Crypto Fundamentals #011

Happy Friday folks! The 3rd week of Jan saw another big ~15% average price increase over the past 7 days alongside some decoupling from the TradFi markets which saw a week-over-week decline in major indexes including the DOW and S&P.

L1 Overview & Highlights

Price / Activity WoW Change:

This week saw a continued jump in prices across the board with an average price increase of ~15% across the ecosystem. SBF / FTX associated coins SOL and APT saw the largest weekly gains of ~37% and ~40%, respectively while alt L1s FTM and NEAR saw 15-20% gains.

The OG major ETH saw a meaningful ~12% gain alongside a meaningful gain in TVL (6% WoW Change)… with double digit WoW increases in TVL by several top protocols including Lido and Convex.

The continued bullishness in the crypto market was not quite reflected in tradfi markets with the DOW and S&P finishing down for the week, but some tech stocks rallied on the news of additional layoffs and better than expected subscriber numbers in Q4.

Per Markets Insider: “Netflix jumped 7% after posting unexpected subscriber growth, and Google parent Alphabet climbed 5% after announcing it would slash 12,000 employees.”

Trading Volumes WoW Change:

This week saw meaningfully higher trading volume across the board, with significant 7D trading as a % of total market cap in tokens such as OP (434%), FTM(215%) and APT (230%) which continue to be most of the tokens that saw the highest price gains over the past week.

Solana continued to be the most highly traded token after ETH, with $12.6bn in volume traded over the past week (more than double the prior weeks $5.8bn of volume🫣) . BNB held its 3rd spot with $4.4bn of volume (vs. $3.8bn in prior week) while MATIC, AVAX and APT rounded out the top 5 with ~$3.6-3.8bn of 7D volume traded.

Developer / User Activity WoW Change:

The devs have returned from holiday in January with a ~70% median WoW increase in CoreEco weekly commits , with the largest jumps at Optimism (~1380% increase) and Fantom (400% increase). Weekly Active CoreEco Devs have also rebounded with a ~54% median WoW increase across the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, weekly active addresses dropped this past week (perhaps on chain folks are all back to work after the holidays), with drops in activity from several major platforms including OP, APT and NEAR (-59%, -34% and -54% decline in WoW activity, respectively).

Osmosis saw the largest increase in activity in the past week with daily transactions and daily active addresses rising meaningfully above its peers (87% and 12%, respectively).

Other Crypto Newz

Genesis filed for bankruptcy this week and disclosed it owes ~$3.6bn to a list of creditors which includes crypto native firms such as Gemini and Decentraland as well as some tradfi folks such as VanEck and Cumberland. It’s likely the fallout from the bankruptcy will impact the crypto ecosystem at large but could take months to years to fully play out.

For now, prices keep pumping past the Barry fud 🥴

The tweet was celebrated by Mr winklevoss who is the largest creditor to the Genesis platform. He appears optimistic the latest development will help Gemini Earn users recover their assets

ecosystem highlights below 👇

Fantom

This week the Artemis team added FTM data to the Artemis Sheets plug-in🤠

We now have more insight into the ecosystem of Andre Cronjre. FTM’s current DAAs of ~44k puts it in the upper half of blockchains we cover, with less usage than Cardano (~53k DAAs) and approximately the same as Arbitrum (43k DAAs). With that said, FTM boasts a healthy Daily Txns / DAAs figure of 7.9x, putting it in the same camp as some of its more scalable / performant peers including APT and below that of ARB and Polygon (10.4x and 10.0x, respectively).

FTM also boasts reasonable TVL and Stablecoin figures (~$450mm for both parameters) given its circulating market cap of only $843mm. FTM’s market cap / TVL of 1.9x is meaningfully below that of its peers (in fact, its the lowest across platforms even on a FDMC basis).

Weekly CoreEco Commits of ~70 have dropped off meaningfully over the last 3 months, but has still grown over the past year (+19% YoY). Will continue to monitor developments in this ecosystem 🧐

Bitcoin

We have also added Bitcoin to the Artemis family of covered assets 🤩

Bitcoin actually boasts one of the most robust developer ecosystems with 86 Weekly Active CoreEco Devs, putting it in the same realm as Solana (~100) and behind the other major dev ecosystems of Ethereum (~372) and Cosmos (~191).

Alongside its bustling dev ecosystem, Bitcoin has ~619k daily active addresses (!!), second only to BSC (~778k) and meaningfully higher than Ethereum (~396k) and Solana (~553k).

With that said, it looks like the Bitcoin ecosystem is only processing ~298k Daily Txns, representing a Daily Txns / DAAs multiple of 0.5x. We think this directionally makes sense given Bitcoin is still primarily a store of value, and transactions would interact with two wallets, but we shall do more digging to make sure the number makes sense ⛏⛏