange is a "DAX" or Decentralized Autonomous Exchange called Pulsara (pulsara.io). I'm not exactly sure why it calls itself a DAX rather than a DEX, probably for branding purposes. The term DAX is more or less an evolution from DEX (Decentralized EXchange) and it's certainly a clever one, but feels a bit gimmicky to be quite honest. Edit: After exploring the pulsara DAX in a bit more detail, I think I take back my previous statement. The integration of DAO elements into the front end of the exchange is very seamless and expressive. It feels much more integrated than a lot of other decentralized exchanges. Pretty much every DEX's native token confers voting rights in the direction of the protocol, but the way Pulsara makes it easy for any normal person to build out a proposal (and the snappy responsiveness of the front end) has me impressed.
For example, in "Treasury" you could make a proposal to send all of the assets in the treasury to your own wallet. If enough token holders vote "yes" you would be the recipient of about $900k worth of $SARA tokens.
The Coreum native token, while currently created through token emissions similar to many other cosmos based blockchains via inflation paid out to stakers who economically secure the blockchain in a process that is known as "byzantine fault tolerant", was initially generated via a TEG or Token Generation Event on the "XRPL" or Ripple ledger... I honestly don't know enough about Ripple's architecture to speak straight from the stream of consciousness, but basically it's like a blockchain but different. Search "Is Ripple a blockchain" and you'll certainly get some interesting answers.
Coreum has an average block time of about 1 second, which is pretty damn fast. It also has a relatively small validator set of 64, compared to lots of other cosmos chains that exceed 100. Over 60% of the Coreum tokens $CORE are "bonded" which means they are staked/delegated to "validators" who are responsible for validating transactions and maintaining the Coreum blockchain. There's almost 650 million $CORE tokens.

Okay I'm kind of going off the deep end in terms of details here. If you read all that, sorry if it was boring or made very little sense. I am very aware that most of the 3-5 readers of the flarnchain newsletters aren't trying to geek out on technical details and random facts about an obscure Layer 1 blockchain in an obscure corner of the crypto universe.

The key takeaway I'd like to leave you with, if you've made it this far, is that there's an awful lot of "future of finance" financial rails being built on Coreum, and the ecosystem is vibrant and active. Many Layer 1s last for a bit, wilt, and then become zombie chains. I think Coreum has a bit of polish you don't see with most cosmos chains, but that could be a direct consequence of the fact that it comes from XRP, which is the fourth largest crypto asset in all of crypto. Coreum is connected to a liquidity powerhouse, that is third only to Ethereum and Bitcoin. I don't count Tether because Tether is a token that lives on many blockchains, rather than Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP - these are known as layer 1 blockchains.

This week, in my "52 weeks of coreum" initiative, I bought 53 $CORE with one $OM that was sitting in my Osmosis wallet. I staked 50 of those CORE. In total:

Total holdings: 64.02 CORE
Total staked: 60 CORE
Total invested: $8.07
Value of invested amount: $7.04
% Gain / Loss: -12.74%

Assessment? Far too early to tell if this is going to go well. Obviously I could compare the change in the assets sold to buy CORE to evaluate opportunity cost, so I'm tracking the data there, but that sounds like way too much work. Also, once I start collecting Staking rewards from my staked CORE, it gets a bit more interesting. I may even diversify inside the Coreum ecosystem over the course of these 52 weeks, perhaps using some of the staking rewards to buy coins like $SARA (the token of the DAX I discussed above).

Overall, I'm excited to get back into the analytics and evaluation of a little investment adventure. In the past, I eventually ended up with pretty interesting tracking devices, so I'm curious to see how this evolves over time.

That's the end of this week's flarnchain newsletter! Sorry for getting a bit technical, and sorry for no market animal artwork this week. If you opened this and saw a wall of text and zero pretty pictures (and felt bummed out about it), here's a pixel art sketch I drew a couple weeks ago, that will eventually become a Proto Tower on the Stargaze blockchain.