Fiery Incentive Programs and a Silver Lining for BTC

Market Update

ETH broke out to trade above $3,400 for the first time since May at the New York open, while yesterday’s outperformers in the FTM ecosystem retraced earlier gains. The market in general is looking strong today — which is a welcome development, as always.

Cross Chain Competition Heats Up

• Since launching “Avalanche Rush”, its DeFi incentive program on the 18th of August, Avalanche has enjoyed a gush of liquidity to its EVM chain. However, deposits on the network have slowed down in recent days, with the last 2 days resulting in net outflows from the Avalanche Bridge. This was likely impacted by incentive programs on competing Layer 1s.
• Fantom and Celo, on the contrary, saw an uptick in total value locked for their DeFi projects after announcing incentive programs for their respective chains on Monday.

Activity on Fantom Climbs

• Transactions on Fantom’s EVM chain more than tripled yesterday post-announcement while Avalanche transactions count appears to be dwindling.
• Interestingly, the number of unique addresses has not increased quite as much, implying that most of these transactions were executed by existing users on the network. One possible reason for this is the unpleasant UX of the Fantom bridge during periods of high demand and network congestion.

Alt-Chain’s DeFi Tokens Slump After an Impressive Rally

• A number of FTM DeFi tokens (GRIM, SPIRIT, SCREAM) reached new highs yesterday on the back of the liquidity mining news, but the tokens have seen a sharp reversal since. FTM incentives aren’t as straightforward as most imagine. The incentives only go live in a few months and are accompanies by token lockups. Additionally, unlike Avalanche, whose aim is to attract users via liquidity mining incentives, Fantom’s program is geared towards builders and project founders.
• Avalanche DeFi tokens took a substantial hit as opportunistic participants playing the hype sold their tokens in search of greener pastures.

Bitcoin Price Stalls as HODLers Accumulate

• Price action for majors have been going through a bout of consolidation over the last few weeks. BTC continues to trade in its new price range between $46K and $50K. The on-chain data suggests a significant increase in HODLer net positions recently.
• A positive holder net position change reveals that long-term investors are net buyers at these levels. Generally, this is a fairly bullish signal for the medium term.

Notable Tweets

Black Friday came early for Aurory’s NFT launch.

I guess it was Black Friday, 1 SOL instead of 5
Post-mortem about the contract in the way ?

If someone want to update the meme I would appreciate

— Aurory (@AuroryProject) August 31, 2021

Punks are going to Hollywood!

MASSIVE.

“The agency will represent the crypto-art projects from Larva Labs for film, TV, video games, and publishing projects, becoming some of the first crypto-native IP to seek mainstream content deals.” https://t.co/IlOqGRw6dQ

— Farokh (@farokh) August 31, 2021

Arbitrum gears up for mainnet.

We are excited to have the Balancer Protocol live on Arbitrum on Day 1!

Stay tuned for the removal of the whitelist from our mainnet! https://t.co/vZ1SofVx8s

— Arbitrum is hiring (@arbitrum) August 31, 2021