As the dust settles from the chaos of last week, BTC & ETH remain range bound, while most altcoins continue their downtrend. Outside of the markets, there have been many interesting developments that have taken place. While general interest in Web3 has decreased, Coinbase & Robinhood announce Web3 (things like Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and NFTs) wallets of their own to lay the foundation and infrastructure for mass adoption. In other news, Terra releases a proposal in an attempt to save LUNA, A16z has announced a new fund, and a famous personality has made his way back into crypto.
Coinbase & Robinhood Wallets
Coinbase is among the most popular centralized exchanges in the crypto industry. It is used by millions of people and has been a very effective tool for giving the average person access to cryptocurrencies. This week, they announced that they will be launching their very own self-custody Web 3 wallet similar to the likes of Metamask and Rainbow. Given that the bulk of Coinbase’s customer base is retail participants who aren’t very active within Web3, they have announced a new easy-to-use, seedphrase-less wallet with a smooth user interface to make the Web3 experience simple and enjoyable for their customers. https://blog.coinbase.com/access-web3-with-the-coinbase-app-2b804c0aee8a#:~:text=Introducing%20web3%20right%20in%20the,Coinbase%20helps%20you%20keep%20secured.
Robinhood is the popular stocks and options trading platform that saw parabolic growth over the last few years. Their primary selling point of fee-free trading on an easy-to-use platform is what onboarded millions of young retail participants into the stock market. Will Robinhood lead the next wave of adoption into Web3? They have offered crypto trading services since 2018 but this week they also announced their own Web3 wallet. The aim is to allow their customer base to get access to the services that are offered in the Web3 world. Similar to Coinbase, the user interface and user experience is going to be very smooth and simple in an attempt to abstract away the complexities of Web3 and from what it sounds like, may also be creating a seed phrase-less wallet. This is a major step forward in terms of bringing mass adoption to Web3. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/147333/robinhood-launches-defi-wallet-to-rival-metamask?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
Terra proposal
Last week we covered the shocking and historic crash of LUNA & UST. A collapse of that magnitude inevitably left many people hurt. VC funds, developers, investors, and community members were all hit hard. In an attempt to resurrect the Terra ecosystem, the founder Do Kwon tweeted about a proposal that was made by the Terra team.
Proposal 1623 was presented to the holders of governance tokens. The general premise is to fork the Terra chain and not include the stablecoin UST. The only token will be the native token LUNA and Terra will become a regular layer 1 blockchain similar to Avalanche, Solana, and Ethereum. The old chain will be called Terra Classic (LUNC) and the new chain would be called Terra with the native token LUNA. Holders and stakers of LUNA will be airdropped a portion of the new LUNA and network security will be incentivized by staking LUNA at 7% https://agora.terra.money/t/terra-ecosystem-revival-plan-2-amended/18498
A day or 2 later, they released an updated version of the proposal. The main changes were to increase liquidity at the beginning of the chain, or the genesis block. Essentially, the holders of UST & LUNA will be airdropped more tokens than what was previously suggested at genesis. Additional changes were based on increasing liquidity received by the pre-attack holders of LUNA & UST and reducing tokens received by post-attack holders of LUNA & UST. This is the final attempt from the team at Terra to salvage something. Time will tell us whether this attempt will be successful or not.
DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) Dropping
TVL stands for Total Value locked and is a metric that shows the sum of all assets that have been deposited into DeFi. There is often a debate within the community as to how useful a metric this is but it is a good metric to gauge general interest and sentiment in DeFi. All through this year TVL has been dropping and it continues to fall till today. It has decreased 54.5% since the start of the year decreasing from $241.6 billion to $110 billion at the time of writing. This shows that interest has been fading from DeFi for a couple months and general sentiment around DeFi is negative. The LUNA & UST crash followed by regulation threats only made this worse. Will the launch of Coinbase and Robinhood wallets later this year spark a change?
A16z Announces New Fund
A16z is the crypto venture giant. It currently has $28.2B in assets under management and has been invested in every layer of crypto since the inception of Ethereum. This week, they announced a $600M fund that will be focused on the gaming side of crypto. Given how nascent the gaming space within crypto is, the primary focus will be on investing in founders & a team. They will put resources behind backing the brightest individuals who they believe have the potential to take the gaming space forward. After that they will look to make sector specific bets.
Popular Personalities
The crypto industry has had many controversial personalities. Many have been involved with government agencies, and some of them have also ended up going to prison. This week, 2 famous personalities had their stories settled.
Arthur Hayes is the founder of the centralized trading exchange BitMex. He is regarded as a controversial figure within the crypto industry but a very smart individual. He was found to be running his exchange BitMex in violation of the US Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) while profiting hundreds of millions of dollars. He pleaded guilty to these charges previously but this week it came out that he was given no jail time. He will be facing 6 months of home detention with 2 years of probation. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/148053/bitmex-arthur-hayes-doj-sentence?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
On the other hand, we have Martin Shkreli. He was famous for hiking the prices of a medicine that only he had the license for by 5,455% and was sent to prison in 2017 after being found guilt on two counts of securities fraud and one count of attempted securities fraud. He was released from prison this week. Within a few hours of being released he instantly found himself on crypto twitter interacting with the community. He hosted a twitter space that lasted a couple of hours where he answered everyone’s questions. He then gave his thoughts on crypto and which projects he likes and said that he will likely be working on something in this space over the coming months. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this. https://twitter.com/Enrique5060782?s=20&t=fsCdWqd-Vy8xvShYu6bV0w
Tune in next week for a fresh recap on all the action happening in the crypto-verse.