Weekly Crypto Digest: AI-related crypto tokens surge following Nvidia’s earning announcement.
2024.2.19–2024.2.25
Dear Reader,
Welcome to Gryphsis Academy’s weekly Crypto Digest. We bring you pivotal market trends, insights into emerging protocols, and fresh industry updates, all designed to enhance your crypto and Web3 expertise.
Enjoy!
Follow us on Twitter and Medium
for more in-depth research and insights
Market and Sector Snapshot:
Layer 2 Overview:
Last week, Layer 2 both showed positive growth, with Starknet and zkSync Era seeing the most significant growth of 156.34% and 15.42%. Like KTX. Finance, DefiEdge, Teller, Interport Finance, and zkLend are protocols that exhibit noteworthy TVL growth.
LSD Sector Overview:
In the LSD space, Ethereum deposits rose by 0.65%, while total withdrawals decreased by 1.92%. In terms of market share, all blue-chip LSDs rose, with swETH and stETH seeing the most significant growth, at 25% and 9.42% respectively.
RWA Sector Overview:
Last week, the market capitalization of the world’s real assets increased by 12.07%, and the 24-hour trading volume increased by 24.16%. RWA tokenized treasury rose 0.23% and tokenized US Treasury value rose 0.91%. Notable growth tokens include $MBD, $MZERO and $ONDO, with coins like $CPOOL, $CANTO and $DETF experiencing larger losses.
Main Topics
Macro Overview:
- US Stock V.S. Crypto
Big Story:
- AI-related crypto tokens surge following Nvidia’s earning announcement.
Protocol Spotlight:
- Bluefin
VC Funding Highlight:
- Flare (35M)
- OX.FUN (4M)
- Superfluid (5.1M)
Alpha Threads:
- @DeRonin_ on $STRK
- @TheDeFISaint on Near Protocol
- @malviya9 on zkML
- @francescoweb3 on Frax Finance
- @cyrilXBT on AI
Macro Overview
At the stock market level, the SPX and NASDAQ rose by 1.67% and 1.42%, respectively. In the coming week, watch for major events such as new home sales, core durable goods orders, ICB consumer confidence, RBNZ interest rate decision and corporate profits.
Story of the Week
AI-Related Crypto Tokens Surge Post Nvidia’s Excess Earnings Announcement
Semiconductor giant Nvidia (NVDA) reported fourth-quarter earnings that exceeded already high expectations, boosting the broader stock market as well as tokens associated with artificial intelligence (AI).
On Wednesday, Nvidia announced earnings of $5.16 per share for the fourth quarter, surpassing the average analyst estimate of $4.59 from FactSet data. The chipmaker also reported revenue of $21.1 billion, above Wall Street’s expectation of $20.4 billion.
Following Nvidia’s earnings announcement, prices of AI tokens soared. SingularityNet (AGIX) jumped over 20%, Fetch.AI (FET) rose more than 10%, and Render (RNDR) increased by 8%. According to CoinGecko data, the overall market cap of AI tokens has surpassed $16.5 billion.
In contrast, the CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a benchmark for the largest and most liquid cryptocurrencies, fell by 2.7%.
“Accelerated computing and generative AI have reached a tipping point. Demand is surging globally across companies, industries, and countries,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
Nvidia also forecasted revenue of $24 billion for the first quarter, exceeding analysts’ expectations of $22.2 billion. The company’s stock price has risen over 200% in the past year, with a market value at one point nearing $1.7 trillion, surpassing tech giants like Amazon and Google in value, as its chips have driven the pace of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. This rally was so strong that Goldman Sachs even dubbed it “the most important stock on earth.”
In after-hours trading on Wednesday, the chipmaker’s share price rose by more than 7%, while S&P 500 futures increased by 0.5%, and Bitcoin fell by 1.2%.
Weekly Protocol Pick
Welcome to our “Weekly Protocol Pick” — where we spotlight a protocol that’s making waves in the crypto space. This week, we’ve picked Bluefin, a decentralized perpetual contract exchange based on order book model.
Formerly known as Firefly Exchange, Bluefin is now a perpetual exchange exclusive to the Sui blockchain. Bluefin utilizes an order book model to provide all users with a quality experience featuring low latency and free order placement, akin to what centralized exchanges (CEX) offer in the DeFi space.
In 2023, the official team rebuilt the codebase and completed the release of Bluefin v2. Constructed on Sui, Bluefin v2 delivers traders with enhanced performance, reduced costs, and a more Web2-like user experience. Bluefin v2 introduced:
- Optimistic trade confirmations + on-chain finality: Sui supports parallel execution as it doesn’t require full sorting of all transactions, only relative sorting for causally related ones.
- Wallet-less trading experience: Users can log in with social accounts such as Google and Apple.
- Spot trading using Sui’s on-chain order book.
- A new margin engine with cross-margining capabilities.
- High TPS: Achieved a peak throughput of 5400 TPS on the mainnet, with peak throughputs ranging from 10,871 TPS to 297,000 TPS in a series of tests.
To incentivize user participation in the V2 version, officials launched the Initial Trade&Earn Program, allowing participants to enjoy a distribution of 6% of the total $BLUE supply. The program ended on March 30, 2024, and plans for a long-term incentive program were to follow. Users began trading after depositing USDC.e, with all first-time product users receiving 0.2 $SUI as GAS support for transactions such as deposits/withdrawals, opening/closing positions, and leverage adjustments.
Users could also earn additional rewards by participating in the referral program, providing mutual recommendations. It served as an extra reward distribution of $BLUE rewards for trading and earning. Rewards were distributed after a one-week waiting period following the end of each 14-day Epoch.
At the end of each epoch, all referred users received a 10% Boost reward on top of the rewards accumulated through trading and earning programs. In addition, referrers also received a 10% Boost reward from the trading and earning rewards of the users they referred.
Our Insights
Over the past year, Bluefin’s total trading volume was $5.9B, with a monthly peak of $3.2B and a daily high of $401.4M. The current TVL is 15.29M, with annual trading fees at 19.18M. On the Sui network, it currently ranks first in the perpetual track, with its only competitor being ABEx Finance. The track has significant potential, and Bluefin has already established itself at the top.
While specific details of its economic model are not yet available, the launched Initial Trade&Earn is noteworthy, with each Epoch lasting 14 days and each Epoch’s rewards totaling 1.79M $BLUE + 119K $SUI in the incentive pool.
After each Epoch, there is a three-day cooling-off period, after which users can immediately claim 50% of the rewards. The remaining is locked in the protocol’s Vault, and if users wish to claim the full reward, they can gradually unlock it over the next two Epochs. Unclaimed rewards will be sent to the protocol treasury after this period.
The event will end in a month, and it is speculated that Bluefin’s token will also be released shortly thereafter. With Sui’s momentum rapidly advancing and joining the ranks of the top public blockchains, Bluefin, as a leading perpetual exchange, is likely to become one of the most popular trading platforms in the Sui ecosystem.
Thanks to its innovative trading mechanism and user-friendly reward program, Bluefin is expected to attract a large number of traders and liquidity providers. As its user base and trading volume grow, the demand for its token’s application scenarios is likely to expand, making its future moves worthy of further attention.
VC Highlights: Top Funded Crypto Protocols This Week
Welcome to our weekly Investment Spotlight, where we shine a light on the most significant venture capital moves in the crypto space. Each week, we’ll focus on protocols that have attracted the most funding.
Flare
Flare is a Layer-1 blockchain that enables secure, universal interoperability between chains, scaling blockchain use by allowing all digital assets and on-chain information to flow freely. Its consensus protocol for external data allows decentralized applications on Flare to safely and trustlessly acquire and use information from other blockchains and real-world data sources, solving the oracle problem and ushering in a new era of utility.
https://x.com/FlareNetworks/status/1761044910537327092?s=20
OX.FUN
OX.FUN is a crypto derivatives trading platform. The core element of the gamified experience on OX.FUN revolves around the OX Farm. User can also expect to see leaderboards, competitions and copy trading vaults to help maximize the trading adventure.
https://x.com/OXFUNHQ/status/1760960909487624696?s=20
Superfluid
Superfluid is a Web3 streaming payments protocol for handling subscriptions, salaries, rewards, or any other composable stream of value on a per-second basis. Its core feature is “streaming” payments, where money flows from one address to another in real-time, based on programmable logic and a single on-chain transaction.
Protocol Updates
Magic Square, a Binance Labs-backed web3 app store acquires token launchpad TruePNL
Uniswap Foundation proposal suggests turning on rewards for UNI token holders
Uniswap rolls out ‘uni.eth’ subdomains using ENS infrastructure
Worldcoin surges 40% in 24 hours, leadership hints “major announcements” coming
Lido adds 1inch for faster withdrawals of stETH and wstETH
Industry News
Ethena captures 5% of ether perpetual futures open interest; founder downplays concerns
Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms generated record $281 million total revenue in 2023
Spot Bitcoin ETF cumulative trading volume exceeds $50 billion
Kraken seeks to dismiss SEC lawsuit, says claim was ‘retaliation’ for political remark
FalconX expands into Hong Kong as institutional demand rises
Alpha Threads
Alpha is abundant on Crypto Twitter, but navigating thousands of threads in Twitter can be hard. Each week, we spend several hours researching, handpick threads packed with insights, and curate a list of weekly selection for you. Let’s dive in!
https://x.com/DeRonin_/status/1760370423257034956?s=20
https://x.com/TheDeFISaint/status/1761386296444879033?s=20
https://x.com/hmalviya9/status/1761320769164886096?s=20
Upcoming Events
News Sources:
https://www.theblock.co/post/278802/ethena-eth-perpetual-futures-open-interest-risk
https://www.theblock.co/post/278868/bitcoin-miner-riot-platforms-2023-report
https://www.theblock.co/post/278843/web3-app-store-magic-square-acquires-token-launchpad-truepnl
https://www.theblock.co/post/278798/spot-bitcoin-etf-cumulative-trading-volume-50-billion
That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading this week’s edition of our Gryphsis Academy Newsletter. We hope you found our insights helpful and our updates informative.
To stay up-to-date with Gryphsis Academy, follow us on Twitter and Medium. See you in the next edition!
This newsletter is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. The past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results.
