Bitcoin Price: $56,891.62 (-5.72%)
Ethereum Price: $3,996.90 (-6.78%)
MetaMask Revenues, DEX Fee Competition, and Aggregator Wars
- In Sept. 2020, Metamask announced its native swapping feature that gets quotes from multiple DEX aggregators to give users the best execution prices available on-chain. With this move, Metamask became an aggregator of aggregators — or a “meta” aggregator (pun intended).
- Metamask levies a 0.875% fee on each swap, which is exorbitant by DeFi standards. And this has resulted in over $200M in revenue over the last 11 months. The simple UX of swapping via the Metamask plug-in seems to trump the ludicrous fees the wallet charges for trades.
- Uniswap’s market share among Ethereum spot DEXes hit a record high of 72%.
- The introduction of a new low-fee tier was a recent catalyst. On November 13, Uniswap launched its new 0.01% fee tier, making Uniswap’s stablecoin quotes among the most competitive in DeFi. As observers have pointed out, this likely marks the beginning of a fee-centric race to the bottom.
- 1inch is still the leading DEX aggregator by a large margin. However, competitors such as Matcha and Paraswap are starting to eat into its market share.
- 1inch had its second-best month ever in October, with $13.8B in volume. But Matcha and Paraswap — once-distant competitors — saw $3.5B and $2B in volume, respectively.
- Aggregators are a crucial piece in enhancing the UX of using DeFi-native liquidity. Watching how this shapes up is likely to be a key theme going forward.
- On the bright side, aggregator volume is back on the rise after a period of contraction in Q3. DEX volumes are on the same trajectory, and despite pathetic price action amongst DeFi majors, their fundamentals and usage are looking brighter than ever.
Bitcoin falls to a 1-month low after a 6% dive drops BTC price to $56.6K
- Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD abandoning the $58,400 support after multiple retests in previous days and at the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $57,800.
- Despite high volatility and challenging the $60,000 mark, within the past hour the price fell as low as $57,200 — its lowest since Oct. 15.
- “Strong market-wide selling is going on,” trader and analyst Rekt Capital wrote in his latest Twitter update.
- “Undoubtedly, seller exhaustion lies ahead. Watch for high sell-side volume bars in the short-term. These tend to signal bottoming out after constant selling and precede either a strong bounce or an entire trend reversal.”
Acala wins first Polkadot parachain auction with over 32M DOT staked
- On Thursday morning, Acala, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol operating on the Polkadot (DOT) network, announced it had won the first-ever Polkadot parachain auction.
- Acala raised a total of 32.5 million DOT, worth roughly $1.28 billion, from 24,934 contributors via an initial coin offering (ICO) structured as a crowdloan. As the proceeds are classified as ‘crypto debt,’ Acala would eventually need to pay back the DOT it had solicited from investors. Users’ DOT are locked for the duration of the rental agreement for Polkadot’s parallel chains up for sale.
Avalanche soars to new highs after Deloitte adoption — But risks emerge for AVAX price
- Avalanche (AVAX) rose to a new price high on Nov. 18 and posted weekly gains after its developer, Ava Labs, entered a partnership with “Big Four” accountant firm Deloitte.
- The AVAX price reached a little over $110 after rising circa 16% week-to-date (WTD), with its circulated market cap hitting $23.76 billion, almost 0.93% of the total crypto market cap.
- AVAX picked its bullish cues from Deloitte’s decision to use the Avalanche blockchain for building a disaster relief platform.
- The deal, according to Avalanche’s founder Emin Gün Sirer, would “help state and local governments easily demonstrate their eligibility for federal emergency funding.” Avalanche’s blog post further noted that their blockchain solutions would assist Deloitte in “minimizing fraud, waste, and abuse,” which is prevalent in existing disaster management solutions.
US city sets up Bitcoin ATM in airport after crypto payment adoption
- North Dakota’s City of Williston continues its exploration and adoption of the cryptocurrency industry with the installation of a crypto automated teller machine (ATM) in its international airport.
- The city’s administration officially announced the installation of the “government-hosted cryptocurrency kiosk” at the Williston Basin International Airport, allowing passengers and non-travelers to buy and sell 40 digital currencies. The list of supported coins includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB).
- For the initiative, the City of Williston partnered with the crypto service Coin Cloud, which provided its digital currency machines (DCM) to the city. According to the firm, a DCM is “more than just a Bitcoin ATM” as it allows users to buy and sell not only Bitcoin but also 40 other digital assets with cash. “Old school Bitcoin ATMs can’t do all that,” Coin Cloud asserted.
