Cronos Expands, LooksRare Stalls, $MAGIC Growth, Intro to Celestia

Chart of The Day: As Markets Move Sideways, Cronos Grows

• Cronos Chain is the EVM sidechain running in parallel to the Crypto.org Chain. Users and developers enjoy the EVM compatibility of their go-to wallets and solidity code base when using Cronos Chain.
• Since December, Total Value Locked (TVL) on Cronos has grown from $1B to near $2.5B today, a whopping 2.5x despite uncertain market conditions.
• The growth is mainly led by MM Finance (AMM) and MM Optimizer (Yield Aggregator), which grew their TVLs by 46% and 56% respectively over the past 7 days.
• Cronos’s growth has been interesting to observe as the main bulk of their TVL comes from their Crypto.com users. This means there are more new entrants that have their first DeFi experience on the Cronos chain.
• Additionally, there is still yet to be a bridge to allow capital to move from Ethereum and EVM-based L1s over to Cronos chain. Currently, there are only a few options to bridge funds over to Cronos Chain.
  1. Bridging ATOM directly from Cosmos Hub to Cronos using Keplr.
  2. Using Osmosis to swap for CRO, withdraw CRO to Crypto.org Chain in Keplr and bridge to Cronos.
  3. Use either the Crypto.com App or the Crypto.com Exchange as a bridge to move assets like USDC or ETH over.
• Once a bridge that links Ethereum and other EVM-based L1s to Cronos opens up, we might see another wave of capital porting over to invest in native projects or take advantage of new yield farm opportunities.

$MAGIC In The Air, $LOOKS Struggles, & Upcoming Mints

[Excerpt from our weekly NFT Insights]

• As expected, trading volumes on LooksRare dropped steeply after the halving of trading rewards from 9 Feb. This is because majority of volume on LooksRare is still due to wash trading for rewards. The number of daily active users tell a more genuine story about platform adoption: we can see that LooksRare is still far from capturing meaningful marketshare from OpenSea.
• $LOOKS token price has also fallen >60% since the beginning of February. This is in part due to yield farmers selling and moving on because the APR is no longer as high, but also related to recent controversy over the token incentive model where the team was able to collect staking rewards for their unvested tokens. Over 23,000 ETH (~$73M) was cashed out by the team and sent to Tornado Cash. This token incentive model has been transparently stated in their documents, although it has led to some obvious questions as to whether it is equitable for team members to be earning so much in this way.

• Marketplace: Volumes on the Treasure marketplace fell sharply between late January and early February, but have since picked up following the Bridgeworld game launch. On 15 Feb, it was announced that Trove marketplace will be delayed to Q2 due to changes in org structure. Trove is a generalised marketplace on Arbitrum that extends beyond Treasure NFTs (for more info, see the whitepaper here).
• Bridgeworld: In addition to Atlas Mine, Questing (6 Feb) and Crafting (12 Feb) mechanics have now been activated. The base entry point to play the game is a Legion NFT. Auxiliary Legions are at a floor price of 1,400 $MAGIC (~$7,600) while Genesis Legions are at a floor of 15,500 $MAGIC. Notably, Genesis Legions have appreciated considerably over the last two weeks in $MAGIC terms; when denominated in USD, their rise is even more impressive, considering MAGIC’s price has run up ~40% over the same period.

Pay Attention To Celestia

[Excerpt from a recent Delphi Pro report]

A Brief Introduction to Celestia

• “Celestia’s vision is a marriage of Cosmos’ sovereign interoperable zones and a rollup-centric Ethereum with shared security.”
• A monolithic chain where everyone executes all transactions is inherently not scalable. Indeed, this is why almost every major ecosystem is building for a multi-chain world.

• As we laid out in our previous report, “L1 vs L2: Entering The Endgame”, ecosystems differ in how they envision a multi-chain world. The two approaches that attract the most activity today are those of Ethereum and Cosmos.
• In a nutshell, Ethereum envisions a Rollup centric future. Rollups tend to be expensive and less flexible than L1s but can share security with each other. In contrast, Cosmos is an ecosystem of interoperable sovereign L1s known as Zones. While Zones can be cheaper and more flexible than Rollups, they can’t share full security with each other. Celestia combines the best of these two worlds.
• Celestia was born in search of an answer to the following question; “what’s the least a blockchain can do to offer shared security for other blockchains (i.e. rollups)?”
• For more details, see our latest deep dive on Celestia here.

Notable Tweets

Canada Might Experience a Bank Run

Incredible. Justin Trudeau’s threat to freeze bank accounts has led to a bank run!

Good. Stop leaving your livelihood in the hands of corrupt governments.

Drain the banks. Buy #bitcoin

— @Layah Heilpern 🎙 (@LayahHeilpern) February 17, 2022

ETH Tips Now on Twitter

Breaking: Twitter just added Ethereum addresses to tipping.

But no @ensdomains support.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLyRpA0VcAUCfMI?format=jpg&name=900×900

— Ethereum Fear and Greed Index (@EthereumFear) February 16, 2022

THORChain Showcases Cross-Chain Swaps

You were told you were going to get <any chain, any asset> to <any chain, any asset>

And that’s exactly what you will get.

THORChads always deliver. Pick your side anon.

$RUNE

— THORChain #LUNAISCOMING (@THORChain) February 17, 2022