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Bitfolio Academy Coaching Community Newsletter

May 1, 2022

May Focus!

Crypto growth attracts Blackrock & Fidelity

by David Anderson on May 1, 2022

Blockchain technology is creating a financial and technological revolution. Adoption is growing rapidly, and investors are eager to invest in crypto assets. Last week, due to customer demand, Blackrock with $10 trillion in assets under management (AUM) and Fidelity with $11 trillion in AUM have created “crypto industry” ETFs. 

Blackrock introduced its new ETF product “iShares Blockchain and Tech ETF (IBLC)” along with a research report, entitled, “The Great Acceleration: Three Permanent Transformations.” In the report, it says that the preference of millennials and emerging market consumers for DeFi and virtual wallets is surging. And, it says that the markets have not priced in the impact of blockchain adopters. This fund will allow investors to get exposure to crypto by owning stock in companies that invest in crypto or that support the blockchain industry.

Fidelity created two new “crypto industry” ETFs, namely, “The Crypto Industry and Digital Payments” ETF as well as a “Metaverse” ETF. Neither fund invests directly in crypto; rather, 80% of the investment is in companies that are focused on the crypto industry.

In addition to the announcement of two new ETF products, Fidelity announced that it will be allowing their 401k accounts to invest in Bitcoin directly. For the first time, Fidelity will allow their 401K investors to buy BTC, up to 20% of their portfolio. MicroStrategy will be the first company to participate in the new program, offering this option to their employees.

As Blackrock and Fidelity respond to customer demand and create more and more crypto products for investors, more and more assets will flow into the crypto industry. The crypto industry is poised to greatly expand over the coming months and years. Only time will tell how big the crypto industry will become and how disruptive blockchain technology will be.

ON CHAIN ANALYSIS
May 1, 2022

Summary: The biggest winner is Solana with a 240% increase in daily active addresses from April 15. However, the solana blockchain failed to reach consensus and had to be restarted after being down for 7 hours. So, daily transactions were down 61%. The biggest loser is Cronos, down 37% in daily transactions from April 15. 

Bitcoin

Average Daily Transactions (last 30 days): 261,409 (Down 1.5% from April 15) 

Average Active Addresses (last 30 days): 663,695 (Down 1.4% from April 15)

Ethereum

Transactions Daily: 1,211,671 (Up 8.2% from April 15)

Unique Addresses: 194,858,512 (Up 0.7% from April 15)

Terra

Transactions Daily: 646,918 (Down 1.4% from April 15)

Addresses: 3,949,716 (Up 4.2% from April 15)

Binance Smart Chain

Transactions Daily: 4,692,673 (Up 5.8% from April 15)

Unique Addresses: 156,330,109 (Up 2.7% from April 15)

Avalanche C-chain

Transactions Daily: 797,156 (Down 9.7% from April 15)

Total addresses: 2,918,192 (Up 5.0% from April 15) 

Daily active addresses: 79,426 (Down 12.0% from April 15)

Cumulative transactions: 157,619,830 (Up 9.2% from April 15)

Fantom

Transactions Daily: 819,058 (Up 5.9% from April 15)

Unique Addresses: 2,953,445 (Up 5.5% from April 15)

Solana

Transactions Daily: 8,314,758 (includes consensus transactions, 80%, Down 61.5%)

Daily active addresses: 4,680,667 (Up 240% from April 15)

Cumulative transactions: 71,729,008,395 (Up 4.2% from April 15)

Tron

Transactions Daily: 3,536,978 (Down 12.7% from April 15)

Daily Active Addresses: 1,289,814 (Down 16.7% from April 15)

Polygon

Transactions Daily: 3,685,332 (Up 13.3% from April 15)

Unique Addresses: 142,006,205 (Up 0.8% from April 15)

Cronos

Transactions Daily: 237,361 (Down 37.2% from April 15)

Unique Addresses: 723,255 (Up 8.3% from April 15)

Near

Transactions Daily: 919,092 (Up 48.1% from April 15)

Unique Addresses: 6,654,618 (Up 16.8% from April 15)

DEFI TOP CHAINS
May 1, 2022

Summary: The biggest winner is Terra at $28.38 billion in TVL (up 8.0%) and 14.3% of TVL (up 14.9%). The biggest loser is Fantom at $4.02 billion, down 31.0% from April 15. Waves also continued to decline, down 29.6% from April 15.

1. Ethereum TVL: $110.07 billion (Down 5.7% from April 15) and 55.60% of total (Up 2.0% from April 15)
2. Terra TVL: $28.38 billion (Up 8.0% from April 15) and 14.34% of total (Up 14.9% from April 15)
3. BSC TVL: $12.16 billion (Down 6.8% from April 15) and 6.14% of total (Down 1.1% from April 15)
4. Avalanche TVL: $9.43 billion (Down 9.2% from April 15) and 4.76% of total (Down 3.6% from April 15)
5. Solana TVL: $6.11 billion (Down 2.8% from April 15) and 3.09% of total (Down 3.1% from April 15)
6. Fantom TVL: $4.02 billion (Down 31.0% from April 15) and 2.03% of total (Down 26.7% from April 15)
7. Polygon TVL: $3.61 billion (Down 11.5% from April 15) and 1.82% of total (Up 6.1% from April 15).
8. Cronos TVL: $3.02 billion (Down 19.0% from April 15) and 1.53% of total (Down 13.5% from April 15).
9. Waves TVL: $1.54 billion (Down 29.6% from April 15) and 0.78% of total (Down 25.0% from April 15).

NFT MARKETPLACES
May 1, 2022

In the last 30 days, OpenSea ($393.9 million) and LooksRare ($79.7 million) have had a combined total revenue of $473.6 million (Up 15.9% from April 15).

1. OpenSea: 32,810 daily users (Down 10% from April 15), $418.21 million daily volume 
2. Magic Eden: the daily users and volume was up, but the Solana restart on April 30 caused the numbers to drop.
3. LooksRare: 3,530 daily users (Up 348% from April 15), $44.68 million daily volume

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS

On April 7, Bitcoin (BTC) turned bearish, and BTC has remained in a bearish trend. For now, BTC seems to be finding support at around $38,000. Bitcoin has held up better than altcoins.

The TOTAL crypto market turned bearish on April 9. Since my last newsletter on April 15, TOTAL has lost $1 billion. The bears are in control as investors derisk their portfolios in the face of the headwinds from Federal Reserve tightening and from the expected 5 basis point interest rate hike in the first week of May. TOTAL is currently finding support at $1.7 trillion.

TOP STORIES

Metaplex Candy Machine takes Solana down for 7 hours

On May 1, botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program took the Solana network down for seven hours. Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus. Read more.

Dragonfly Capital Raises $650M as Billions Flow Into Web3

On April 27, Dragonfly Capital announced it has raised $650 million for its third venture fund. Dragonfly has invested in NEAR Protocol, Avalanche and Dune Analytics. Read more.

Meta’s Reality Labs loses $2.9b in Q1 2022

“Reality Labs” is formerly known as Facebook’s Oculus division. Zuckerberg remains optimistic about future profitability from the metaverse, while posting huge losses. The market did not respond well. Read more.

Decentral Bank Launches $USN: a NEAR-native Stablecoin

USN will be backed by a Reserve Fund that contains NEAR and USDT. USN is similar to UST, backed by LUNA. USN’s peg to the US Dollar is secured through on-chain arbitrage and a self-balancing Reserve Fund. The NEAR used to mint USN goes to the Reserve Fund, rather than being burned (as in the UST-LUNA model). Read more.

Bitcoin is now legal tender in the Central African Republic

The Central African Republic (CAR) has adopted Bitcoin as an official currency. The CAR is one of the world’s poorest and least-developed countries. Read more.

Goldman Sachs Explores the Tokenization of Real Assets

On April 27, Goldman Sachs said it is examining non-fungible tokens (NFT), particularly the "tokenization of real assets," as the investment bank dives deeper into the crypto space. "We are actually exploring NFTs in the context of financial instruments…” Read more.

The NFT sector is projected to move around $800 billion over next 2 years

In August 2021, the total trading volume of NFTs rose to over $5 billion, sparking NFT summer. According to a report by CoinGecko, the NFT market is now expected to move more than $800 billion in the coming two years. Read more.

Goldman Sachs offers first Bitcoin-backed loan

The banking giant joins crypto-friendly banks such as Silvergate Capital Corp. that are offering Bitcoin-backed U.S.-dollar loans. Read more.

BlackRock and Fidelity create Blockchain ETFs

Blackrock with $10 trillion in assets under management and Fidelity with $11 trillion, both introduce Blockchain and crypto industry EFTs. Read more.

PCE index jumped 6.6% in March

Energy goods and services are up 141%, annualized. Read more.

The US economy shrank by 1.4% in the first quarter of this year

One economist says that interest rate hikes have consequences. Deutsche Bank reports that recession risks are high. Read more.

Tron announced USDD stablecoin

On Twitter, “USDD will be launched on May 5.” See Tweet. USDD will mimic UST in terms of architecture, burning TRX. Read more.

The Brazilian Senate Approved a Bill to Regulate the Crypto Sector

The bill establishes a cryptocurrency legal framework in Brazil. Also, in the bill, green crypto mining would be tax free. Read more.

Hedge Funds Stampede into Terra DeFi

The Fireblocks CEO says that over 250 million dollars was deployed in the first 72 hours by hedge funds and wealthy investors. There's been a half a billion dollars flow into Terra from our platform in the last week. Read more.

Fidelity will allow 401Ks to buy BTC

Fidelity, with 11 trillion dollars in assets under management, offers BTC to customers. For the first time, Fidelity will allow 401Ks to buy BTC, up to 20% of their portfolio. Read more.

Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44b

The deal brings arguably the internet’s most influential platform under the control of one of the world’s richest people. Twitter's board of directors unanimously agreed to Musk's offer. Read more.

Coinbase launched the beta version of its NFT marketplace

Built on the Ethereum blockchain, the beta version of the marketplace features digital works that you can browse from artists such as Cool Cats, Doodles and Azuki. Coinbase is currently selecting beta testers from its waitlist and will not charge transaction fees for purchases. Read more.

STEPN continues to make big gains

The StepN app is making big gains in Apple’s AppStore, and the STEPN token went from $2.30 two weeks ago to $3.30, today. Read more.

Moonbird NFTs launch with a bang

Moonbird NFTs, features 10,000 pixelated images of owls, launched on Ethereum. The NFTs initially sold for 2.5 ether (ETH) each, but quickly started being traded for tens of thousands of dollars. A few days after launch, the cheapest Moonbirds sold for around 20 ETH. On April 23, Moonbird #2642 sold for 350 ETH ($1 million) on OpenSea. Read more.

Polygon launches Supernets

On April 22, Polygon launched Supernets with a $100m fund. Supernets are dedicated blockchains that are run for a specific application, project or use case. Supernets can be secured by Polygon’s MATIC. Read more.

Bitcoin’s correlation with the Nasdaq 100 index is still very high 

In the last couple of years, Bitcoin has shown a tendency to move in the same direction as the Nasdaq 100 index. The 40-day correlation between the Nasdaq 100 index and BTC continues to be high. Read more.

The Fear and Greed Index: 22 (Extreme Fear) 

As the price of Bitcoin drops below $38,000 the Fear and Greed index remains unchanged from two weeks ago: 22 (Extreme Fear) on May 1. Read more. The fear and greed index for the stock market is at 34 (Fear). Read more.

On April 4th Neutrino USD losts its Peg.

USDN lost its near-1:1 peg to USD during the first week of April, dropping to as low as $0.65 before recovering to around $0.88. The developers of the Waves blockchain, the native token of which (WAVES) backs USDN, stand accused of price manipulation. WAVES dropped in price from $61 on March 31 to $25 on April 9. Currently, WAVES is trading at $13. Read more. Read much more.

Waves TVL spiked to $4.2 billion; Now, $1.5 billion 

Waves blockchain saw massive growth in Defi during the last week in March, but since the high, Waves has lost $1.7 billion in TVL. Vires.finance is still experiencing a liquidity squeeze. Read more. 

Can Ethereum’s Merge Kick-start a DeFi Summer?

Ethereum’s merge (or the shift to proof of stake protocol) could happen before the end of the summer. After Ethereum’s merge, some analysts predict staking yields in the range of 10% to 15%. Read more.