DeFi Market Overview
-Will Sheehan
Low Cap Rebirth
When the Uniswap-v2/v3 router pops off it means the casino is back in town. This time lead by coins based on Vitaliks use of hypothetical tickers in tweets. With the base fee ticking to over 50 gwei for the first time since july (even higher than during merge). Coming on the back of a XEN, a pulsechain fork that incentivized sybil transactions for ponzi free rolls. Willingness to spend is up, regardless of how unsavory applications.
Notably, MEV yields per block are only marginally higher than during the lower gas regime which provides an early hint that MEV is less correlated to low cap volume than perhaps we intuitively thought. More data is needed here but it implies to me that we do not see MEV yields tick up notably until volume on majors rebounds, backrunning and CEX/DEX reign supreme until further notice.
frxETH
Frax launched frxETH with 1600+ ETH deposited thus far. With cbETH and now frxETH, lido is facing capital efficient competition (rETH’s capital inefficiency has been very limiting). cbETH brings in its custody moat and infrastructure, with the “USDC of ETH” and now frxETH is compete quite directly with stETH as a DeFi friendly staking deriv. Frax can and will play the incentives game, a game they know better than most, but the liquidity of stETH remains formidable, sitting with almost 600k of ETH liquidity in curve (not to mention wstETH in uni and balancer.) What’s unclear to me thus far is how frxETH actually differentiates itself other than simply being a part of frax’s vertical stack (lending, swaps, incentives)
NFT Market Overview
-kezfourtwez
NFT liquidity has felt quite dry again this week, another 70k-ish volume candle on the weekly chart. The most interesting thing happening is Blur’s new marketplace/aggregator and how they are jumping in the royalty ring by incentivising users to pay them with an airdrop.
Despite normie confidence in cryptographic products being at an all time low, more and more IRL <> NFT integrations are happening. Collaborations between web2 and web3 companies and IRL uses of NFT’s are at an all time high. This all happened just this week;
The first ever house was sold as an NFT for 175k USDC
The prestigious Balon D'Or football awards ceremony handed out ledgers with immortalised NFT versions of their awards to winners
Azuki implemented physical backed tokens (PBT’s) using their cryptographic ‘bean chip’, tying NFT’s to physical goods and allowing the decentralised transfer of a physical good
Perrier-Jouët partner with luxury good backed NFT marketplace Blockbar to release extremely limited edition NFT champagne
INTERPOL (yes that’s right the international criminal police organisation), has released their own metaverse
Performance highlights:
Nyolings is this weeks winner and managed to pull a 20x off the lows, from the post mint dip of 0.01 all the way to a top of 0.24 ETH
Otherdeeds broke a key HTF support at 1.5, the floor is currently free falling with sales as low as 1 ETH
Renga is also having a rough time is down 30% on the week to 1.3 ETH
Azuki saw 4.4k ETH in volume this week and a 12% rise in floor price off the back of their PBT announcement
Blur - has been in a private beta for a couple of months now but the new NFT marketplace/aggregator for pro traders was made public yesterday. Spearheaded by @pacmanblur who has a background is building centralised exchanges, the platform is angled towards high volume users. As a Parsec enjoyer I dig it, but I can see how your average nftrader may find the UI a little harsh and prefer the comforts and familiarity of Gem or Opensea. Blur on the other hand offers a lightweight and efficient interface with features like;
- Mass listing with optionality for highest trait floor
- Optional royalties
- Listings natively on Blur + other marketplaces simultaneously
- Preset gas
- Listings depth
- Volume across multiple timeframes
The UI/UX places a big focus on profitability, all throughout the site are visual cues to help you figure out your PnL down to a granular level as well as subtle indications of holder distribution.
Along with the launch the team confirmed a two-part airdrop, with the token going live 3 months from now in January 2023 (feel old yet?). The criteria for wave 1 is total volume across all marketplaces in the last 6 months. For now, receivers get care packages that range from uncommon to legendary in rarity, the more rare yielding more tokens come actual drop time.
Part two of the airdrop will be much larger in weight and is based on loyalty to the platform as well as adhering to royalties. In their ‘we are live’ announcement, Blue notes that there are already many 0% royalty options and they want to incentivise overall royalty revenue in the ecosystem
Nyolings - are this weeks bear market success story. Sneak peeks and marketing of the cute, claymation pfp’s originally began back in April so they’ve managed to foster a decent sized community and following. They minted out just over a week ago to a combination of an allowlist and a public dutch auction. Starting at 0.03 ETH (bear market tings), it made its way down to 0.01 before finding enough buy pressure to sell out.
Nyolings lean hard into the cute meta, and I’ve been seeing them win the hearts of many Doodles holders on the timeline. 3D, claymation, varying yet uniform enough traits, clean and reasonably distinct style, humanised enough to be a very relatable pfp - they tick all the boxes for success. As usual, in hindsight this was a very obvious winner.
Another bullish continuation post-reveal, I love to see it. Some things have changed for the better in the bear market. I wrote a little about this a few weeks ago with Kitaro and Renga, but I think the market just doesn’t have the kind of free flowing capital to inflate prices to way past where they should be pre-reveal
Since hitting the secondary market, they have facilitated over 20k trades with 1.8k ETH in volume. Floor price currently sits at 0.18 ETH and the chart is looking super healthy, they continue to make new highs. In the NFT world, building for 6 months pre release is a long time and a lot of hard work, so congratulations to the team and welcome to the world of cute pfp’s!
Thanks for reading and bye for now, stay on top of the markets with Parsec and we’ll see you next week.
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