The Weekly Airdrop: 0x82

September 15, 2023 // Overall Market (+0.94%): Coinbase confirms Lightning Network integration, Franklin joins the spot BTC ETF race, Court approves FTX asset sales, Hivemapper Maps 50M KM

Sep 15, 2023

Crypto markets experienced significant volatility early this week as investors prepared for a slew of macroeconomic data and the off-loading of FTX assets after a court’s approval on the 13th. Over the weekend and into the Monday session we saw BTC and ETH sell off (-3.6%) and (-5.8%), respectively. Crypto sharply rebounded during the Asia session leaving BTC (+1.9%) and ETH (-0.9%) relatively unchanged from the prior week while altcoins bore the brunt of the sell off with little rebound.

Headline CPI data came in slightly hotter than expected on Wednesday, largely as a result of increasing oil prices, leaving markets without much direction as BTC remained range bound from the prior week and settled around $26.5k.

DEFI OVERVIEW

Onchain Activity

RUNE (+9.6%) has been a major outperformer this week, primarily driven by news that Metamask enabled cross chain native BTC swaps, which will use THORchain in the backend to facilitate trades. This will increase volumes on THORchain as it gets exposure to Metamask’s 21M users
dYdX volumes have nearly doubled week over week and have eclipsed $1b in 24 hour volumes across their perpetual swaps multiple days this week increasing fees +61.9% WoW. Despite major pairs largely remaining unchanged, volatility early in the week drew in more traders

Offchain Activity

Courts have agreed to allow Galaxy Digital to take control of the liquidation process of the FTX estate token holdings. Per the terms of the agreement, sales will be capped at $50m for the current week and scale up to a $100m in potential sales per week thereafter. There is an option to increase this to $200m per week but, requires court approval
MetaMask announced it will be adding new features known as “snaps”, which essentially allows for third party developers to add Metamask integrations (similar to chrome extensions) to increase interoperability across apps and add new functionality

WEB3 OVERVIEW

Onchain Activity

DePIN networks have been leading the charge in Web3, when it comes to showcasing a strong growth in fundamentals. Onchain monthly revenues crossed $120k for back to back months in June and July, +179.9% from the beginning of the year, as DeWi protocols like WiFi Map and Geodnet begin to scale

Offchain Activity

Render Network‘s strong relationship with Apple continues, after Apple revealed that the iPhone 15 will be the first iPhone to feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the A17 Pro chipset. What this means is that iPhones will be able to be used as light nodes on the Render Network, and leverage OctaneX

TREND HIGHLIGHT:

Mapping the World with Hivemapper

Hivemapper is one of the most successful proof of concepts for DePIN projects today, incentivizing a community to put in actual work to map out roads across the world. The network has mapped over 50M km of roads worldwide (~8% of total global roads), with ~5M km of mapped roads that are completely unique, and not available on other mapping services, like Google Maps or Apple Maps.

It took Google Maps 5 years to cross 5M unique miles mapped. It took Hivemapper only 8 months to hit half that number, proving once again that Web3 based, DePIN networks can bootstrap the supply side of viable products much faster than their Web2 incumbents.

Dive in deeper here.