Weekly DeFi/NFT News — December 6, 2021

Weekly DeFi/NFT news is a collection of major weekly events/announcements brought from the most trustworthy data sources, such as The Defiant, Spencer Noon, Week in Ethereum News etc. with comments and extra insight from the Bulldax DeFi labs.

Magic Eden: Leading NFT Marketplace on Solana daily transactions overtake OpenSea — Spencer Noon

• The platform launched in September and has quickly become the market leader; notably, while OpenSea has ~99% market share in the Ethereum ecosystem, Magic Eden still only has about ~77%, with other major brands being Solanart, Solsea, and DigitalEyes.
• While Magic Eden’s monthly users are half of OpenSea’s, daily transactions are 2–3x higher; Magic Eden users transact ~6 times per day, on average, versus ~2 times per day on OpenSea.

• With lower gas fees, the marketplace seems to cater to a different audience — collectors favoring lower cost NFTs and higher velocity trading.
• This month, the average transaction on Magic Eden was $96.50 versus $1,872 on OpenSea. Magic Eden’s 7D average volume per user is ~1/5th of OpenSea’s.

• Both platforms charge similar fees: Magic Eden charges 2% on all transactions, and OpenSea charges 2.5%. While having more transactions, Magic Eden’s 30D revenue is ~1/10th of OpenSea’s; Magic Eden’s average monthly revenue per user is ~$42, versus ~$200 on OpenSea.

Source: Spenser Noon https://ournetwork.substack.com/p/ournetwork-issue-100?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta

Zero-Knowledge Pioneer StarkWare Launches Layer 2 Rollup Network — The Defiant

• StarkWare, the team that pioneered zero-knowledge-based rollups in 2018, has launched the mainnet alpha of StarkNet — the team’s much anticipated Layer 2, zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup network.
• StarkWare describes StarkNet Alpha as a “permissionless decentralized rollup operating as an L2.” They claim the network can offer decentralized applications (dApps) “unlimited scale” for computation without compromising the composability or security of its underlying settlement chain Ethereum.
• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described rollups as having taken the place of sharding in the network’s immediate roadmap for scaling Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/starkware-layer-2-rollups-zk-proofs/

Bancor Launches V3 AMM In Bid to Regain Dominance — The Defiant

• Bancor was the first-ever automated market maker (AMM) and holds a special place in crypto lore after attracting $153M in 2017 in what was then the largest initial coin offering (ICO).
• After falling off the radar as it lost market share to rival AMMs like Uniswap and Sushiswap, the protocol is back and launching Bancor 3 with key upgrades.
• The most important new feature may be something called Omnipool which promises to cut gas costs for traders in half.
• “With Omnipool, there is now no extra ‘hop’ in Bancor trades. We’ve effectively virtualized the intermediate BNT hop,” Nate Hindman, head of growth at Bancor, told The Defiant. “This reduces gas costs and enables Bancor to attract more trading fees with the same level of liquidity, making the protocol more capital efficient.”
• Though it shipped the first AMM, Bancor has lost ground to competitors like Uniswap which regularly facilitates over $1B in daily trade volume — Bancor has only breached $100M in daily trading volume twice in November.

• Bancor 3.1 called Sunrise, and 3.2, called Daylight, are yet to come. “Actually the most groundbreaking stuff is going to come in that phase.” — Hindman said.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/bancor-v3/

$106M worth of metaverse land sold last week — DappRadar

• A Tuesday post from the decentralized application analytics firm reported that between Nov. 22 and Nov. 28, activity was “booming” on The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels and Somnium Space with a combined $105.8 million worth of trading volume among them from more than 6,000 traders.

• “Undoubtedly, metaverse land is the next big hit in the NFT space. Outputting record sales numbers and constantly increasing NFT prices, virtual worlds are the new top commodity in the crypto space. The wave of attention towards virtual worlds like The Sandbox and Decentraland started with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta.”
• Metaverse events are becoming an industry-standard in the crypto space. Allowing brands, artists, and creators to showcase their work and product to millions of people worldwide, virtual events in the metaverse will only become more popular.

Source: https://dappradar.com/blog/over-100-million-in-metaverse-land-sales-last-week

AUM in DAOs grows to $15B and membership increased by 133% since August — Roberto Talamas, Data Scientist at Messari

• The DAO landscape has seen incredible growth over the past 3 months For starters, the total AUM controlled by DAOs increased from $7B to $15B

• DAO membership increased a staggering 133% since August. Now there are over 1.6M members across 164 organizations.

• At the beginning of 2021, only 12 DAOs had more than $1M in their treasury. By August the total number increased to 34. Now there are 58 DAOs with over $1M in assets under management.

• The number of DAOs with over 100 members 14x since the beginning of the year. In just the past three months, DAOs with 100+ members increased a whopping 73%.

Source: https://twitter.com/RobertoTalamas/status/1465882799420891137