Parsec Weekly August 19th
Canto/Dogechain, Sudoswap, Arbitrum, Nft Updates
DeFi Overview
-Will Sheehan
The merge trade has (at least temporarily) slowed down, with ETH and the major merge names (LDO, OP) cooling off. A TDD has been chosen however and an estimate puts it at September 15th, all eyes will certainly return to merge related trades around then.
In the meantime a few more nascent narratives/trends have popped up/continued to percolate
Canto / DogeChain rotations
Canto, a “Layer-1 blockchain built to deliver on the promise of DeFi” soft launched last weekend, its drawn some capital as it ramps up but has been fairly muted from an absolute $ perspective. Canto is launching we protocol inlined solidly AMMs and compound style lending. Velodrome has proven that solidly can maybe work on longer timescales when pool creation is gated, but the long term incentives of LPs forgoing swap fees for rewards are still unknown.
Dogechain also entered the public consciousness. Unabashedly retail low cap focused, dogechain dominated the timeline for all of 36hrs. Dogechain is certainly the first of many branded L1s/L2s (shibachain been rumored for a while), theres nothing particularly interesting with dogechain other than the narrative fizzling almost instantly. The appetite for another BSC season is clearly still quite theoretical, retail flows remain well below where they were. L1 rotations like canto would have garnered billions in late 2021, and maybe it still will when incentives launch. But the data and stickiness of the narratives is saying otherwise.
Sudoswap
Sudoswap is basically the first protocol I’ve seen that has bridged DeFi and NFTs. With market share creeping over 10% on select days, sudoswap has been a shining light in a very weak nft market. Sudo has been lifted by lps very quickly adding liquidity to new trendy collections (e.g. Webaverse/8liens), with a few LPs very actively market making (like incoom.eth).
Projects have also started launching directly on sudoswap by listing a sell wall of pre-reveals as a mint mechanism. This is a backdoor growth hack for sudoswap volumes since mints usually don’t occur on an exchange. Sudoswap All of this is pre token launch and pre aggregator support. $XMON has been the best performing on-chain asset since the bottom and it is only a promise of a convert.
Arbitrum Rotation / “Real Yield”
Optimism season was not destined to be (at this stage) and lot of the L2 bid relapsed on CEXes, meanwhile the Arbitrum eco saw some strength, with a combination of new project launches and continued use/activity around existing projects
GMX OI ticking up to >3x lows from June
Dopex atlantic straddles selling out (repeatedly)
Umami USDC vault
Mycelium launch
Umami is on the leading edge of a new narrative called “real yield", which is just a cash yield. RedactedV2 also recently launched with a cornerstone being an ETH denominated yield. Projects eschewing native token yield is certainly a positive in my book.
In general the arbitrum ecosystem remains one of the stronger non-ETH L1 ecosystems, with a nice mix of established projects and continued new deployments. With nitro release later this month and an odyssey revamp, lots of future catalysts at play in a market lacking staying narratives.
NFT Market Overview
-kezfourtwez
gm jpeg enjoyers, another week of our bags trending to 0. A few new mints churned through some impressive volume since our last post but none managed to hold anywhere close to their ATH. Bluechips down bad also, I might have to stop calling them bluechips soon.
8liens take the cake this week at #1 in weekly vol with 4.3k ETH in volume accompanied by a meteoric rise and fall, sitting at 0.5x the floor on the week
Webaverse sitting at #9 on the weekly vol charts with 1.07k ETH traded and 0.52x on the week
Rare Apepe YC, a project from a few weeks ago still steaming along at #5 with just under 2k ETH volume and 0.55x floor on the week
Seasoned meme veteran Cryptodickbutts recently rose from 2 to 3.2 ETH not long after their one year anniversary
Webaverse - The talk of the town this week has been Webaverse and the auction for the genesis passes. In a nutshell Webaverse is a browser-based open metaverse powered by AI and VR which takes pride in its open-source values;
Accessible to all
Without walled gardens
Transparent
User privacy and ownership
Fun
Diverse and for all
Community owned and managed
By staying browser based, completely open-source and focusing on collaborative building using generalised file formats like Three.js, WebGL, and WebXR they promote inclusivity, accessibility and creativity. Anyone can build upon Webaverse and are heavily encouraged too. ‘Upstreet’ is their first endeavour, a collaborative MMO utilising the Webaverse engine. Anyone can participate in Upstreet but the genesis pass will grant holders a parcel of land and “will include its own lore and artifacts, along with future airdrops from the Webaverse team”.
The auction was prefaced with an allowlisted mint in which holders of 21 separate NFT communities chosen by Webaverse could enter a premint raffle for the chance to win 1 mint spot for 0.2 ETH, 12k were minted. During that time the genesis pass swiftly 4x’d up to 0.8 ETH on secondary with sales as high as 0.95 in the flurry of fomo that ensued. After the auction for the remaining 8k the price of a pass has settled back down to 0.45 ETH
Webaverse looks to be first collection that Sudoswap listings have eclipsed that of Opensea, just an observation from my end but their seems to be a lot of interest coming from CT as opposed to just NFTwitter, and CT seems to like the efficiency of Sudo so far.
All in all, a super interesting project which I personally like and in my opinion it seems like the first real crypto-native competitor to Yuga’s ‘The Otherside’. Only downside I can see so far is unlike the Otherside, Webaverse doesn’t utilise improbableIO’s scaling solution. I jumped into the game for a quick look around but my M1 Macbook pro couldn’t really handle it.
Digidaigaku - Free stealth mint, Digidaigaku gained serious momentum after minting out in 15 minutes last Wednesday. In the next eight hours the floor price rose from 0 to over 2 ETH. Quite a mysterious one so far, the art is objectively good (waifu vibes) and it comes from Gabriel Leydon who in 2013 founded mobile games that eclipsed the likes of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans in gross revenue. Prior to Digidaigaku’s release, Leydon explained in a tweet that he and his partner recently started a web3 gaming studio ‘Limit Break’ which raised funds from a long list of VC’s including FTX, Coinbase and Paradigm. At the end of the tweet Leydon hinted at surprise which we can only assume was this drop, though it remains to be seen if it has anything to do with Limit Break. The website for the collection and gaming studio are both void of information apart from branding and the words “Stealth Mode ON” featured on Limit Break’s twitter and LinkedIn profile.
The top 5 holders collectively own 18% of the supply though none have sold a single NFT yet and were actually accumulating on the way up. The post-reveal dump saw floor price retrace back down to a bottom around 0.7 ETH but has since risen back to 1.1 ETH with a total of 1.3k ETH traded
8liens - Another new project, 8liens has seen a huge amount of volume since it minted out on Wednesday, and now sits atop the weekly volume chart with 4.3k ETH in volume. It was a free mint, 0 royalties and a cc0 license, a traders wet dream. The team kept 10% of the supply as payment but none have been sold yet. The project has some high profile names involved including Bharat Krymo
and Phon Ro as advisors and was founded by crypto OG’s, Debussy and Scalynelson. OG crypto artists too, Gremplin, the creator of Nyan cat, Bryan Brinkman and Hackatao are among some of the artistic cameo’s involved in creating the projects 1/1’s.
8liens ran hot out of the gate up to a healthy floor around 0.2, some consolidation before some large sweeps absolutely sent it all the way up to the 0.8 range. The post reveal retrace took it back down to 0.2 but it’s been slowly trending down and the floor now sits at 0.09 ETH. From my experience and knowledge circles it felt like a bit of a mystery when it first started making its way around discord and twitter, fomo really kicked in after more information about the founders, background and ethos of the project made it’s way onto twitter during the whitelist mint. An impressive launch, and even more impressive volume to follow, though even a project of this calibre yielding this much volume can’t seem to hold its floor in the current market conditions.
Bye for now, make sure to use Parsec to stay on top of the market and we’ll see you next week
good
amazing