Recent Research

📊 Battle for Supremacy: Blur vs. OpenSea Pro – 6/14

• OpenSea aims to cater to a broad user base, while Blur strategically targeted professional whale traders as the key to challenging OpenSea’s dominance.
• OpenSea responded to Blur’s incursion by launching OpenSea Pro, a marketplace and aggregator that caters specifically to professional traders.
• Blur’s bid pool order book has significantly enhanced the efficiency of the NFT market by narrowing bid-ask spreads, thus enabling smoother trading across collections.
• Blend achieved a remarkable feat by capturing 77% of the total NFT borrowing volume market share and facilitating over 32k loans totaling $466M in volume within 3 weeks.
• It is crucial to acknowledge that Blur’s metrics, particularly trading volume, might be inflated due to ongoing BLUR incentives.

📊 Bull v Bear – FOMC: Pump the Brakes! – 6/14

• Join us for a riveting episode of Bull vs. Bear immediately following Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s FOMC speech. In Market Matters, we dissect the Fed’s decision to hit pause on rate hikes and what the future might hold. We’ll delve into The Great Decoupling, examining the diverging paths of crypto and equities. Is crypto still the canary in the coal mine?

📊 Monthly Chartbook – AI Narrative Takes the Wheel – 6/12

• It’s clear that Silicon Valley, similar to crypto, is going through a grueling winter. But in another corner of the market, spring has sprung and the age of AI has bloomed.
• GPUs are particularly well-suited for AI due to their ability to process large amounts of data in parallel, a feature that CPUs lack.
• Solana was the first blockchain to demonstrate the power of parallelization. At a high level, this is possible due to Solana’s architecture, which requires smart contracts to describe what state (data) will be read or written while executing in the runtime.
• On Solana, when one part of the state is heating up — e.g., during a popular NFT mint — that local fee market becomes more expensive without affecting any of the other parts of the state.

📊 A Wild BART Appears – 6/8

• BART patterns are most frequently characterized by a sharp surge in the price of an asset followed by a period of consolidation before a final, rapid decline in price.
• Many conclude that BART patterns are a sign of manipulation in crypto markets, namely due to the relative illiquidity of crypto markets and what that means for large, sophisticated market participants.
• However, it is important to note that BART patterns can (and are) be caused by natural market forces, like degenerate speculators using Forex levels of leverage in a 100 vol asset class…

Relevant Reminder

📌 Solo, Liquid, or Centralized: A Guide to Staking ETH – 6/6

• In this report, we delve into the diverse options available for staking ETH, the latest developments in ETH staking, and strategies that could amplify the compounding effects of your earnings.
• There’s currently a 45-day waiting period for new validators to enter the network, a factor that represents a significant opportunity cost for solo stakers.
• When comparing purely on yields, solo staking options are the clear winners.
• Liquid staking protocols show strong growth, with them holding the majority share of ETH staking inflows over the past few months.
• CEXs have seen a significant decrease in their market share, falling from 52.8% at the start of 2022 to just 30.6% in May 2023. 
• In contrast, liquid staking and staking pools have been progressively growing their market shares, currently at 51.5% and 17.8%, respectively.