SPIRIT Blockchain – Weekly Wrap-up

Here’s what happened in blockchain and crypto this week.

The Merge is a monumental event for the blockchain space, with many market participants referring to it as the most important moment in crypto history. Technically, coordinating the Merge was an impressive feat since it involved a large-scale software upgrade across a global set of participants – all while maintaining 100% uptime. After rigorous battle testing that included three major testnet “merges” and 13 “shadow forks”, the mainnet Merge executed seamlessly. At 6:43AM UTC (2:43AM Eastern Time) on Thursday, a visualization of pandas and the words “PoS Activated” hit the screen, showing that the Proof-of-Stake process had successfully been activated. Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted 15 minutes later: “This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem.”

The miner-to-validator transition was almost flawless as validator uptime stood at almost 100% on the consensus layer, suggesting that most validators’ nodes were successfully connected and prepared for the Merge. Since then, network uptime has remained steady and blocks are being produced by validators without any major problems. Prior to the Merge, many leading crypto exchanges suspended deposits and withdrawals of ETH and Ethereum ERC-20 tokens.

Hashrate on Ethereum Classic (ETC), which continues to operate under a Proof-of-Work system jumped immediately after the Merge as some former Ethereum miners directed their GPUs to mining on the Ethereum Classic network. However, ETC revenues will be just a fraction of the former mining rewards, with ETC mining accounting for only about 1/40th of the daily revenue that was previously made on ETH pre-Merge, according to data by Coin Metrics. Meanwhile, the native token of EthereumPoW (ETHW) – a “fork” and continuation of the Proof-of-Work Ethereum blockchain – lost more than 60% today after yesterday’s mainnet launch.

Looking ahead, the long-term goal for Ethereum 2.0 will be to allow millions of users to transact on Ethereum on a regular basis by making cheap and fast transactions without limitations. However, this will not happen over night and there are many approaches to tackle this issue. In the short run, “Layer 2” protocols that sit on top of Ethereum and are based on a technology called “rollups” will help the blockchain to achieve greater scalability. Put simply, Layer 2 protocols allow for cheaper transactions while still receiving the security benefits of the Ethereum base layer.

Another scaling approach is “sharding”, a technique that uses multiple blockchains that will be coordinated by Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain. The first implementation of sharding is expected to launch in 6 to 12 months and will likely lower transaction costs on the network. “Ethereum today can process about 15-20 transactions per second, this Ethereum, including the rollups and sharding, according to the math, could process 100,000 transactions per second,” Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said during a presentation in July.

Market Overview

The global cryptoasset market capitalization dropped below the $1 trillion threshold this week, currently amounting to $990 billion –  down from $1.08 trillion since Friday last week, with bitcoin accounting for 37.6%. Among the Top 30 cryptoassets by market cap, Cosmos (ATOM) outperformed once again, gaining another 14.3% over the week. During the same period, the price of bitcoin (BTC) was flat around $19,458 while the price of ether (ETH) fell by 12.9% to $1,424 after “the Merge”. The total value locked (TVL) in DeFi sits at $53.9 billion – down from $59.4 billion last week – with Ethereum accounting for about 57.5% of TVL.

This Week’s Headlines

• Charles Schwab, Citadel and Fidelityannounce the launch of new digital asset exchange EDX Markets
• CFTC Chair Behnam asks senators for more authority in crypto markets
• SEC has the authority to facilitate “different set of disclosures” for crypto, Chair Gensler says
• South Korean court issues warrant for the arrest of Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon, local newspaper reports
• FTX in the lead to buy Voyager Digital’s assets out of bankruptcy
• Celsius has a new plan to revive the firm, The New York Times reports, presents creditors with a plan to revive business operations
• Chinese crypto miner Poolin issues “IOUs” after freezing withdrawals
• KKR experiments with tokenizing private equity assets on Avalanche, WSJ reports
• S&P-rated DeFi platform Compound Treasurylaunches crypto-backed loans for institutional clients
• Job adds suggest Fidelity is working toward a retail-focused crypto offering
• Binance CEO says the EU’s MiCA regulationwill become a global standard
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art considers buying NFTs with proceeds of $70 million auction, WSJ reports 

Notable Deals and Fundraising

• FTX Ventures to acquire a 30% stake in Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital

• NFT maker Doodles raise $54 million at a valuation of $704 million
• Former Citadel executives raise $50 million to launch crypto market maker Portofino Technologies
• Diamond tokenization startup Diamond Standard raises $30 million
• Ownera, a trading network for tokenized assets, raises $20 million from J.P. Morgan and others
• Crypto data infrastructure platform Goldskyraises $20 million seed round
• Token management platform Magna raises $15 million at a $70 million valuation
• Some of Thailand‘s biggest banks back DeFi platform Forward in a $5 million seed round
• NEAR Web3 wallet Sender raises $4.5 million at a $45 million valuation
• Crypto auditing platform Sherlock raises $4 million in a seed round
• UK venture firm Northzone launches new €1 billion Web3 and fintech fund
• Two Sigma Ventures raises $400 million across two funds
• North Island Ventures launches $125 million investment fund

Manuel Trojovsky, Head of Crypto Investments & Research

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