Avalanche Rush, PFP Continues Rally, ETH Burn Leaderboards

Market Update

In the short term, BTC & ETH markets looked overheated with high funding rates in the last few days – a sign of euphoria & greed. We are expecting some form of pullback or funding reset, so we suggest exercising caution especially when it comes to using excessive leverage. However, L1 tokens such as LUNA, AVAX and SOL appear resilient.

Avalanche Activity & TVL Runs

• Avalanche Foundation’s $180m liquidity mining program announcement brought Aave and Curve into the ecosystem. Opportunistic apes and fork developers attempting to get in early on this news propelled Avalanche DeFi TVL and AVAX token prices.
• While it’s obvious that Avalanche is taking a page out of Polygon’s playbook (ie. incentivize blue-chip DeFi protocols, pump base token, reinvest token into ecosystem), it remains to be seen if Avalanche can emulate Polygon’s success – but the rush of mercenary capital flowing into the ecosystem is obvious.
• Since August 1st, TVL exploded from $163M up to $1.5B, which translates to 823% growth in less than a month.

• Since launching on the 19th of August, BenQi has led the way in terms of TVL growth, which is unsurprising as lending protocols tend to attract more deposits compared to AMMs. Trader Joe, Yield Yak, and Snowball are also benefiting greatly as yield farming season begins on Avalanche.

PFPs May Further Heat Up

• NFTs have been on a boom for the past month since the 100 punk sweep with even more Profile Picture (PFP) projects gaining traction. Visa has very recently publicly bought a CryptoPunk and has it as their profile picture, showing public support for NFTs. This vote of confidence from a major corporation further drove the floor prices of CryptoPunks from ~57.5 ETH to 63.7 ETH on day close.
• In the past month, Pudgy Penguins have undoubtedly gained the most popularity and became one of the most used PFP on Twitter, partially popularized by 0xElm0 – an anon meme peddler on CT. Another notable mention would be, being featured on The New York Times. Pudgy Penguins have grown to a peak of ~4.5 ETH before settling now at ~3 ETH(+2365%) in the past month.
• An up-and-coming PFP project to look out for is 0n1 Force, with its unique hand-drawn features. Logan Paul bought a ‘Bumble-Bee’-like character for 188 ETH just today. Launching just around 10 days ago, its floor price has grown from ~0.5 ETH to ~7.4 ETH (+1374%).

ETH Burn Leaderboard

• Since EIP-1559 went live, OpenSea, Uniswap v2 & Axie Infinity’s bridge contract, Tether and Uniswap v3 were the top 5 smart contracts responsible for burning the most ETH. A staggering 85,000+ ETH has been burned in less than 3 weeks! ?
• OpenSea alone is responsible for ~11,200 ETH burned so far and is leading Uniswap v2 (~6,300 ETH) by a sizeable margin. Most Ethereum gas spikes also happen due to NFT minting or PFP launches. This leaves little doubt that the current NFT / Gaming cultural hype cycle contributes heavily to ETH burns.

Notable Tweets

MicroStrategy purchased an additional 3,907 BTC.

MicroStrategy has purchased an additional 3,907 bitcoins for ~$177 million in cash at an average price of ~$45,294 per #bitcoin. As of 8/23/21 we #hodl ~108,992 bitcoins acquired for ~$2.918 billion at an average price of ~$26,769 per bitcoin. $MSTRhttps://t.co/8jUlJImJbO

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@michael_saylor) August 24, 2021

A thread on leveraged sandwich attacks.

Alright, let’s go

A thread on leveraged (!) sandwiching using flashswaps https://t.co/ens2plRtOQ

— Robert Miller (@bertcmiller) August 24, 2021

Thought-provoking thread on art and collecting.

I decided to make this because I get a lot of questions about my views on 1/1 art versus other categories. This sums up how I feel about the entire space right now: pic.twitter.com/Eldhz0LxKV

— batsoupyum (@batsoupyum) August 21, 2021