Crypto Research

FED RAISED RATES ABOVE FUTURES This week, the Fed went ahead and raised interest rates another 75 bps in its attempt to stimy demand and bring down the prices of consumer goods. While the rate hike was already priced in by the market, the Fed’s revised dot plot was not. The Federal Reserve’s forecast for rates (green line below) was well above the futures market expectations. Thus, asset prices continued...

Funding increased from a slow week last week from $260M to $422M. As we’ve seen all month, crypto infrastructure remains the leading interest for VCs. Infrastructure accounted for nearly half of all funding at $208M and comprised 11 of the 24 deals this week. The largest of these infrastructure deals was Sardine, a platform that provides real-time fraud prevention services for web3 and fintech companies. Sardine raised $51.5M in a Series...

Funding was down this week, dropping from $607M to $241M, as total deals fell from 26 to 18. While infrastructure remained the highest funded sector at $158M, it declined nearly 68% from last week's huge week. The only sector that saw an increase from last week was NFTs. This was due entirely to a $54M raise for Doodles, which puts the Web3/NFT company at a whopping $704M valuation. We discuss this...

THE GOOD In what was undoubtedly one of the greatest instances of long-term collaboration and a celebration of human ingenuity, the Ethereum network finally converted from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in the early morning hours on Thursday. Contrary to most of the Testnet Merges, there were essentially no hiccups, as the execution layer seamlessly merged with the Beacon Chain and miners powered down their GPUs for the final time (or migrated...