Artisan – #24 Weekly: Mar 20 – 26 | Web3 Narratives

BTC will be worth $1m, 9 future directions of NFTs, Ethereum’s Cancun upgrade, Stacks 2.1, Next wave of game-changing infra, Sui Mainnet in Q2, Uniswap v3 on Avalanche, Blur updates its royalty policy, SEC charges Tron’s Justin Sun, SEC investigating Coinbase……

🤔 Analysis & Thoughts

The next wave of game-changing infra that will unlock new user behaviors and business models (Read more)

• Category-specific auctions that cater to the needs of specialized categories of applications
• Event-driven automation infrastructure that lets users automate actions under given conditions
• Some projects that encrypt databases, confidential messaging and attestations, and access controls
• Hybrid custody infrastructure that could offer both better flexibility and security
• New arbitration mechanisms that help designing dispute infrastructure in an environment that explicitly forgoes rule of law

Banks are insolvent: BTC will be worth $1m due to hyperinflation (Read more)

• The problem is that there isn’t enough in the banks on a mark-to-market basis to cover withdrawals
• So anyone who bet on long-term Treasuries got killed in 2021. Anyone who bets on short-term Treasuries is going to get killed in 2023. The absolute worse place you can be is to have large amounts of assets locked up in three month treasury bills

ABCDE: 9 future directions of NFTs (Read more)

• In this article, the author analyzes the latest EIPs and proposes 9 future directions of NFTs. 1) Permission enabled NFTs. We can essentially fragment the utility of an NFT into specific pieces, and let different players take the most advantage of each of them
• 2) Relation enabled NFTs. There is an urgent need to enable bundling multiple NFTs to be owned by one. 3) NFT as vesting utilities. It can expand into a wealth of applications to bring traditional financing on-chain. 4）NFT as utility tokens
• 5) NFT as identity tokens. Soul-bound tokens and naming services have been popular vessels of identity representation on-chain. 6) NFT for richer content. This kind of NFT holds richer content to be used on any intermediary platforms and multi-verses
• 7) NFT for physical assets. 8) NFTfi with advanced metrics. With the permissions, relations, vesting, utility values in NFTs, NFT valuation and exchange need to be much more sophisticated to embody the market needs to differentiate the values in each portion of the NFT 9) NFT as an EOA

Exploratory analysis of public blockchains and their ecosystem valuation models (Read more)

• The article introduces a PE ratio for blockchains, where PE = Market capitalisation of a blockchain / Market capitalisation of Ethereum
• In the early stages of a new blockchain, ecosystem growth rates tend to be high, resulting in a relatively higher PE ratio. This, however, tends to decline as its market capitalisation gradually stabilises and the blockchain’s ecosystem enters a more mature development period
• One observed trend involves the PE ratio of an optimal non-Ethereum smart contract platform falling between 6-20%. At present, the ratios of APT, MATIC, OP, and SOL are 6.2%, 5.2%, 5.2% and 3.8% respectively
• Another trend introduces a ratio between the FDV of a blockchain’s leading DEX and the FDV of the blockchain itself, with this ratio falling within the range of 1-3%. For reference, the current ratio of UNI’s FDV to ETH’s FDV is 3%, and that of CAKE to BNB being 4.4%, and JOE to AVAX being 3%

How did Blur turn the tables on the largest NFT marketplace (Read more)

• Like any two-sided market, Blur faces a chicken-and-egg problem: without a supply of NFTs by creators, there’s no demand by buyers, and vice versa
• Their first drop merely rewarded NFT trading activity in general. The two subsequent drops were aimed specifically at incentivizing the buy and sell sides, while also rewarding ‘loyalty’ to Blur over other marketplaces
• The mechanism is unique because it’s not rewarding easily-gameable actions like transactions, but instead actual trading liquidity. That’s what Blur was really incentivizing in addition to loyalty, and on that front it absolutely worked
• For the retention of users, things are much better for airdropped users compared with non-airdropped users. They are not merely trying to rack up some points and leave, they’re actually sticking around

Ethereum’s Cancun upgrade will offer potential investment opportunities (Read more)

• The increased scalability and lowered fees from the introduction of EIP-4844 in the Cancun upgrade stands to benefit the various L2 ecosystems. Optimistic-based L2s will become more diversified, zk-based L2s will become more usable with the enhanced data availability, and others that are associated with high costs of operations might see rapid growth
• New developments surrounding decentralised storage will surface to solve the short storage periods of blobs and historical data. At the same time, data availability layers for L2s and L1 storage expansion networks such as EthStorage will also gain traction
• The market for rollups-as-a-service (RaaS) is also likely to expand with the implementation of EIP-4844. Currently, optimistic-based RaaS seem to have a greater advantage, allowing for the rapid establishment of an ecosystem. However, the custom design nature of zk-based RaaS might prove to be more competitive in the long-run. Homogenisation of present RaaS is severe, but we can expand further development in customisability in the future

🌍 Layer 1/2s

Stacks 2.1 activated, including decentralized mining and better bridges (Read more)

• Stacks 2.1 introduces several improvements to Stacking that will eliminate inefficient or confusing aspects of Stacking, the PoX reward & security mechanism

Sui Mainnet will launch in Q2 of this year (Read more)

• The official said that Sui Mainnet will launch in Q2. There are no official plans for an airdrop at this time

Render Network eyes potential Solana migration (Read more)

• Render has proposed building its new burn-and-mint equilibrium (BME) model on Solana and is awaiting community review
• The BME model, which the community approved last month, requires users to burn a predetermined amount of RNDR, the network’s native token in exchange for non-fungible work credits distributed through node operators

Succinct introduces Teleopathy, the first decentralized and secure zkSNARK interoperability protocol for Ethereum (Read more)

• Telepathy enables interoperability without compromise. Built with zkSNARKs, Telepathy allows developers to trustlessly communicate from Ethereum to any other chain with the security of Ethereum’s light client protocol, without resorting to less secure multisigs or centralized actors

💰 DeFi / CeFi / NFTFi

Uniswap v3 to be deployed on Avalanche (Read more)

• The governance proposal was passed with over 48M votes in favour of it and will be executed in the coming 5 weeks

Thala Labs partners with LayerZero (Read more)

• The partnership will integrate both Move Dollar (MOD) and the Thala governance token (THL) as omnichain fungible tokens (OFTs) to enable seamless multi-chain connectivity
• As OFTs, the tokens will be natively multi-chain without needing to be wrapped when moved across chains, avoiding the potential security risks involved

Pixelcraft Studios, the creators of Aavegotchi, raises $30M in multiyear token sale (Read more)

• The multiyear token sale featured zero official participation from venture capital firms or investors, presenting a turning point in the decentralised funding space
• 25% of the funding will go towards Pixelcraft Studios while the protocol’s DAO treasury will receive the remaining 75%

Synthetix raises $20M in strategic investment (Read more)

• The investment was made by DWF Labs, who purchased $15M worth of the Synthetix’s native token SNX with a further purchase of $5M to follow
• Synthetix’s perpetual futures product will be integrated into DWF Labs’ trading business with the aim of boosting the protocol’s trading volume

IoTeX blockchain’s DAO votes to add ETH liquid staking derivatives (Read more)

• More than 140M IOTX was staked in favor of the proposal, which suggests natively adding support to represent staking buckets as NFTs so that liquid staking protocols can manage their stakes through smart contracts
• This implementation would serve to increase the IOTX staking ratio and enhance network security by expanding the number of validators

Endgame: A simple overview of MakerDAO’s governance revamp (Read more)

• Endgame aims to make Maker Governance more efficient, transparent, and inclusive by establishing a resilient and reliable governance equilibrium. To complement this increased resilience, Endgame also catalyzes scalable and parallelizable product innovation and growth strategies

🖼 NFT / 🎮 Gaming / 🎭 Metaverse

Blur updates its royalty policy, and recommends creators to block competitors (Read more)

• Blur walks through the options that creators have and how they can enable full royalty enforcement on both OpenSea and Blur.
• Blur enforces full royalties on collections that block trading on OpenSea.

Bitcoin NFT marketplace Gamma presents Bitcoin ordinals marketplace (Read more)

• Gamma is committed to providing the digital asset layer for Bitcoin, built on a foundation of creator tools, marketplace, and API infrastructure, offering a user experience comparable to well-established platforms like OpenSea and MetaMask

Magic Eden releases Bitcoin NFT marketplace (Read more)

• The NFT marketplace is integrating support for Bitcoin wallets Hiro and Xverse to help users trade Ordinal NFTs
• To kick off its launch, Magic Eden is teaming up with popular Ordinal collections Taproot Wizards, Inscribed Pepes and Bitcoin Bandits to help onboard its users to Bitcoin-based NFTs

🏢 Institutional Adoption / DAO / RWA

Microsoft reportedly testing Edge browser Web3 wallet integration (Read more)

• Microsoft is reportedly working on integrating a crypto and nonfungible token (NFT) friendly Web3 wallet into its Edge web browser
• In a March 17 Twitter thread, software documenter — and occasional info leaker — Albacore shared a series of supposed Edge user interface (UI) screenshots showing the early stages of the firm’s new Web3 wallet

Sony to introduce NFTs into PlayStation games (Read more)

• Sony published the patent ‘NFT Framework For Transferring And Using Digital Assets Between Game Platforms’ to interpret NFTs into PlayStation games
• The patent supports the sales of NFTs via its own marketplace powered by a digital ledger that publicly displays prices

🧑🏻‍⚖️ Regulations

SEC charges Tron’s Justin Sun and celebrities including Lindsay Lohan and Jake Paul (Read more)

• Justin Sun, and three of his companies including digital asset network company Tron Foundation Limited, were charged for the unregistered offer and sale of two “crypto asset securities,” while eight celebrities were also accused of violating securities laws in touting related tokens
• Justin Sun was also accused of violating federal securities laws after he allegedly conducted a scheme to artificially inflate the trading volume of TRX in the secondary market

SEC investigating Coinbase for its Earn product, wallet service and exchange activity (Read more)

• Exchange giant Coinbase was issued a Wells Notice by the SEC, notifying the company of investigations into several offerings and continuing a string of regulatory warning shots fired at crypto firms in the U.S.

Circle sidesteps SWIFT after bank collapses, turns to Gibraltar’s Xapo Bank (Read more)

• Xapo Bank will offer one-to-one dollar conversion of USDC in collaboration with Circle, and will support USDC transfers so members can bypass the SWIFT payment system

🌟 Follow us for more crypto updates, insights, web3 narratives, and upcoming educational contents and lessons:

• Discord: https://discord.gg/z2jcbpm89n
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/artisan_xyz
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artisan-xyz/M
• Medium: https://medium.com/@artisan_xyz
• Website: http://www.artisancollective.xyz/

The Artisan Narrative is an educational resource intended for informational purposes only. It covers all things Web3 and may discuss assets that the Artisan Collective, ArtisanDAO or writers have financial exposure to. Views are on ours own. None of Artisan Collective, ArtisanDAO, its registered entity or any of its affiliated personnel are licensed to provide any type of financial advice, and nothing on newsletter, website and social media should be construed as financial advice. Artisan Collective, ArtisanDAO, writers might also receives compensation from its sponsor; sponsorship messages do not constitute financial advice or endorsement.