This week was … well, crazy. Top 3 stories? Firstly, it’s a great time to be an L1 or L2, especially when your Daddy (Big V) makes it into the Time Mag. Secondly ‘Fake News’ appeared with reputable outlets apeing in ‘no questions asked’. Thirdly institutional investors find crypto appealing [understatement of the … Millenium?]. Grande week, let’s unpack..
1. My Daddy is Cooler than yours
Did you see Vitalik at EthCC? He appears to be very humble in spite of all the attention garnered as the Patriarchal Figurehead of Ethereum [this week making it into Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people list]. However, with Ethereum gas prices flying off the Richter scale over the past year, competing Layer 1 blockchains and Layer 2 solutions have stealthily made their way into the popularity limelight offering superior scalability. This past week witnessed Algorand’s one-up of Avalanche’s recent $180m DeFi grants program, kicking off the Viridis $300m fund for DeFi. Previously there was Celo with what now pales to ‘just’ a $100m DeFi incentive program. By launching these grants programs, competing chains hope to [and succeed in] luring established developers to launch DeFi protocols on their networks and attracting new users. Bootstrapping network to build community and establish revenue-generation is quickly becoming the new ‘4Ps’. The L1 and L2 communities are definitely feeling the temperature tick up as investors and developer networks pile in.
Nevertheless, it’s not <UpOnly> all the time, as we noticed a couple of the emerging darlings [Solana & Arbitrum] had a bit of a shaky week with some considerable.. downtime.. These hiccups will most likely smooth out to be just a blip, but when hoping to lure institutional capital to participate on networks, it’s a great comfort to ensure a ‘zero-downtime-environment’. This is where, as an institution-grade settlement layer, Ethereum really shines.
Talking of performance, we did notice Cardano pushed their upgrade successfully launched smart-contracts. Congratulations to the IOHK team 🥳
2. ‘Fake News’
It wasn’t so much the news itself that was surprising; Litecoin being accepted as a payment method at Walmart is technically possible… However, the speed at which the ‘news’ was covered by reputable outlets without a proper fact-check was a little unnerving. One of the most common phrases associated with digital assets is - DYOR [Do Your Own Research]. This was a $25m+ illustration, according to Bybt’s Litecoin liquidation reports.
3. ‘Real News’ [ish]: Institutions ‘Love’ digital assets
At least, that’s how we [optimistically] interpreted the word ‘appeal’ in the latest institutional investor digital assets study from Fidelity Digital Assets. According to their 1,100 surveyed Financial Advisors, HNWIs, Family Offices etc across Europe, the US and Asia, 9/10 investors said they found digital assets appealing. 70% of all investors surveyed had a neutral-to-positive perception of digital assets. Nearly 8 in 10 investors surveyed felt digital assets have a place in a portfolio.
Digital asset adoption continues to rise, with corporations like MicroStrategy and Tesla adding allocations to their balance sheets. Whilst adding appreciating on-chain assets to corporate treasuries arguably makes sense within an inflationary environment, another approach is to actually partner with leading on-chain developers. This is what Google Cloud has just done with Dapper Labs, developer of the $680 million NBA Top Shot marketplace, to support and scale Dapper’s Flow blockchain.
“Slowly at first, then all at once.”
And now for some strong opinions…
Cathie Wood, founder CEO and CIO of Ark Invest has the same kind of magnetism that Raoul has; it’s a well-argumented, articulated, researched, high conviction view on the potential for emerging technologies. If you’ve never read Ark’s yearly Big Ideas, they’re illuminating… Always great content from Bankless and always compelling viewing from Cathie; check it:
… brought to you by Alkemi Network
Alkemi Network is building an on-chain liquidity network with a suite of tools and products that serve as onramps for everyone to participate in decentralized finance. See our latest announcement on a successful TGE and deploying a DAO:
Alkemi Network is also planning to participate in NYC crypto events this month, so if you’re around, come and say Hi to Co-Founder & CSO, Brian Mahoney 👋 - we’re always keen to connect with more people in the industry!