Your Weekly Update On All Things Crypto |
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The Crypto Gathering - Did Not Disappoint |
Last Wednesday kicked off the three-day event that crypto enthusiasts had circled on their calendar, The Crypto Gathering. It was hosted by Raoul Pal and the Real Vision team and jam-packed with over 65 A-List interviews across the three-day span. Although the conference was virtual, it had the feeling of a 'Davos meets Burning Man' for crypto enthusiasts. Conversations spanned every sector of the crypto economy from stable coin regulation to virtual reality metaverses being built on the blockchain.
With more than 32 paradigm-shifting conversations, there were too many highlights to summarize in one newsletter, however, these were some of our favorite conversations:
Learning from a 1st Mover - Michael Saylor and Raoul Pal discuss the likelihood of Bitcoin becoming the new monetary standard for the global economy
Why Bitcoin will Green the Planet - Meltem Demirors, Caroline Cochran, and Whit Gibbs discussed why Bitcoin will actually be a driver of renewable energy adoption and how it will allow humans to settle in previously uninhabitable locations
Into the Metaverse - Raoul Pal and Piers Kicks chat about blockchain-based gaming and the rise of digital, virtual-reality metaverses where people go to live, work, and play. Piers discusses various virtual worlds that are already hosting concerts, earning revenues, and fully immersive.
Fireside Chat - with Gavin Wood and Olaf Carlson-Wee - The former CTO of Etheruem and Founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood, discusses the future of blockchain, the creation of Polkadot as a "layer-zero blockchain" and the importance of interoperability in the crypto ecosystem.
It Starts with Charts - Legendary analysts Willy Woo and Peter Brandt have a conversation hosted by Laura Shin about the "once-in-a-lifetime" price action of Bitcoin, and how the Bitcoin chats differ from anything we have ever seen throughout history.
Minus some buffering time on the first day of interviews, the Crypto Gathering went off without a hitch and surely provided value to anyone and everyone who was listening. The conversations over the past week were a stark reminder of how fast the cryptocurrency space moves and how much there is left to discover with this new technology. To get access to recordings of all these conversations, you can visit the Crypto Gathering, here.
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Crypto Network Effect Compounds as NFT's Boon |
In a recent Cointelegraph interview, Kris Marszalek, the CEO of Crypto.com, sat down to discuss the catalysts driving crypto user adoption around the globe. According to their study, it took over a decade for crypto to reach 100 million users, roughly 1% of the world’s population. The next milestone, however, will come to a lot quicker.
“Going from 100 to 200 is going to be much, much faster than going from, you know, 50 to 100 [million],” explains Marszalek. He believes crypto’s increasing network effect to be the result of two converging trends; the 'institutional money train’ and ‘NFTeeing up adoption’. The first has continuously made headlines and pushed the market cap to new all-time highs. The second brings a new sort of adoption into play, bringing crypto to the forefront of culture and consumerism.
Since late 2020 and throughout 2021, crypto has welcomed the arrival of household names into its ecosystem. Companies like PayPal and Tesla have acquired Bitcoin and look to further develop payment rails for both native and non-native cryptocurrency users. Major banks like Morgan Stanley and BNY Mellon are starting to roll out digital asset services. This institutional ‘money train’ has brought a tsunami of capital into the cryptocurrency market, opened the doors to Wall St., and helped push crypto into the consciousnesses of companies and communities alike.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have secured their spot as one of the hottest crypto topics of 2021. One digital artwork NFT’s even sold for over $69M selling for upwards of $69M. However, what’s most interesting about NFTs is how attractive they are from both a consumer and influencer perspective and their ability to bring in non-crypto users into the crypto ecosystem.
For starters, they mimic common mainstream commodities like trading cards and art, but can also act as virtual land and digital clothing. This is easier to understand for most as it brings a physical aspect to a digital good. I’ll often have people come and show me their recently purchase NFT art, a trait that bitcoin or other digital assets lacked. Moreover, the marketplaces to buy and hold NFTs are easy-to-use and welcoming to all.
Now add in the fact that celebrities and influencers around the world are capitalizing on the craze, selling NFT versions of their tweets, albums, and pretty much anything else. As Marszalek puts it, “Today, culture is led by influencers who are just operating online.” If, or better yet when, NFTs are an integral part of most modern societies, crypto-adoption won’t only be led by institutional market drivers, but the underlying consumer need to buy and have goods.
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Avanti Financial Raises $37M in Series A and Receives Banking Charter |
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Avanti Financial Group, a Wyoming-based digital asset bank aimed towards institutions, announced it had closed a $37 million Series A funding round. This brings Avanti's total funding since its inception in October of 2020 to $44 million.
The round’s proceeds will help Avanti gather the capital needed, as required by regulators, to launch its services & products while funding development and covering operational costs. There was participation from a number of institutional investors such as Binance.US, Coinbase, Morgan Stanley, Creek Digital, and Susquehanna Private Equity, and Avanti's own executives and directors contributed.
Avanti is a 'new breed of the bank' that connects digital assets with the legacy financial system. Founded by Caitlin Long who serves as CEO, Avanti was the second crypto-bank after Kraken to receive a bank charter. Avanti caters to traders, fin-tech companies, banks, corporate treasuries, trusts, pension funds, and more. It seeks to become a compliant bridge between digital assets and the U.S. dollar payment system, and a custodian that meets the strictest level of institutional standards.
Caitlin Long said that Avanti has received over 2,500 inbound institutional customer inquiries since its charter approval. The funding will help meet regulatory compliance standards and assist with the development of Avanti’s dollar-pegged token called Avit. This is just one part of Avanti’s roadmap, which “includes offering API-based U.S. dollar payment services for wires, ACH and SWIFT; issuance of our tokenized, custody and on-/off-ramp services for bitcoin and other digital assets,” states Long.
This is a big step forward for the crypto industry and a sign of what’s to come. In 2017, the bull-run was characterized by a flood of retail investors. Now we are seeing institutional players like PayPal and Tesla as the driving force. With registered chartered digital banks, such as Avanti, larger-scale institutional corporations will have a more comfortable and compliant way to get involved and interact with crypto in a manner that’s similar to the legacy financial systems.
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Bitcoin Stock-to-Flow Projections |
In keeping with the Bitcoin theme of last week, we wanted to once again step back and look at the 10,000ft macro Bitcoin perspective. So we thought we would analyze one of the most scrutinized and polarizing models for Bitcoin's price action to date, the Stock-to-Flow model. The Stock-to-Flow model was introduced by a pseudonymous Bitcoin analysis called Plan B. The model represents a projection of Bitcoin's "fair-value" as it relates to its supply schedule and the halving events every four years. Since the model was released, the price movement has been eerily similar to the projections made by this model. This has lead analysts and speculators alike to call on the Stock-to-Flow model while forming their assumptions around Bitcoin's price.
A few things to notice about the model:
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The chart is in log scale, meaning each parabolic advance is exponentially greater than the last.
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Parabolic run-ups tend to leg the halving by 1-2 quarters.
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Price tends to explode past fair value in the peak of the bull-run hysteria.
We expect the same phenomenon to occur this year and expect the price to push well above the fair value of roughly $100K. Plan B himself was featured on the Crypto Gathering last week and went on the record that he was suspecting a nearly $200K Bitcoin this market cycle before crashing down and consolidating below fair value for roughly a year before making its next move.
Every hardcore Bitcoin analyst should become familiar with the Stock-to-Flow model as it has proven to be one of the best predictors of Bitcoin's price to date.
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Alt-Coin Dominance Coiling Up For A Breakout |
In totality, the alt-coin market has been relatively boring over the past few weeks as alt-coin dominance has traded sideways in a roughly 5% trading range. However, over the past week, we have started to see some indications as to what might be in store for the broader cryptocurrency market over the next few weeks. On the daily chart, alt-coin dominance is beginning to form an ascending triangle. This is a bullish structure as it signifies there is growing buy-side support for alt-coins, but dominance keeps getting rejected at the same resistance level of 40%. That said, each test of that 40% level weakens the resistance, and eventually, (if the market structure holds true) we should see a breakout to the upside of this ascending triangle pattern. Another key principle of market structures is, "the longer the run, the larger the rally." Given that the alt-coin dominance charts have been pushing sideways for quite some time, we should be on the lookout for a major rally in alt-coins if we can manage to breakthrough this market structure.
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LUKSO is a Blockchain infrastructure, providing a series of standards and solutions for physical and digital consumer goods, in order to foster transparency, circularity, and new forms of responsible production and consumption. LUKSO is the next project by the creator of ERC-20 and ERC-725, a network dedicated to moving Blockchain beyond DeFi. LUKSO will introduce standards and tools that will enable a new economy based on Cultural Currencies, Digital Certificates, and Universal Public Profiles.
After seeing a massive exponential run-up from October of 2020 to early March, LYXE had a chance to cool off, retracing a full 50% from its all-time highs. The token has shown strong bullish momentum over the past three days and might be ready to make its next push for all-time highs.
The mainnet of this project has not even launched yet, and the market cap is still below $250M, meaning it is still incredibly early stage. However if the LUKSO team delivers on their mission, this may be one of the hottest NFT plays of this bull-run.
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RARI is the native token of the Rarible ecosystem and the first governance token in the NFT space. Rarible is a premiere NFT marketplace where you can mint, buy and sell digital collectibles without any coding skills required. RARI enables the most active creators and collectors on Rarible to vote for any platform upgrades and participate in curation and moderation.
Given the explosion of the NFT space over the past few months, we feel that is important to include an NFT strategy within your portfolio. Rarible is currently 35% down from its all-time high but has been setting higher highs and higher lows over the past 4 days. With a relatively low total supply of 25 million and a low market cap of only $120M at the time of writing, we think the RARI token is well-positioned to be a leading player in the NFT sector over the course of this bull run.
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We at CryptoWeekly are not Financial Advisors. None of the content or opinions expressed in this newsletter should be considered financial advice. We highly recommend that you do your own research before investing in any project within or outside the cryptocurrency space. |
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