Welcome to the first edition of Crypto monthly, a byte-sized newsletter from Anamcara Crypto that brings the best resources from us, from others, to your inbox on all things crypto and web3. Our goal is to give the latest on the signals from builders, researchers and creators in the crypto economy, and go deep on one or two topics. We are still early, and will continue to iterate to bring you the very best content.

Price action (24hrs): Bitcoin BTC $20,122.135 (-0.79%) Ethereum ETH $1588.42 (-0.81%)

What is the current state of the NFT market?

NFT transaction volumes continue their downward trend and hit a 12+ month low. NFTs generated $0.8B / ~375K ETH of volume in the last 30D and have decreased ~7% MoM / ~86% YoY on a $ basis. (source, go deeper here). BAYC continues to be the top project on the NFT leaderboard in terms of total sales volume (source)

With NFT Marketplaces, OpenSea continues to be the dominant player (~60% of marketshare), with MagicEden as a close second (~15% of marketshare). MagicEden continues to eat into OpenSea’s overall share and is the dominant player in Solana NFT volume.

We are seeing the trend of traditional players lean into the NFT ecosystem with Ticketmaster, Starbucks and Etihad being the latest. Expect to see this trend of NFT-based loyalty/membership programs continue for sometime (Starbucks, Etihad)

There is an explosion in no/low code platforms(ThirdWeb, Manifold) that allows top creators to directly reach potential customers, making them increasingly less reliant on centralized marketplaces. Twitter accounts for ~75% of social media traffic driven to NFT marketplaces, followed by YouTube with ~12%. (source)

Token-gated experiences: We are paying particular attention to ‘token-gated access/experience’ that requires users to hold an NFT to access an event, experience or store (e.g. Shopify). This utility-oriented use case is really interesting for NFT adoption.

Key-takeaway: We are at an inflection point in the NFT ecosystem - with traditional trading volumes at an all time low, leading to the rise of the real-world utility based use cases that are driving adoption.

Ethereum Proof of Stake is here! Why should we care about it?

It’s the end of an important chapter but the story's just getting started. Huge congrats to the @ethereum ecosystem for the successful Merge on September 14th, 2022.

Ethereum’s Merge represents a critical turning point for the existing proof-of-work platform as it transitions to a new consensus mechanism. What it does not do is immediately reduce gas fees nor improve transaction speeds to a noticeable degree. Blocktimes will fall from 13.4 seconds to maybe 12.2 seconds post-Merge, possibly achieving a ~9-10% improvement.

The bull case to watch here with a switch to Proof-of-Stake,

1. There will be limited supply going forward + validators stake their coin for the long term.

2. And there is massive developer activity happening on the network that bolsters its use case. According to Electric Capital, over 4,000 open-source developers actively work on Ethereum monthly as of January 2022.

Key-takeaway: This is a unique moment in Ethereum’s evolution that has the potential to rally the community and accelerate overall adoption.

Go Deep: What is on the horizon? What should I pay attention to?

#Bitcoin Lightning network

Lightning 101: Bitcoin's L2 payment network that lets users deposit BTC and transact near-instant and for pennies via payment channels. It's been live since 2018, works, and can theoretically scale to millions of transactions per second.

At <1 cent fees, Lightning transactions are much more suitable for everyday BTC payments. More intriguing, is Lightning's potential to replace existing payment processors for fiat transactions without the consumer ever knowing that BTC is involved.

Visa/Mastercard raked in $24B in 2021 by collecting 2-3% every time someone swipes a credit/debit card. Global remittance companies take an even fatter 6.4% for sending money across borders (on average). Lightning can undercut them all.

Key-stat: Bitcoin users are adding over 10 BTC of public capacity to the Lightning Network every single day now.

Key-takeaway: Exhibiting promising growth, with the potential to disrupt $150B a year payment + remittance industries.

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