TLDR. Your summary of everything blockchain related:
Azuki launches PBT (Physical Backed Token) and Gold plated Skateboards
Siemens chooses Ethereum for it's NFT license agreement
SEC investigates Three Arrows Capital
Hennessy + Friends with benefits DAO introduce web3 membership club for Art Basel Miami.
Toys R Us releasing NFT's on Solana
Kanye West looking to buy social media platform Parler
Ethereum based smart contracts coming to Ripple
FCA head of Crypto AML compliance to step down in 2023
Suspicious activity around new L1 Aptos' (launched yesterday) tokenomics raise concerns about it's launch on major exchanges.
Do Kwon (Co-Founder of problematic stablecoin Terra) releases new long format interview
Ripple announces recipients of $250M NFT creator fund.
Into the details:
Market's continue to show resilience across the board and a potential looming and drawn out recession appears to be further priced in by the day. This increases the probability of somewhat stable markets for the foreseeable future and makes massive sell off's likely (not accounting for wars, invasions etc).
On the crypto side, the total amount of Ethereum addresses holding 1 ETH reaches another all time high, and record numbers of Ethereum SDK installs continue. We continue to see information like this that both mirrors macro sentiment and furthers the potential for a decoupling from traditional markets + mass adoption of the crypto ecosystem. To further this point, just in the past 24 hours, Chainsafe, Shardeum and Web3 Builders Inc have all completed $7M-22M raises. Blockchain raises during this recession have been continuous and signal unparalleled strength for a nascent industry.
NFT's:
Azuki's PBT announcement has garnered attention across the board and causes a massive spike in trading volume with over 20x it's usual daily volume as confidence in leadership grows. As team's continue to innovate and relatively stable Ethereum prices allow people to both effectively price purchases and trades + speculate, this should give the NFT market space to increase volumes in the short term.
To look out for:
Layer 3's. Just like the incredible opportunities and innovations provided by L2's like Polygon, Arbitrum, ImmutableX etc. We should see the same hotbed's of activity begin to bubble up with any innovation in the L3 space. Whilst in my opinion it's somewhat early for these to be realistically used by the average person in day to day activity, it's always worth keeping an eye on what's next.
$GHO (A decentralised stablecoin on Aave). Whilst stablecoins aren't the easiest topic given their shady history and incoming regulation, a trusted team like Aave are trying to bring something new to the table and I think there's value in taking a look.
DyDx - This exchange built on Starkware continues to innovate and with the popularity of Starkware increasing + the continued adoption and complexity of Cairo (the language it's built on), it's worth keeping an eye on future developments.
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*Disclaimer: None of the above represents financial advice.
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