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| Breaking down Ethereum’s evolution and its impact on crypto markets March 16, 2022 +2.23% $2,627.74 $315.13B $13.00B (As of March 15, 2022 @ 21:56 UTC. ETH price % change over 24 hours.) Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Hi, I’m Andrew Thurman, CoinDesk’s resident acronyms and portmanteaus reporter. I’ll now be taking over as Valid Points’ newsletterer (with some assistance from Sage Young, a fast-rising intern star).
We hope you enjoy this week’s edition.
Ever seen “The Revenant”? To my memory, the last crypto bear market was a little like that.
Alejandro Iñárritu’s 2015 Best Picture nominee is a bleak, grueling retelling of the legend of Hugh Glass, an enduring 19th century American frontiersman who – after being mauled by a bear – embarks on a gory pursuit of his son’s killer. One highlight amid the various scalpings, hangings and human and animal suffering of all kinds comes when Glass survives a snowstorm by taking refuge in the disemboweled corpse of his horse. In another, he cauterizes a toothy neck wound with gunpowder. It’s a rough watch!
Traders in 2018-19 endured a similar death march. The charts speak for themselves (stunning vistas of troughs and valleys are abundant among the few names that survived at all), but in some ways on-chain activity paints an even more desolate picture.
Weekly active Ethereum addresses fell as low as 165,000 in February 2019. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) effectively didn’t exist until Moloch DAO and MakerDAO resuscitated the concept. OpenSea, now a non-fungible token (NFT) powerhouse transacting in the billions of dollars, sold $475,000 in tokens total for the entire 2018 year. Decentralized finance (DeFi) accounted for under a million dollars.
This time around the bear looks a little different, to say the least. Indeed, there’s even some debate as to whether or not we’re truly in a bear market at all: In traditional finance, bear markets are marked by a 20% downturn. In crypto, grizzled old heads will tell you the carnage hasn’t started until your favorite long-term play is down 90% ... and then another 90% when you try to buy the dip.
By those standards, so far the bear market of 2022 looks more like Winnie the Pooh than a proper predator.
Ethereum continues to fizz with activity, with pockets of development, usage and adoption that remain robust – and one could argue might even be stronger than ever – in spite of anemic price action.
Ultimately, it’s a sign of the maturity of the technology. In 2018 the ecosystem was the asset: The only value Ethereum had was the speculative promise of what it could one day become, and to what degree ether (ETH) reflected that promise.
Today, vast swaths of what’s being built on Ethereum are largely agnostic to ether’s price, and in at least one instance may even be inversely correlated. Far from a horrific trek across a desolate, bloody tundra, this bear market features plenty for Ethereans to be excited about.
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Pulse check
The following is an overview of network activity on the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain over the past week. For more information about the metrics featured in this section, check out our 101 explainer on Eth 2.0 metrics. Disclaimer: All profits made from CoinDesk’s Eth 2.0 staking venture will be donated to a charity of the company’s choosing once transfers are enabled on the network.
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Validated takes Ethereum builder ConsenSys raised $450 million at a $7 billion valuation. WHY IT MATTERS: ConsenSys has been a core driver in the development and usage of the Ethereum ecosystem. For instance, MetaMask, ConsenSys’s flagship Ethereum wallet, has reached over 30 million monthly active users, while Infura, a platform created by ConsenSys that provides API services to connect to Ethereum, has over 430,000 developers. The company is reportedly planning aggressive expansion, though looming litigation from disgruntled shareholders may slow it down.The Ethereum Foundation announced the Kiln Merge testnet, which is “expected to be the last merge testnet created before existing public testnets are upgradeable.” WHY IT MATTERS: The Kiln is set to be a successor to the Kintsugi merge testnet, which allowed Ethereum developers to successfully implement stable and robust protocol specifications for the ecosystem. Now that developers, node operators, infrastructure providers and stakers can test on the Kiln testnet, we are closer than ever to a proof-of-stake Ethereum mainnet.A $200 million raise has valued Immutable, a liquidity and scaling platform for NFT’s built on Ethereum, at $2.5 billion. WHY IT MATTERS: The funds will be used toward global expansion, including boosting Immutable Gaming Studio and merger-and-acquisitions activity. Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of Immutable, said on CoinDesk’s “First Mover” for March 15, 2022, that Immutable plans to bring blockchain gaming to the masses and reinvent the most important Web 2 companies, especially in social media.Goldman Sachs is offering clients access to an ether fund through Galaxy Digital, a technology-driven financial services firm. WHY IT MATTERS: Regulatory documents filed last week with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission show the fund has sold approximately $50 million to clients with a minimum investment amount of $250,000. The bank’s attempt to offer more exposure in ether to their clients demonstrates large institutional demand for digital assets and its ecosystem.
Factoid of the week
Join TaxBit’s Erin Fennimore, Deloitte’s Rob Massey and Invariant's Quincy Enoch to obtain an overview of the Infrastructure Bill’s immediate and far-reaching effects on the crypto space and enterprise institutions.
Open comms Valid Points incorporates information and data about CoinDesk’s own Eth 2.0 validator. All profits made from this staking venture will be donated to a charity of our choosing once transfers are enabled on the network. For a full overview of the project, check out our announcement post.
You can verify the activity of the CoinDesk Eth 2.0 validator in real time through our public validator key, which is: 0xad7fef3b2350d220de3ae360c70d7f488926b6117e5f785a8995487c46d323ddad0f574fdcc50eeefec34ed9d2039ecb.
Search for it on any Eth 2.0 block explorer site!
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