The Newsletter by Tokenize Xchange (Vol.136| May 2021)
New Crypto Earn Listings: ADA & DOGE
From this May 13, Cardano (ADA) and Dogecoin (DOGE) will be available in our Crypto Earn feature:
- 5% without staking 100TKX
- 8% with staking 100TKX
New Coin to The Market: MATIC
Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is a Layer 2 scaling solution backed by Binance and Coinbase. The project seeks to stimulate mass adoption of cryptocurrencies by resolving the problems of scalability on many blockchains.
MATIC, the native tokens of Polygon, is an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens are used for payment services on Polygon and as a settlement currency between users who operate within the Polygon ecosystem. The transaction fees on Polygon sidechains are also paid in MATIC tokens.
USERS CAN NOW PURCHASE MATIC ON TOKENIZE.
ETH’s New High: $4.2k
Ether hit a new all-time high price on Monday ot $4,213 at around 08:45 UTC (12:45 p.m. ET).
“Ethereum has been pushing stable growth and hitting new all-time highs, albeit this is being eclipsed by the gains in the alt market,” Friedman said.
On Monday, ether’s dominance, or its share of the total crypto market capitalization, crossed 20% for the first time in three years.
“We are witnessing a prolonged ether and [decentralized finance] catchup phase after a long period when most institutional interest was clustered around bitcoin,” said Jean-Marc Bonnefous, partner at investment firm Tellurian Capital. “This shows in the growth in CME ether futures and also in the fact that the move up is relatively orderly.”
Aggregated open interest in ether futures hit $10.7 billion Sunday, continuing to sustain above $10 billion even through the weekend, according to data aggregator Skew.
So far this year, ether is up over 440% while bitcoin has appreciated 91% on spot exchange Bitstamp.
“Ether is currently outpacing bitcoin, in part because investor sentiments are charged in hopes of a more healthy network in the future,” said Konstantin Anissimov, executive director of exchange CEX.IO.
“There is a lot of forward-looking excitement for the Ethereum community with protocol upgrades incoming,” said Jason Lau, chief operating officer for San Francisco-based exchange OKCoin. “ETH 2.0 is slated to arrive sooner than expected.”
“Ultimately, the potential and emergence of a decentralized future is a narrative that is attracting speculators, investors, users and developers across Ethereum and other crypto ecosystems,” he said.
DOGE Imitators Help Send Ethereum Transaction Fees to All-Time Highs
The Doge effect is sending Ethereum transactions fees up the proverbial tree.
Per data from BitInfoCharts and Blockchair, the average cost of an Ethereum transaction is currently $64, partly driven by demand for the Ethereum token (and Dogecoin doppelganger) Shiba Inu (SHIB) — and its own copycats. Binance exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that the platform “ran out of ETH (+9.26%) deposit addresses due to SHIB,” which “has never happened before for any ERC20 token.”
Ethereum’s fees, called gas, are priced in ETH and vary depending on the type of transactions; for example, a simple transfer costs less gas because it is less computationally intensive, while a transaction to swap, say, ETH for WBTC (+3.06%) would cost more.
SHIB was created last year, but the renewed trading interest appears to only be driven by speculation that the coin will mimic Dogecoin’s stupendous success (this success has come to pass, as SHIB is up 36,750% in 30 days, fueled by exchange listings at Binance, OKEx and Huobi). Dogecoin has become a favorite of TikTok influencers and the world’s second richest man, Elon Musk.
Nipping at the heels of both DOGE (+4.89%) and SHIB’s success, other imitators have cropped uprecently.
Most of these would-be doge-eat-doge projects are spun up on Ethereum as ERC20 tokens, the most popular token design for Ethereum which led to the mushrooming of ICOs in 2017.
In 2020 and earlier this year, it was not uncommon for Ethereum fees to go vertical as use of DeFi platforms grew. But this new fee pressure, rather than resulting from use of actual smart contract platforms, seems to come largely from traders speculating on a litter of dog coin
Yearn, EOS Rise Over 30%
The biggest CoinDesk 20 gainers Tuesday were yearn.finance (YFI), up 48%, and eos (EOS), jumping 36.6% as of 21:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).
Rich Rosenblum, co-founder of crypto market maker GSR, told CoinDesk the jump in YFI, which is a lending and yield service where users can park crypto to make gains, comes from its ease of use.
“It’s been the Tesla of self-driving investment management,” Rosenblum said. He also compared yearn.finance’s founder, Andre Cronje, to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. However, Rosenblum had a caveat: “Crypto moves a lot faster than autos, and others are hot on the trail.”
As for eos, Rosenblum pointed to eos creator Block.One’s $10 billion funding to build a new exchange infrastructure subsidiary, called Bullish Global. Eos is a developer platform for DeFi, a rival to Ethereum.
Peter Chan, lead trader at OneBit Quant, told CoinDesk he’s concerned about DeFi’s continued success on Ethereum, which may be why alternative platforms like Eos are doing so well in digital-asset markets. Growth of the sector seems to still be adding to congestion on the Ethereum network, particularly when exchanging tokens on the decentralized exchange Uniswap.
“It’s been quite tough lately dealing with the insane gas prices,” Chan said. “Trading on Uniswap costs more than $200 per transaction now. Crazy.”
According to ETH Gas Station, Uniswap is one of the top generators of fees on Ethereum: Users have spent $2 million in the past 30 days paying for transactions to be processed on the exchange.
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