Overview of Fundraisings of the Week
Web3 Startup Naetion Secures $150m Investment From GEM Digital.
KuCoin Raises $150 Million to Further its Exploration into Web3.
Citi, Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon Invest in Crypto Firm Talos as Institutional Adoption of Digital Assets Accelerates.
D-ETF Secures $50 Million Prior to Public Sale.
Irreverent Labs raises $40M for NFT robot cock fighting game MechaFightClub.
Crypto Startup Moralis Raises $40 Million in Fresh Funding.
Token.io raises $40M to expand open banking-based account-to-account payments in Europe.
BVNK grabs $40 million for its crypto banking services.
Soluna Raises $35M From Spring Lane Capital to Build Green Data Centers for Crypto, Machine Learning.
Jambo Raises $30M in Series A Funding.
Fundraising Trend Since the Beginning of the Year
DeFi
Weekly TVL
Gross: ⬇️ $110.77B
Top 3 Apps: MakerDAO ⬇️ ($10.48B), Lido ⬇️ ($8.72B), Curve ⬇️ ($8.71B)
Top 3 Chains: ETH ⬇️ ($70.39B), BSC ⬇️ ($8.41B), AVAX ⬇️ ($5.23B)
Top 7D Change 📈: Decentralized keeper network — Keep3r Network (KP3R) (+305%, $572.46m)
DeFi News
[StarkGate Alpha Live] StarkGate alpha is now live, allowing users to test transferring between Ethereum and StarkNet.
[dYdX Mobile Live] dYdX is now available on mobile for iOS users, supporting most mobile wallets like MetaMask, CoinbaseWallet, TrustWallet, etc.
[Terra Crash] Beginning on 9 May 2022, UST began to break its peg to the US dollar. Over the next week, the price of UST plunged below 25 cents, while Luna fell to “virtually zero”, down from an all-time high of $119.51. The collapse wiped out almost $45 billion of market capitalization over the course of a week.
NFT
Key Metrics
7D SALES: $558,436,383
7D CHANGE IN SALES: -49.77%
7D NUMBER OF SALES: 932,636
NFT News
May 12, Quicknode acquires NFT analytics site Icy Tools.
May 12, Refik Anadol’s Living Architecture: Batlló sold to 6529 fund for $1.3M.
May 10, Azuki NFT Founder Admits To 3 Failed Projects.
May 8, Instagram to support NFTs from Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Flow.
GameFi & Metaverse
[Sorare launch esport on smart contract] The soccer-centric NFT game platform Sorare is confirmed to launch a Major League Baseball fantasy game this summer, the game will be launched under the partnership of both MLB and the MLB Association.
[Bitmex x. AC Milan NFT series] The Born to Lead NFT Collection launched by Bitmex and AC Milan is about digitizing the most historical moment and memorizing the glory and the sportsmanship of the club and the fans. The NFT is also used in season 22/23 to unlock tickets and private tours.
[Lululemon applies for NFT trademarks] The leading lifestyle brand Lululemon is applying NFT-related trademarks hinting at a future exploration of crypto trading, and metaverse retail stores. metaverse classes and virtual goods.
[StepN featured on Forbes, now has 2.3M monthly active users] StepN is opening a new chapter for “X to earn” as it is a game that simply pays you to get fit. The governance token $GMT market cap is now at $9.4B and its daily shoe sales contributed to $57M according to Delphi digital. The STEPN team places token price stability as their prime goal to become a long-lasting P2E game. Aside from having various embedded game mechanism to gain use case of the token to mint shoes and upgrade shoes, the team also use income generated from the NFT marketplace to burn fixed supplied token GMT, now it has successfully burned 68M $GMT accounted for 10% of the total supply. Not only manage from the downside of the token price, but the team is also planning to utilize Dynamic Minting to mitigate the effect that the price spike will bring to users, the minting price will incorporate the USD value of $GST to maintain the purchasing power in-game.
[Budweiser x. Dwyane Wade] The former Heat star, Dwyane Wade is partnering with Budweiser to promote its zero-alcohol beer through physical goods and NFT. The NFT will also act as passes for different tiers of experiences including virtual Jersey, autograph, and in-person tours.
[Nasa x. Epic Games] Nasa, the US Space agency is partnering with Epic Games to create a Martian metaverse stimulation to mimic the real mars terrain and day/night cycle to train Martian astronauts before deployment.
[Samsung building its own metaverse] Revealed by the vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics, Han Jong-Hee, that the company is building its own metaverse and he further confirmed that a device is involved in their plan.
[Gamestop is applying trademark for Gamestop Blockchain] Gamestop is exploring gamefi by initiating a game-focused blockchain.
DAO
LFG hit hard (and crashed)
This week, we witnessed the biggest tragedy ever in the decentralized community and crypto world, how Terra crashed into ashes due to a collapse of faith and consensus within the community. Luna is now trading at $0.00002 with a total supply of 6,521B, The Market cap at its peak was valued at $41B now is at $1.6B. As for UST, after two days of battle at a price level of ~$0.9, deterioration accelerated its drop rate and it is currently trading at $0.17.
Meanwhile, there are multiple reasons contributing to this event, we can grasp a couple of main ones:
- The macroeconomy is experiencing down terms as the FED announced to increase 50 basis point interest rates and reduce the size of the balance sheet starting June 1st.
- The Mechanisms, unlike the traditional stablecoin like USDC, USDT or DAI have a set of collaterals such as USD, BTC, ETH, or other assets that yielded a large amount of liquidity, UST is simply the liability of Luna, where $1 of luna burned will mint a UST and vice versa. Normally the arbitrager will be able to maintain the UST with USD by burning Luna or UST. Notably that Luna potentially has this Death Spiral situation where in a bank run situation $UST holder will be able to mint more $Luna and further deteriorate the price of it. Although LFG later adopted BTC as part of the collateral, $Luna is extremely vulernable as its liquidity is limited and it has nothing to resist the Dealth Spiral, but after dumping all Bitcoin that the reserve has.
- The Incentives is trading for time to have the ecosystem grow, Terra is explosive in this bullish cycle with 10x TVL in 1 year and over 70 dapps in the ecosystem, Anchor Protocol, one of the loan protocol build on Terra, is offering over 19% fixed rate APY to UST LPs while the protocol generates less than 10% as income(and other protocols are offering below 5% APY). The other incentives are from LFG which granted $570M reserve for the protocol to hold more UST and at the peak, its TVL amounted to $17.05B costing the reserve roughly $5M per day to subsidize. It is not going to last unless a massive adoption of UST.
- Internal Risk Management Luna has enacted various plans to deal with questions regarding the vulnerability of the tokenomics and the Macroeconomy, namely the $10B BTC plan to adopt Bitcoin as part of reserves and Anchor Protocol released proposal to lower interest rates by 1.5%. However, the team and DK seem to be very optimistic in the ecosystem even though many have referred them as “Ponzi”, DK even participated in a $10M Bet-on agreement for $Luna to be worth over $88 in a year. They obviously overlooked the potential risks of “The Big Short” and in that case, any vulnerability will be fully exploited. The is an alert for everyone, for projects located in the center of the universe, to never let down your guard.
- Failed “Guard Plan”
“Ineffective”: The $84M dump on curve causes funds pulled from Anchor Protocol, LFG deploy $7.5B funds in reserve but purposely left the UST unpegged at $0.95 for a day, that was mostly due to the confidence that DK has, but ends up further deteriorate the situation.
“The trade”: rumor has it that LFG was seeking a $1B bailed out from Jump, Celsius, and Jane St. at 50% of $Luna’s concurrent price (~$15) with a 1-year lock, the deal is bad, and extremely damaged the economic wellness of $Luna holders.
“The Intransparency”: LFG has indeed transferred all $80,394 BTC in reserve to Binance to bail out the protocol, however, it’s impossible to track or verify if a real buyback UST plan has occurred. Aside from that, an ex-terra employee revealed that DK was behind the failed stablecoin project Basis and Basis was a pilot project for Terra.
Currently, the Terra Blockchain is halted for safety concerns of the chain, protocols like Venus and blizzard finance were attacked as Chainlink is pausing price feed on Luna caused $22M loss, there are PE/VCs participated in $1B LFG raise and their Luna is locked all the way to 2025 and last but not least the UST and Luna holders who have strong faith in their community but now has very little left.
Regulation & Adoption
- May 9: (🇸🇻) El Salvador bought 500 BTC more, about $15.3 million, bringing the total number owned by the country to over 2,300 (about $72.5 million at Monday´s price).
- May 11: (🇨🇳) China’s Shanghai High People’s Court issued a document in which Bitcoin is declared a legal virtual property protected under the country’s law.
- May 13: (🇦🇪) UAE´s leading airline, Emirates, said it has plans to add “Bitcoin as a payment service” In addition, the airline will add NFT collectibles on its webpage.
- May 13 (🇳🇴) Norway’s parliament rejects the proposal on banning Bitcoin mining.
Macro
- May 11: (🇺🇸) US CPI YoY 8.3% vs 8.1% estimated, inflation above estimates.
- May 12: (🇺🇸) US PPI (Producer Price Index) in line with expectations, increased at an annual rate of 11% in April, — 0.2% from the previous month. The same month where the US crude production has fallen for the first time since January.
- May 12: (🇺🇸) Mortgage rates in the US rise to 5.3%, the highest since July 2009.
- May 13: (🇺🇸) Stocks rose after Fed chair Powell anticipates a 50bps raise for the June and July meetings.
- May 13: Gold falls to nearly 1800USD/oz, on track for a fourth straight weekly decline.
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