Bitcoin Price: U$46,446.10 (-1.78%)
Ethereum Price: U$3,680.00(-1.63%)
Convex Wars, OpenSea Recovery, & NFT Endorsements
- Recently, the “Curve Wars” have been a hot topic. Simply put, Curve’s stablecoin AMM rewards its liquidity providers with CRV, which can be 1) sold to realize yield or 2) staked into veCRV (voting escrowed CRV), where a weekly vote decides how rewards are allocated across Curve’s pools. Major stablecoin projects have realized this weekly vote allocation is critical to keeping their Curve liquidity high. (Losing that vote means LPs’ yields drop, and capital may move elsewhere.) Now, a so-called “war” has ensued, with various protocols openly bribing votes and rewarding veCRV holders with their native tokens.
- In April 2021, Convex pioneered this bribing game with a 1% airdrop in exchange for support from veCRV holders. Now, it has grown to have great sway on Curve’s valuable governance vote: 85% of Curve TVL is now routed and staked via Convex. And nearly half of all veCRV supply is owned by Convex.
- Convex is now the single largest owner of veCRV at 47% of total supply. This gives them the most governance power to decide where CRV incentives should be distributed.
- OpenSea volume is showing recovery signs as volume starts to trend upwards. Yesterday alone, daily volumes hit near $250M, the highest it has ever been since the peaks of Sep. 2021. Alongside that, it was also the platform’s most actively traded day yet in terms of users, hitting a new high of 60K daily active traders.
- Dec. started out with Metaverse real estate from Sandbox soaring, triggered by Softbank and Adidas’s purchase.
- BAYC season is next as Adidas Originals purchased an ape. This was followed by multiple celebrities (too many to be named), with the latest being Eminem. This BAYC hype spilled over to its sister projects MAYC and BAKC as they are the cheaper alternatives to BAYC. These branding partnerships and celebrity purchases have brought in a lot of attention to BAYC, ultimately forcing BAYC prices higher, and bringing it closer to flipping CryptoPunks in floor price.
- RTFKT studios (Creators of CloneX) were also acquired by a large brand you may have heard of — Nike.
- Mutants (MAYC) were late to the party but caused a huge commotion as ‘Mega Serums’ started to get acquired. When used, they revealed a newly minted Mega Mutant. The latest one to be revealed was bought for 888 ETH by Taylor Gerring, co-founder of Ethereum. This led to the acquisition of “Mega Serums,” and another one was bought by 0x_b1 for 999 ETH. Following that, CEO of Chain Protocol, Deepak Thapliyal purchased one at a new high of 1,542 ETH.
Samsung to introduce NFT platform within its new smart TVs
- Samsung Electronics announced Monday that its new smart TVs will allow users to purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
- Specifically, MICRO LED, Neo QLED, and The Frame TV models, which are set to launch sometime this year, will support NFTs.
- “With demand for NFTs on the rise, the need for a solution to today’s fragmented viewing and purchasing landscape has never been greater. In 2022, Samsung is introducing the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator, a groundbreaking platform that lets you browse, purchase, and display your favorite art — all in one place,” the company told The Verge.
Samsung uses blockchain technology to address climate change
- Samsung Electronics America announced Monday at the CES Tech Conference in Las Vegas its partnership with veritree, a blockchain-based climate solutions platform, to plant 2 million mangrove trees in Madagascar over the next three months. veritree uses blockchain technology to manage the reforestation process and verify each tree that is planted.
- The tree-planting initiative is part of Samsung’s nature-based action plan on environmental sustainability, specifically to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The goal is to restore roughly 200 hectares of land and sequester roughly 1 billion pounds of CO2 over a 25-year period.
Cardano became the most developed crypto project on GitHub in 2021 — Santiment
- According to data compiled by CryptoRank and Santiment, Cardano was the most developed crypto project on GitHub in 2021, with over 140,000 events.
- Rounding out the top three were Kusama and Polkadot at second and third places, respectively, with roughly the same number of events over the year. Cardano beat Ethereum’s development activity by a wide margin, with the latter coming in fourth place. Santiment defines a GitHub event as either creating an issue, creating a pull request, commenting on an issue or pull request, or forking/starring/watching a code repository, among others.
- The rare Serum #69 for Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club just sold for 1,542.069 ETH ($5.8 million), making it the largest sale of a Bored Ape “serum” thus far.
- Deepak Thapliyal, CEO of the blockchain tech startup Chain, bought this rare non-fungible token or NFT — though not without competition from the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Meta4 Capital, which had offered to buy Serum #69 for 1,500 ETH ($5.76 million).
Grayscale reshuffles its DeFi index, adds Flexa’s AMP
- Crypto asset management firm Grayscale announced Tuesday a shake-up in the constituents of its DeFi index as part of its quarterly rebalancing.
- The firm, which is owned by crypto deca-unicorn DCG, said that it would remove Bancor and UMA from the index and add AMP. Bancor – the token tied to the decentralized exchange — and UMA — a token tied to a protocol for synthetic assets – together accounted for 2% and 2.9% of the index at the time of its launch, respectively. Grayscale launched the fund and its underpinning index in July 2021 to provide institutional investors exposure to the fast-growing corner of the crypto market without having to custody tokens themselves.
