Let's be honest, these markets are pretty brutal.
Hopefully it's not too tough looking at your portfolio 😬
In times like these, it's worth asking, has anything fundamentally changed?
- Crypto adoption is still rising
- $67 billion is still locked in DeFi (which didn't even exist a few years ago)
- Crypto devs are still busy building (we know, we've got the data)
- NFTs are still booming (Yuga Labs did $561M alone)
So take a deep breath. Things are bad now, but not much has changed fundamentally. Some of the best projects and investments happen in downturns.
Contents
- Weekly Projects to Watch
- Top News This Week
- Fresh Content from the Team
- Stack Product Updates
Weekly Projects to Watch
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Insight of the week (beta)
Utrust (UTK/USDT)
In a sea of red. This bullish insight from our AI caught our attention.
The chart shows the expected performance, based on 10 similar occurrences in the past. Similar indications previously led to a median price increase of 21.93%, over the following 14 days.
Top risers overall
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- Holo ($HOT) ⬆️ 3%
- Arweave ($AR) ⬆️ 2%
- KuCoin Token ($KCS) ⬆️ 2%
- TRON ($TRX) ⬆️ 2%
Top risers by Dev Rank
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- XRP ($XRP) ⬆️ 9%
- Monero ($XMR) ⬆️ 7%
- Arweave ($AR) ⬆️ 7%
- TRON ($TRX) ⬆️ 6%
Top small cap risers by overall rank
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- Ethereans ($OS) ⬆️ 106%
- NFTrade ($NFTD) ⬆️ 59%
- PegNet ($PEG) ⬆️ 54%
- Zerogoki ($REI) ⬆️ 49%
Top News This Week
Solana Suffers Outage, Yuga Labs Sees $561 Million in NFT Sales and Ethereum Gas Fees Spiked
The Solana blockchain network went dark through a seven-hour outage, which was caused by a significant rush of bots that attempted to mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on top of the blockchain network.
Specifically, the NFT mining program for Solana, known as Candy Machine, struggled under the large traffic from bots that aimed to push through transactions. This caused the network’s mainnet to fall out of consensus and crash as the nodes that belonged to validators collapsed under the traffic’s weight.
Validators within the network are computers responsible for the process of validating the transactions and maintaining the integrity of the blockchain.
Furthermore, Yuga Labs, the creators of the popular Bored Apes Yacht Club collection of NFTs, launched a sale of virtual land.
They managed to make over $318.7 million from the initial mint, with over $242 million in total secondary volume traded. This means that they made up to $561 million through the NFT sales. Each piece of land sold at 305 ApeCoin (APE), and they sold out almost instantly. This led to extremely high fees on the Ethereum blockchain, which was used for the process of minting the NFTs.
Specifically, users paid between 2.6 ETH or $6,500 to 5 ETH of $14,000 in gas fees based on data from Etherscan. Furthermore, based on data from Glassnode and Data Always, nearly 70,000 ETH was burned on Mary 1.
Vitalik Buterin commented that the only truly acceptable Ethereum fees are under $0.05 and disagreed that several popular scaling solutions have solved the issue of high network fees. The buyers of the "Otherdeeds" NFT collection, however, went underwater.
While the initial purchasers paid $5,800 per NFT, plus as much as $6,000 in transaction costs or "gas fees,". The NFTS could be bought later on for as little as 3.5 Ether (ETH), where many buyers that would sell the NFTs at that price could use $1,700 per transaction.
Warren Buffett Does Not Believe In Bitcoin, Joe Rogan Believes It Is a Viable Currency, and Craig Wright Filed Legal Action Against Coinbase and Kraken for Misrepresenting Bitcoin
Warren Buffett has maintained his skeptical stance on the topic of cryptocurrencies. At the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, he announced that it is not a productive asset and that it does not produce anything that is tangible. According to Buffet: "Whether it goes up or down in the next year, or five or ten years, I don't know. But the one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it doesn't produce anything".
Joe Rogan, who is the host of The Joe Rogan Experience, has a different stance on Bitcoin. He noted that the cryptocurrency is now a "viable form of currency" that people can "actually buy things with" and said that "the government is freaking out."
Additionally, Craig Wright has resumed litigation against entities that infringe on his copyright and challenge his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright's legal team states further filings against major exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken over misrepresenting "Bitcoin Core" as the actual Bitcoin.
The proceedings assert that the misrepresentations by Coinbase and Kraken, which are continuing to push BTC as the original Bitcoin, have confused investors who are unaware of the "authenticity" of the assets that they are dealing with.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an Executive Order on Blockchain
The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has signed an executive order which is focused on the regulation of blockchain technology. This executive order is aimed at promoting responsible crypto development throughout California and is aimed at ensuring customer protection.
Newsom called California "a global hub of innovation"; however, he lamented that "government [often] lags behind technological advancements." Newsom also explained that the order would help create the groundwork for "consumer and business to thrive."
Elon Musk Secured $7 Billion in Fundraising From Sequoia, Binance, and Other Investors to Back Twitter Bid
Elon Musk managed to secure $7 billion through investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Binance, and Fidelity 89. This contributed to the backing of Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter.
Elon Musk did end up acquiring Twitter. On April 25, Elon Musk shared a tweet following the announcement that spoke on free speech and how this forms the cornerstone of a "functioning democracy."
The acquisition of Twitter will be finalized towards the end of 2022, following the approval of Twitter’s stockholders and regulatory bodies that are overseeing the matter.
Stack Product Updates
Now you can track the growth of any project's social followers. Just head down to the Social Activity section in any report:
Here's an example for Ethereum
Lots of progress is being made on our new smart insights, as demoed above in "Insight of the week". We look forward to being able to start rolling that out further towards the end of the month.
Thanks for reading,
The Stack Team
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