SWIFT to BTC, Alethea AI's New Drop, & TracerDAO V2

Chart of The Day: SWIFT Bans on Russia Banks

Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) is a messaging system that uses standardized, secure codes that allow financial institutions to send and receive information, such as instructions for transferring money across borders.
Over the weekend, the White House released a joint statement that signaled its intent to remove Russian banks from SWIFT. This disconnects Russian Banks from the international financial system and prevents them from operating globally. Since then, the EU said they are excluding seven Russian banks from SWIFT, excluding those that handle energy payments.
Cutting off the Russian Ruble from the world’s financial system led to a sell-off, causing it to drop 20% over the weekend. As Russians try to preserve value, BTC has emerged as one of the options. This caused BTC to trade at an eye-popping 40% premium.
The supply of active BTC—as measured by movement in the past <24H—has soared to around 565k BTC. This is the highest level seen in over a year. In fact, only 2 events have seen higher activity: Black Thursday in March 2020 and in May 2020.
The supply of BTC held by smaller addresses (0.001 – 10 BTC) saw a steep uptick, which could be a result of capital flight from the Ruble to BTC.
For more, Delphi Pro members can see our latest Office Hours call focusing on the macro situation.

Alethea AI, Gem Overtakes Genie, The Idols Drop

[Excerpt from our Mar. 2 NFT Insights]

The fierce fight between Gem and Genie to be the leading NFT marketplace aggregator continues. Since we last covered this in our NFT Insights three weeks ago, Gem has overtaken Genie in terms of volumes and users despite Genie being first-to-market.
Gem has implemented a number of new features in February that makes it very intuitive to use, including a particularly well-regarded feature that introduces rarity rankings directly into the marketplace listings. It’s still early days, though, and users can be fickle as they migrate towards the product that best serves their needs. However, we do believe aggregators will continue to iterate quickly and improve the overall purchase experience for current and future NFT participants.

Weekly Highlight – Alethea AI’s State of the Ark & The Idols NFT drop

Alethea AI conducted its “State of the Ark” address on Mar. 1, providing a number of key updates and plans for the future. For the uninitiated, Alethea AI is a project that essentially brings interactive NFTs (iNFTs) to life (we covered the team’s first AI NFT drop late last year).
Below are some key points from the project’s address, available here for anyone interested:
- Epoch 1 begins on Mar. 1, 2022. This is the first of many ‘Epochs’ (or seasons) with an intention to prioritize the growth of the network. In each Epoch, the parameters (e.g., staking rewards) will be tweaked in order to balance supply and demand within the Alethea ecosystem.
- A new Alethea NFT collection, Arkiv, will be dropping on Mar. 7. There will be 10,000 NFTs available in a ‘mystery box’ format. Each box could receive one of 11 possible assets that can be used with your iNFT:
  - 5 types of voices (English voice, emotive voices like angry, flirtatious, rap, multilingual)
  - Job cards that enable the iNFT to be employed by Alethea protocol and earn rewards
  - Pre-loaded personas that can be added to your iNFT to give them personalities (like a memory cartridge)
  - 2 types of Art abilities (abstract art, figurative art)
  - Game NFT: iNFTs can play text-based games
  - Mystery Item (to be revealed)
Staking rewards for Epoch 1. Owners of iNFT personality pods can stake their pods and earn rewards:
- Level 1: 1500 credits
- Level 2: Abstract AI Art
- Level 3: Voices
- Level 4: Gen 1 Pods, Rap Voice, Game NFT, Job NFT
- Note: Only Gen-1 pods will continue to receive rewards.
There will be an iNFT launchpad to bring new NFT collections to life, beyond the 10 supported NFT collections currently (details on the process will be disclosed at a later date). iNFT Demo Day will take place on Mar. 31, with the fusion process between personality pod and NFTs enabled ~2 weeks before. Interestingly, one of the judges is the Head of Innovation at Spotify, Mauhan M Zonoozy.
For more, Delphi members can read our latest NFT Insights.

Tracer Brings Perpetual Pools to Arbitrum

[Excerpt from our Delphi Pro report]

Tracer enables anyone to deploy permissionless derivative contracts on Arbitrum. There is currently $13.9M of TVL in Tracer contracts, down from a peak of $50M.
The original concept for the creation of Bitcoin was to detach society from a currency reliant on the trust of governments and banks. Despite this, a great deal of crypto transactions still occur using stablecoins pegged to the US dollar. Recognizing this as an area of improvement for DeFi, Tracer has identified the need for a new breed of stablecoin.
The DAO recently released a paper on their approach to a “Purchasing Power stablecoin” and how Tracer’s Perpetual Pools can facilitate this. A true decentralized stablecoin should allow DeFi protocols to price contracts based on an asset parties can agree on, and which remains stable over the long term.
The mechanics of this proposal leverages the Tracer factory with a GDP oracle coupled with an NGDP futures market to determine NGDP stablecoin price. The NGDP stablecoin will be minted in a Maker-style dynamic where over collateralized stablecoin loans can be made. Needless to say, the successful adoption of such a stablecoin would place Tracer on stage within the $181 Billion stablecoin market and could disrupt current dynamics.
There are a few obvious drawbacks to this design, the most prominent of which is a lack of fungibility. Stablecoins are the go-to transfer asset in crypto because 1 USDT is always 1 USDT. But if users use NGDP stablecoins tied to different rates of NGDP, you no longer have a fully fungible medium of exchange.
After 5 months of market testing V1 Perpetual pools, Tracer recently announced the launch of V2 – and with it, a series of improvements. The most notable change is the release of permissionless markets, meaning anyone can now deploy a custom perpetual pool market with no limit to leverage. Users can choose their own oracle and pick their own settlement token.
Tracer also announced its own index product, whereby a custom index can be deployed by wrapping a series of oracle data feeds into a single token. Indices can provide holders exposure to anything from real-world assets like stocks and commodities to crypto-native assets like CryptoPunks. The platform currently takes a 1% annual fee with their V1 pools, which is significantly lower than most leverage products available on the market today.
For more, Delphi Pro members can read the full post here.

Notable Tweets

All-in-One Resource about EVMOS

Evmos – The next-gen EVM Hub

I present the Evmos Resource Cannon:

• What’s Evmos
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The one-stop thread of info for Evmos

— AP(@alexdphan) March 3, 2022

60Mil of AVAX Unlocks at Mar. 4, 8am (UTC+8)

According to avascaninfo and avax devdata, the AVAX public sale of Option A2 (60million in total) will usher in the last 15% unlock at 8:00 on March 4（UTC+8）, with an unlocked amount of 9m AVAX. The public offering price of Option A2 is $0.5, which is 162x the current return.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) March 3, 2022

Arbitrum AnyTrust Chains

Today we’re announcing AnyTrust chains, an Arbitrum mode for ultra low-cost transactions with strong security guarantees. 🔵

AnyTrust chains will operate alongside Arbitrum One.

— Arbitrum (@arbitrum) March 2, 2022