BANK OF AMERICA

Macro:

• mild recession with good balance sheet in both consumers and corporations

Bonds:

• interest to bonds re-emerge and bonds are likely to perform in the first half year.

• current short-term yield would higher than inflation rate and would be better than stock dividends, and yield competitiveness would go further in next few years.

Stocks:

• Climate Change: Bullish for renewable energy; and for traditional resources like oil.

• Reshoring of supply chains: should be a key theme as Europe and US become less dependent on China.

• Others: automation, digitization, healthcare infra, financials, and bond-like equity sectors for defend: utility, consumer staples.

Portfolio Strategy:

• value and small-cap stocks could outperform growth and big-cap stocks in 2nd half 2023 after Fed pulse and interest rate peaked.

• market volatility in early 2023 could be an opportunity to rebalance and reposition for recovery.

All About Ethereum

Polygon

Trends for 2023

Polygon has declared that it is “on the front lines of developing new use cases for blockchain” and that token sales will be useful for more than fundraising going forward.

• Big focus on GameFi - Polygon developers stated that 2023 announcements will include a game development studio. Some anticipate the project to be similar to WAX and WAX Studios.

• The All-Mighty User ID - A portable, sovereign identity. Polygon ID seems to be a mix of the impulse of a soul-bound token with the lure of a single sign-in.

• Protecting Your User Data - Lens Protocol promises to let you take control of your social media platform – unfortunately, near-term this only seems to apply to Web3 data and virtually no one is using Web3 social media.

• Also Monetizing your User Data - “Acentrik, a strategic initiative by Mercedes-Benz, is building a decentralized data marketplace that will make it easy for enterprises to share and monetize data across domains.” Since Polygon doesn’t acknowledge a possible conflict with the previous point made, it remains to be seen what this will really mean long-term.

• Polygon is Going Big on Defi – Based on the “financial shocks” of 2022, Polygon is expecting the sentiment to swing to a greater focus on decentralization. Polygon listed possible new entrants to their DeFi ecosystem including: Lemon Cash, Gains Trade, Teller, Ovix, Timeswap, Atlendis, Clearpool, Quickswap V3, and Synquote.

• Polygon believes 2023 will be “the year of ZK technology” – zkEVM is anticipating mainnet release in Q1 and Polygon Zero, and Miden plans to launch in 2023.

• Polygon goes hard on “Not your keys, not your crypto!!” – Developers say self-custody is the obvious choice to unnamed centralized exchange disasters. FTX is a prime example of the collapses witnessed in 2022.

Coinbase

Flight to quality:

• We expect digital asset 
 selection will transition towards higher-quality names like bitcoin and ether based on factors like sustainable tokenomics, the maturity of respective ecosystems, and relative market liquidity.

• Ethereum’s successful Merge of its consensus and execution layers in September 2022 has also strengthened the case for ambitious future upgrades, despite the trend towards long-term core protocol ossification.1 In our view, this supports the fundamental narrative for Ethereum as a leader in a multichain world, particularly since nearly all networks are competing for the same pool of users and capital.2 Some chains/ecosystems 
 are doing better than others, and we believe user and developer activity will aggregate to 
 a smaller number of chains in 2023 compared 
 to 2022. However, Ethereum’s dominance 
 could still be challenged in other ways, as the network relies on layer-2 scaling solutions to extend its blockspace, which have their own 
 set of risks.3 This includes centralized sequencers, a lack of fraud proofs, and a lack 
 of cross L2 interoperability, to name a few.handled well given its on-chain, auditable properties. Of course, DeFi comes with its 
 own risks like smart contract exploits, which could put more scrutiny on how different decentralized applications are managing their protocol risks.

• The movement towards self-custody and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols (i.e. decentralized exchanges or DEXs) will likely accelerate after the developments in 4Q22.

Areas for creative destruction

• Meanwhile, we think investors’ willingness 
 to accumulate altcoins has been severely impacted by the deleveraging in 2022 and 
 may take many months to fully recuperate. Newer projects have been hit particularly 
 hard by recent events. In particular, some 
 of these protocols loaned out their tokens 
 to market makers who had used FTX as a liquidity pool. Overall, market depth has 
 come down sharply across exchanges, according to Kaiko (November 14, 2022). Those projects must now wait until bankruptcy proceedings are finalized in order to recover their assets, meaning they may be unable 
 to access a big part of their treasuries’ native tokens for several years. This could have important implications for developer retention and future application development.

• we would expect the bitcoin mining industry to consolidate even further in 2023

• Future participation could also 
 be driven by new forms of utility outside of art/collectibles including digital identity, ticketing, memberships/ subscriptions, tokenization of 
 real-world assets, and supply chain logistics.The debate surrounding the enforcement of royalties at the token level may also pick up in 2023, as it is a hot button issue for the creator community. If royalties 
 are increasingly ignored by market participants, we believe that it could threaten the adoption of the technology more broadly.

Regulatory

• We believe the next market cycle in digital assets will be shaped in significant part by the development of standards and frameworks for regulated entities. Clear guidance is necessary to avoid driving innovation to regions where regulatory requirements are weaker and customers may be at greater risk. In the US, we expect the new Congress to continue working on one or more of the current legislative proposals that had drawn bipartisan support, such as the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), which would empower the CFTC to oversee spot markets in digital assets, and/or the McHenry-Waters draft bill on stablecoins.

Bitcoin

• Bitcoin's resilience amid major stress suggests its long-term success is not dependent on 
 any centralized entity either pumping or dumping it.

• The Lightning Network is a layer-2 protocol built on top of bitcoin that can theoretically scale to millions of instant transactions per second that cost fractions of pennies to send.

Ethereum

• There is still a healthy distribution of overall rewards among validators at the moment – keeping per capita earnings high. That staking ratio is low in part because stakers cannot 
 withdraw their ETH until after 
 the Shanghai Fork.

• 
  

Created 28th Dec 2021

Research time: Dec 2021

Paid to research: 2000 USD (bought an NFT and some Gala tokens)

Accomplishment: Built a breakeven strategy in 40 min, and started to collect $TOWN every day using just 10min afterwards.

Intro:

This report is not for totally beginners. If you are, please check the following links to get basic understanding of Gala platform and Town Star Game.

Gala

https://app.gala.games/

Town Star

https://townstar.com/?utm_source=Platform&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=ts_townstarwebsite_platform&utm_id=ts_townstarwebsite_platform_1

Logic:

1. How to play to earn?

You can take the weekly competition. If you have a significant rank, you will get the bonus.

OR

You can benefit from the NFTs. Getting some from early bird airdrop and sell for money. Getting some from running a Gala Node. Getting some from the Opensea and sell at better price.

OR

You can just accomplish the daily task and collect the $TOWN reward. The $TOWN token is currently 0.89 USD.

2. How to Earn $TOWN

The first two options I mentioned above will not be explained any further. You can do your research if you like them. I am now explaining the last option.

Currently, the game offers only 1 daily task: Reaching 10000 stars to get X $TOWN. The “X” determined by your Gala power and NFT holding.

3. How to reach 10000 stars?

Each time you trade your goods, will win you some stars. The number of stars each trade is determined by the kind of goods. Every resource in the game is limited at the very beginning. And you should make yourself above the breakeven line to survive as the first challenge. After that you should continue to step into the precedule of producing the gasoline, so that you can still get stars in the next several days.

If you finished the work above, congratulations, you has meet one of the criterias to collect $TOWN.

4. What else is needed?

As I mentioned, you need to have Gala power and NFTs in your Gala account. Otherwise, you can only get 0 $TOWN after you finish the daily task.

You can open a Gala account on the official website. Actually it will guide you to finish a wallet set up. Thus you will own a Ethereum wallet after the account registered. And you need to deposit some $GALA in order to have gala power. Then you can buy NFTs from the market in Gala Platform or from the Opensea.

5. My Experience?

In my research, I bought the Mr. Puddles for 0.27 ETH, thought it was the cheapest. Based on my Level 1 Gala Power and 1 Mr. Puddles, I can have 9 $TOWN every day if I finish the daily task.

6. Opinions?

It is a great game, but not a great P2E game.

The point is that if you want to play it well or at least get more $TOWN everyday, you need more NFTs on your farm. The NFTs are very useful utilities to give you advantages in the game by the way. And the number of NFTs you are allowed to use is limited by your Gala power, which means you need to deposit satisfying number of $GALA token. Normally, the NFTs will be firstly go public on the game store market and then go to the secondary market like the Opensea. Some NFTs will be airdropped to your account, but valuable or tradeable or not, it depends. In my research, I found out the price of some of the NFTs are not satisfying in the secondary market. But some of the unique NFT such as Mirandus Vox Dragon sold for 1.48m USD today seems still fascinating. I have not got an opportunity to research that, so I have no comment on it.

7. Conclusion

As $TOWN is supplied by the Gala platform other than Town Star, and the game mechanisms are tending to guiding players to buy more $GALA, thus I assume most of other games on the platform could be the similar mechanism. So, we got the key.

A few month ago, before my nft journey, I would change my profile picture(pfp) whenever I wanted, whatever I wanted, and wherever I wanted. But now, I would update my pfp when I got a new nft or I sold it out. This is the interesting part, all of my social media pfp are the same nft I own or at least owned once. I don’t know how many people like me, but I feel so funny.

Deeply in every human being’s mind, BEING POSSESSIVE is always there. Hundreds or even thousands years ago, nature resources are free to use and worthless, until people declare ownership and fight for it. When there is an ownership, and when people fight for a thing, it thus has value. So does the NFTs.

This explains half of why people are pursuing crypto punk, BAYC, and etc. The other half is more important: why people fight for it. Bitcoin is shit coin (you may disagree with that, I apologize). People tried every way to prove its value, tried it as payment method, tried it as utility, and now becomes the digital gold. It’s success, admit or not, mostly because it is the first cryptocurrency using blockchain technology, which gives it meaning. So is the CryptoPunks, which is accepted much easier.

So we understand the CryptoPunks, what about the other pfp nfts? Recently, I released that pfp nfts are just like the public chains. They all want to challenge the dominance of CryptoPunks, and more importantly, they have their own roadmap. Actually, a pfp nft can become everything. It can be just a jpeg, or used in gamefi, or used in defi, or used in other virtual world, or anywhere else. Once they got enough profit from loyalty, they can become whatever they want. And the NFTs are no longer NFTs…

So, here comes the end. I shared my opinions on PFP NFTs, the so called useless jpeg. And leave one question for everyone to think. If CryptoPunk is the Bitcoin, what is gonna to be the Ethereum.

Why should I do that? Because NFT is and will continue to be the most effective way to guide people from their “boring world” to the crypto world.