M3TA Recap: February 20 – February 26, 2023
This week's edition covers key news from February 20 to February 26, including Bitcoin's price movements, regulatory updates, and notable industry partnerships. Stay informed with M3TA!
Top performers (7D)
Defigram - DFG: +639.2%
Price as of time of writing: DFG/USD - $37.42
Defigram is an app that is built on the Telegram open-source code & provide a gateway to a decentralized wallet. Their decentralized wallet supports the management of multi-chain assets like BTC, ETH, and BSC.
The sudden increase in price is suspected to be a pump and dump scheme due to the fact that over 99% of the trading volume occurred on a single exchange, Indodax (the largest Indonesia digital crypto exchange).
DODO - DODO: +67.4%
Price as of time of writing: DODO/USD - $0.256176
DODO is a Chinese decentralized trading platform that uses the Proactive Market Maker (PMM) algorithm to provide efficient on-chain liquidity for Web3 assets.
Its native token, DODO, recently experienced a surge in price due to a growing parallel demand in China for other tokens based in the same country.
Stacks - STX: +46.7%
Price as of time of writing: STX/USD - $0.873709
The value of STX, which is native to the Bitcoin layer 2 Stacks Network, is surging because of the introduction of the Ordinals protocol.
This protocol enables the application of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Ordinal NFTs on Bitcoin are unique because there is no separate metadata file that describes the NFT; instead, the entire data file exists within the witness signature field of Bitcoin transactions. This means that Ordinal NFTs are entirely self-contained on the blockchain.
RSK Infrastructure Framework - RIF: +120.5%
Price as of time of writing: RIF/USD - $0.146613
The RSK Infrastructure Framework (RIF) provides open-source, decentralized tools and technologies that simplify the creation of secure and accessible DeFi products backed by Bitcoin (BTC).
The recent price surge of RIF is likely connected to the trend of Stack (STX) as they are both related to BTC.
Ankr - ANKR: +36.8%
Price as of time of writing: ANKR/USD - $0.04429682
Ankr and Microsoft partnered to provide a reliable node hosting service for blockchain data access and the service will be available through Microsoft's Azure marketplace which is the reason why the price skyrocketed.
Top losers (7D)
Access Protocol - ACS: -36.9%
Price as of time of writing: ACS/USD - $0.00801192
Access Protocol provides a novel monetization layer for digital content creators. By integrating the protocol on their website, creators can start charging subscription fees and offer exclusive content to supporters.
The project's token was recently listed on major exchanges like Coinbase, Bybit, and Kucoin. The recent drop in price could be attributed to entities who purchased the token during its launchpad phase selling off their holdings.
Blur - BLUR: -31.5%
Price as of time of writing: BLUR/USD - $0.848859
Blur, a new NFT marketplace, distributed its tokens to users as part of its "Season 1" airdrop. The recent drop in price may be due to users selling the airdropped tokens to earn profits.
Onyxcoin - XCN: -24.6%
Price as of time of writing: XCN/USD - $0.00947433
Astar - ASTR: -24.6%
Price as of time of writing: ASTR/USD - $0.078724
Arweave - AR: -20.4%
Price as of time of writing: AR/USD - $9.96
The value of these three coins declined in the past week as they followed the price action of BTC, which was negatively impacted by the recent news from the Federal Reserve last week (more details below).
News Highlight
Decrypt - February 21, 2023
Blur generates $460M in Ethereum NFT trades, a 361% increase over previous span.
OpenSea saw a 12% increase in trading volume to $107M during the same period.
X2Y2 tallied only $11M in trades in the same timeframe.Blur's BLUR governance token airdrop may have contributed to increased trading volume.
NFT collectors primarily using Blur to buy and sell NFTs, while whale traders flip NFTs to boost potential future token reward allocations of “Season 2”.
Klaytn Gorvernance Forum - February 22, 2023
5.281 billion KLAY tokens to be burned immediately, out of 7.281 billion undesignated reserve KLAY tokens (73%).
The remaining 2 billion reserve KLAY tokens (27%) to be designated as the "Klay Value Creation Reserve."
The Klay Value Creation Reserve to explore ecosystem opportunities in conjunction with the Klaytn Governance Council (GC).
The Klay Value Creation Reserve to be entirely burnt after 3 years if opportunities are not secured.
30 percent of block rewards to be allocated to the Klaytn Community Fund (KCF).
20 percent of block rewards to be allocated to the Klaytn Foundation Fund (KFF).
Result is due tomorrow February 28, 2023. Follow the update here:
Decrypt - February 22, 2023
Before this update, traders using Uniswap deploy ETH to execute trade. However, this procedure incurs extremely high cost when the network is too crowded.
Uniswap NFT traders now can use any token on the Ethereum blockchain to purchase NFTs through a simplified interface, including stablecoins like USDC or Tether, and meme coins like Shiba Inu.
Uniswap also plans to support combined sums of multiple cryptocurrencies for a single NFT sale soon, allowing traders to use a combination of tokens such as USDC, Tether, DAI, SHIB, UNI, and Chainlink to buy an NFT.
The feature could help users with liquidity issues to lock in sales faster without manually swapping tokens, and reduces the number of taxable events associated with NFT trading.
Coindesk - February 23, 2023 at 9:00 PM UTC
Base is designed to provide easy, secure access to Ethereum L1, other L2s, and other L1 ecosystems like Solana. It is intended to be a "bridge" for users into the crypto-economy, offering an easy-to-use on-chain experience with access to products on other chains. Therefore, the end goal of Base products is to develop towards supporting as many chains as possible.
Decentralization is essential for the crypto economy and Coinbase is deeply committed to progressing towards full decentralization with Base.
Base is built on the MIT-licensed OP Stack, in collaboration with Optimism. ($OP +10%)
Optimism-based decentralized exchange Velodrome Finance, has also gained 21% in the past 24 hours.
The Verge, February 25, 2023 at 5:09 AM UTC
Meta is releasing LLaMA (which is not actually a single system but a quartet of different-sized models)
LLaMA is a research tool from Meta, not a conversational system like ChatGPT or Bing.
Meta hopes to democratize access to the tool for experts to study problems in AI language models.
Access is granted to universities, NGOs, and industry labs.
Macro
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)
The FOMC - one of the most important governmental financial agencies of the US - holds meetings eight times each year. At these meetings, the Committee reviews economic and financial conditions, determines the appropriate stance of monetary policy, and assesses the risks to its long-run goals of price stability and sustainable economic growth. Open market operations (OMOs) - the purchase and sale of securities in the open market by a central bank - is managed by the FOMC.
GDP growth was +2.7%, lower than forecasted +2.9%, but still high in the context of continuous rate hikes.
First-time unemployment claims last week were at 192,000, showing a strong labor market.
January Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE) reached 5.4%, higher than expected, while core PCE is at 4.7%, above expectations.
Fed members believe more rate hikes are needed to reduce inflation and avoid a recession.
Risks include inflation rebounding, war in Ukraine, reopening of China, and strong labor market.
The Fed may raise interest rates by 0.25% or 0.5% in March.
Speculation that two Fed presidents (Bullard and Mester) support a 0.5% increase.
Micro
THE BLOCK - February 22, 2023 at 11:47 AM UTC
This is the second public testnet to deploy the upgrade, following testing on the Zhejiang testnet earlier this month.
Once deployed on Sepolia, developers will move to the Goerli testnet for the final phase of dress rehearsal before the expected mainnet launch in March.
EWN - February 26, 2023
Tron founder Justin Sun staked 150,000 ETH on Lido Finance, resulting in its largest daily stake inflow to date.
Sun later staked another 50,000 ETH, bringing the total to 200,000 stETH. This triggered the protocol's safety feature called the Staking Rate Limit.
Lido DAO's token LDO also surged by over 11% after the milestone was reached.
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