Visa Goes Punk: The Delphi Debrief

In an unprecedented act of corporate NFT involvement, this week Visa bought a CryptoPunk for $150k. Visa’s head of crypto commented on the deal saying, “Our excitement about this project is less about any individual Punk, and more about the CryptoPunk collection as a whole and what it represents — the beginnings of a new chapter for digital commerce.”

Coincidentally, the sale was facilitated by our colleague Gmoney, who runs our INFNFT fund:

When pressed for a comment, Gmoney said, “I think it’s great for the space and validates that NFTs are here to stay. They’re not the only ones that will be doing things like this.” (We recently published this deep-dive on NFT mania that’s worth a second look.)

For Delphi members, we dropped a bunch of can’t-miss reports including coverage on Convex Finance, Anchor‘s impressive TVL spike, as well as BTC’s macro outlook. Plus, there were several thought-provoking Dailies exploring the current crypto market structure. Lastly, ICYMI, we started a series of coverage on protocol DAO governance. Plenty of alpha to dig through over the weekend.

Nick
@NpappaG

Here were the highlights from this week’s research:

[Proposals] Perpetual Protocol Private Markets – Part I

Over the past few months we’ve been working closely with Perpetual Protocol to design a framework for Private Markets for the protocol. For the context of this piece, we’ll refer to Private Markets as perpetuals markets that can be deployed on the Perpetual Protocol in a permissionless way. These markets would coexist and complement the current markets deployed on Perpetual Protocol (which we’ll refer to as Public Markets).
Delphi Free subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

[Delphi Daily] Tether Grows, Whales Dump, and ETH Hash Rate at ATHs

The market is continuing on yesterday’s consolidation, with BTC and ETH moving lower. L1s like SOL, LUNA, and FTM were affected the most given the L1 run-up the past week. AVAX and BNB, however, remained resilient during this pullback. From the NFT universe, CryptoPunks do not seem to be fazed as floor prices pushed up for another leg, going from ~63 ETH to ~78ETH (+24%) today.
Delphi Daily subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

[DeFi] Anchor Runs A Surplus After Adding bETH

LUNA hit its all time high price today ($34.25), simultaneously lifting Terra’s TVL upward along with it. Terra is now the 3rd largest L1 according to this metric, behind Ethereum & BSC. Within the Terra ecosystem, Anchor is the largest application by TVL, with current levels at ~$2.7b.
Delphi Institutional subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

[Delphi Daily] Avalanche Rush, PFP Continues Rally, ETH Burn Leaderboards

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.
Delphi Daily subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

[DAO Governance] DAO Governance Digest #1

Both Aave and MakerDAO reduced their exposure to USDT in the past week. MakerDAO dropped the debt ceiling for USDT LP tokens to zero, while Aave cut USDT rewards for their new liquidity mining program. DAO members cited Tether risk as being a key concern.
Delphi Institutional subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

[Delphi Daily] L1s Take Off, Can ETH Catch Up?

The market bounced hard into the Asia session, only to chop around a short-term top during the European session and pull back a few hours later. AVAX, ADA, BNB, and RUNE were a few of the biggest winners amongst the top 100 crypto assets today. Visa’s CryptoPunk purchase is sending the price floor soaring.
Delphi Daily subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

[Yield Strats] Yield Strats #24 – Avalanche Rush

This week’s yield strat focuses on yield farming in the Avalanche ecosystem. Avalanche Foundation has announced a $180M DeFi incentive program to bring blue-chip protocols (starting with Aave & Curve) to Avalanche. With phase 1 having lucrative liquidity mining rewards for users over a 3 month period, there are plenty of opportunities for humble farmers. Let’s dig in!
Delphi Insights and Institutional subscribers & clients can see the full brief here.

Delphi Daily Of The Week

[Delphi Daily] A Brief Look at Market Structure

The markets are red again, with BTC and ETH both nuking into the Asia session and consolidating near the lows for the rest of the day. After a splendid run, AVAX is down 18% over the last 2 days, and Avalanche ecosystem coins took a hit too. But the degen hit SAFEMOON and FTX sweetheart SOL are unfazed by the downturn.BTC has gotten beaten up across market sessions today, currently down 3.2% for the day. ETH is down by 4.2%, and the chart looks primed for a short-term pullback. Overall, the market looks much weaker than it has over the past week, but this isn’t a sign of a structural trend reversal.

Get The Full Daily for Free

Featured Podcast

The Delphi Podcast Host and GP of Delphi Ventures Tom Shaughnessy sits down with Jake Brukhman, Founder & CEO at CoinFund, a blockchain-focused investment firm based in Brooklyn, New York. The two spend over two hours discussing all things NFTs, including NFT liquidity, judging NFT communities, CryptoPunks, fractionalization, scarcity, DAOs, pricing NFT assets, the future of NFTs, and much more!

As mentioned, we will continue to iterate on the design of our Delphi Debrief based on your feedback—so please let us know which section you enjoy the most and what else you’d like to see!

Visa Goes Punk: The Delphi Debrief

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