Crypto Research

WHAT ARE ORDINALS? Ordinals, commonly called “Bitcoin NFTs,” have been one of the most exciting developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem this year. Technically, Ordinals are a way of attaching or “inscribing” data to individual sats or satoshis (the smallest unit of a Bitcoin at 1/100,000,000) on the Bitcoin blockchain. The term “Ordinal” is derived from Ordinal Theory, a recently developed system for numbering sats in the order they are mined....

LOOKS LIKE A PAUSE The Federal Reserve approved its 10th interest rate increase in just over a year, raising the Fed funds rate by 0.25 percentage points to a target range of 5%-5.25%. Many interpreted the Fed's comments as signaling a potential pause in the tightening cycle, mainly due to the removal of a sentence in the post-meeting statement. The statement no longer mentioned that "the Committee anticipates that some...

Funding took a dive this week, decreasing from $147M last week to just $75 million, the lowest level in over a month. Each vertical saw a decline in funding, with CeFi and Metaverse & Gaming receiving zero funding. Most of this week's funding was concentrated in the Infrastructure and Web3 & NFT segments, which had $41 million and $20 million in funding, respectively. These verticals in particular have been resilient...

Mark Newton provides in-depth technical analysis on Bitcoin and Ethereum, including: near-term price targets, key levels to watch and more! *Recorded May 2, 2023

Funding declined this week from $280M last week to just $147M this week. Not surprisingly, most deals were infrastructure-related, something we’ve seen all month. DeFi, which has generally been one of the less funded verticals the last year, has slowly begun to see an uptick in funding. DeFi was the second highest funded vertical in the past two weeks, with $45M and $29M funded. This week’s largest deal, Thetanuts Finance,...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Click Here for the full report.Crypto VC funding has continued its downtrend since peaking in the beginning of last year. Q1 2023 marked the fourth consecutive quarter of declines in total fundraising amount and deal count.Despite its decline from peak funding levels, the industry has proved its resilience, with funding levels still greater than 4x that of the previous bear market. We will be watching to see if...

TACKLING THE DEBT CEILING RISK _NET LIQUIDITY REFRESH_ A major theme of this year has revolved around the shifting landscape of global liquidity. Stimulus measures from central banks like the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the Bank of Japan (BOJ), along with a unique domestic liquidity situation where the Fed is technically performing Quantitative Tightening (QT), but their efforts are counterbalanced by a declining Treasury General Account (TGA) and...

Total funding for this week rose approximately 25% from $198 million to $249 million, with the large majority coming from the Infrastructure and DeFi verticals. One of the larger DeFi deals was Nayms’ $12 million round valuing the company at $80 million. Nayms is building a fully-regulated on-chain insurance platform to bring efficient and transparent features to a largely off-chain market. The funding will be used to expand Nayms’ global...

INTRODUCTION The top 50 most valuable protocols all have circulating market caps of at least one billion. Why do these tokens, many of which have unproven business models, trade at such high valuations? One of the core assumptions behind these valuations is that the protocol will someday mature to have product-market fit, justifying its current market value. For protocols that operate decentralized applications (dApps), assessing profitability is one of the...

ETH MOVING SHANGHIGHER As we mentioned last week, the market was overly pessimistic regarding the supply-side effects of the upcoming Ethereum staking withdrawals. Factors such as existing liquidity for most stakers, withdrawal queue limitations, and a market that de-risked in anticipation of the Shapella upgrade all helped to reduce the likelihood of a sudden supply overhang. With this in mind, it seemed reasonable to expect an ETHBTC rally in the...

Funding slid lower this week from $284M to $182M. Continuing the trend of the last three weeks, infrastructure deals comprised the bulk of funding, with 9 deals amounting to $126M or 69% of total funding. Most of this infrastructure funding came in the form of Alt Layer-1 investments in Sei and EOS. The financial verticals had a lackluster week – DeFi and CeFi received just $4M and $7M of financing,...