Market Summary

Bitcoin Price: US$ 38,694.59 (+0.59%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 2,787.71 (+3.75%)

Yield Strats #44 – Unicorn Milk, Stablecoin Farms and Airdrops

• gem.xyz is an NFT aggregator which has recently launched. Akin to other NFT marketplaces, it is a possibility that users will receive a retroactive airdrop.
• Ronin Chain has released their $RON token. Farmers of RON can now claim on Katana DEX.
• Crypto Unicorns has leaked alpha in their most recent AMA that there will be an airdrop of some kind.
• CowSwap has announced its airdrop and distribution criteria. A total of 55,131 addresses are eligible (39,001 CowSwap traders and 31,514 GNO holders). Users of Balancer’s gasless DEX will likely be included.
• Tokenfy has a ‘free-to-claim’ airdrop for OpenSea users. Warning – it requires a MetaMask signature to access the airdrop.
• Crypto Unicorns is a pet-collecting and farming game built on Polygon by Laguna Games. Players will be able to participate in a wide variety of activities including pet collecting, crafting, farming, and PvP games such as battling, racing and jousting. The Dark Forest is a surprise mini-game where players can send their Unicorns into the Dark Forest to forage for UNIM.
• Moremoney is a lending protocol for opening interest-free collateralized debt positions using liquidity pool tokens, interest-bearing tokens and other major tokens as collateral. Borrowers mint MONEY, a USD softly pegged stablecoin backed by an collateralized debt position as well as the yield earned by the collateral. After minting MONEY, borrowers can use it across the DeFi landscape, for interest-free leverage, or simply use it to farm MORE.
• Creditum is a lending and borrowing protocol within the Fantom ecosystem that allows users to borrow or mint cUSD, a stablecoin pegged at $1 USD by posting different tokens as collateral. With access to cUSD, users are able to earn an annualized percentage yield on available farms to earn CREDIT, while maintaining exposure and gaining access to other benefits as future projects are launched. 

NYDIG offering allows participating companies to pay employees in Bitcoin

• The New York Digital Investment Group, or NYDIG, has launched a benefit program allowing employees of participating companies to convert a portion of their paychecks into Bitcoin.
• In a Tuesday announcement, the NYDIG said several firms involved with sports, entertainment and digital currencies would be among the first to offer the crypto payments, including Everbowl, MVB Bank, StretchZone, crypto analytics firm The TIE, crypto mining firm Iris Energy and Fertitta Entertainment — the conglomerate behind restaurant giant Landry’s and the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets. Company employees who participate in NYDIG’s Bitcoin Savings Plan can choose how much of their pay will be converted into Bitcoin (BTC), with no transaction or cold storage fees.
• NYDIG chief innovation officer Patrick Sells said the BTC payment plan was aimed at letting companies offer a benefits package to prospective employees interested in “protecting their financial futures.” According to a recent survey conducted by the firm, 36% of workers under 30 said they would be interested in receiving part of their salary in BTC, with roughly 33% opting for an employer offering payment plans in crypto as opposed to those solely in fiat or other benefits.

$1B worth of ETH burned in the past 30 days due to record high OpenSea NFT transactions

• According to blockchain data from Nansen Analytics on Tuesday, over $1.096 billion worth of Ethereum (ETH) has been burned in the past month. With the introduction of the EIP-1559 last August, a portion of fees is taken out of circulation for every transaction that occurs on the Ethereum blockchain. While sending and receiving ETH does not cost much, higher-level tasks, such as minting nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, via smart contracts, cost far more gas.
• In January, the total volume of NFT transactions on OpenSea hit an all-time high of $3.5 billion. It currently ranks No.1 on a burn leaderboard compiled by Ultra Sound Money, with 65,778 ETH ($181.7 million) burned in the past 30 days. In second and third place were token burns from Ethereum transactions and factivity on decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI), numbering 35,696 ETH ($98.6 million) and 24,223 ETH ($66.9 million), respectively.
• However, Ethereum is still an inflationary blockchain network; the current issuance of 5.4 million ETH per year surpasses 3.5 million ETH burned. The supply of ETH will peak only after the removal of its proof-of-work mechanism via its transition to proof-of-stake, or PoS.

MicroStrategy buys the dip by purchasing 660 Bitcoin for $25M

• Major Bitcoin (BTC) investor ​​MicroStrategy has announced another major BTC purchase during a market dip to collect a total of 125,051 BTC as of Monday.
• According to an official form with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed on Tuesday, ​​MicroStrategy purchased 660 BTC between December 30, 2021, and January 31, 2022, for “approximately $25 million” in cash.
• The average BTC price of the purchase amounted to $37,865 per BTC, including fees and expenses, the report notes. As of Jan. 31, MicroStrategy held about $3.78 billion worth of BTC at the average purchase price of approximately $30,200 per BTC, inclusive of fees and expenses.

Bitcoin whales buy at $38K as BTC supply per whale hits 10-year high

• Identifying clusters of whale bids, Whalemap uncovered what appears to be renewed market confidence among those with some of the largest BTC balances — between 100 BTC and 10,000 BTC.
• “Recent prices triggered whales to accumulate Bitcoin,” researchers summarized on Twitter Tuesday.
• According to cluster data, whales now own 330,000 BTC bought at spot prices between $36,000 and $38,000.
• Overall, the portion of the BTC supply per whale wallet is now at its highest in a decade, data from on-chain analytics firm Glassnode uploaded to Twitter by popular account Priced in Bitcoin shows.
• This comes despite the vastly larger Bitcoin user base compared to the largest cryptocurrency’s early days. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s stablecoin project Diem officially shuts down

• Meta, formerly branded as Facebook, has officially announced the closure of its digital currency project Diem after years of major efforts to move forward with the initiative.
• Announcing the news on Monday, Diem CEO Stuart Levey confirmed that Meta is selling intellectual property and other assets related to the Diem stablecoin project to its Silvergate Capital Corporation.
• The Diem Association and its subsidiaries will start winding down operations “over the coming weeks,” Levey said. The association, however, is still confident that Diem’s ideals will continue to thrive even after Meta officially terminated its involvement in the project, the CEO noted:
• “We remain confident in the potential for a stablecoin operating on a blockchain designed like Diem’s to deliver the benefits that motivated the Diem Association from the beginning. With today’s sale, Silvergate will be well-placed to take this vision forward.”

Fidelity: Bitcoin is a ‘superior form of money’

• Fidelity, the multinational brokerage giant, released a paper on Bitcoin (BTC) titled Bitcoin First. The financial services provider calls for BTC to be treated separately from the rest of the digital assets.
• The paper argued that BTC is fundamentally different from the hundreds of other digital assets trading in the market and no other digital asset is likely to overtake the top cryptocurrency “as a monetary good.”
• Fidelity’s paper called Bitcoin a superior form of money rather than just a tech. It is the most ”secure, decentralized form of asset and any “improvement” will necessarily face tradeoffs.” The paper read:
• “Bitcoin clearly possesses a lot of good qualities of money, combining the scarcity and durability of gold with the ease of use, storage and transportability of fiat.”