Invest in Knowledge

Best ways to know what’s ACTUALLY going on!

No need to panic during these downtimes – it’s actually a great time to educate yourself! The best way to keep up to date with all market updates, breaking news, and industry insights (apart from being subscribed to this newsletter) is to have a podcast playing in the background of your everyday activities. Next time you’re making dinner, we highly recommend listening to an episode from one of our favourites below:

Feeling Confused by some of these Crypto Terminologies?

Not to worry – we cover a lot of funky and interesting words in our articles and it’s important to know what we are on about so things make sense. Before you start on your digital assets journey, we recommend taking a look at these links to get a grip on some of the jargon:

  • AMM (Automated Market Maker)
  • Lending (Collateralized Lending)
  • ERC 20 (Fungible Token Standard)
  • Vaults (Decentralized Crypto Safe Storing)
  • Staking (Deposit Token Into Contract for Yield)
  • Flash Loans (Borrow Crypto Without Collateral)
  • Airdrop (Giveaway Token for Marketing Purposes)
  • NFTs (Digital assets that represent ownership of real-world items)
  • Yield Farming (Providing liquidity to token pairs rewards crypto)
  • dApp (Peer-to-peer decentralised application)
  • Fork (Change in blockchain’s protocol)

📅 This Week in Crypto 📅

The Ethereum scaling tool is one of six companies selected by the media and entertainment giant to be a part of its program to develop AR, NFT and AI Experiences. The price of MATIC, Polygon’s native token, jumped almost 21% to just over 69 cents over the last 24 hours.

The city of Shanghai aims to lead China’s economic recovery by backing development in metaverse products and services, low-carbon energy projects and smart terminal technology. The South China Morning Post reported that the Shanghai government planned to establish an industry fund of 10 billion yuan in assets, or nearly $1.5 billion, dedicated to metaverse development. China pushing metaverse but not cryptocurrency.

Binance has flipped Coinbase to rank as the number one exchange globally with the most #bitcoin held. This is yet another milestone for Binance, depicting the trust vested by users with their holdings on the exchange. Coinbase had maintained its stance as the exchange with the most #BTC holdings since 2014.

📰 Digital Take Away 📰

Just another Winter in July

Fears of global recession and the worst inflation in more than 40 years have wreaked havoc in the digital asset markets, especially in the cryptocurrency market this year— unleashing a fierce crypto winter that’s forced bankruptcies for companies like Three Arrows Capital and Celsius, and massive layoffs from big, centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Crypto.com.

It’s anyone’s guess whether the current crypto bear market will ultimately rival the years-long crypto winters of 2014 and 2018—the latter wiping 80% from bitcoin’s price while crushing hundreds of then buzzy new tokens.

Before comparing the current market situation with 2018, it is necessary to understand how the blockchain industry got to its current state. The previous crypto winter became a critical period for the burgeoning dApp ecosystem. The foundations of the industry as we know it today were laid during this period. The projects leading the blockchain space kept committed to building and enhancing their products despite the downward trend. Networks like Ethereum, EOS, and Bitcoin’s Lightning, achieved important milestones, while Web3 projects including Axie Infinity, ETHLend (now known as Aave), and even DappRadar, were successfully launched in a period when interest in the space was scarce.

DeFi summer of 2020 saw a plethora of projects showcasing the potential of a decentralized financial ecosystem. Curve, MakerDAO, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and a handful of other DeFi players in the space paved the way for a multi-billion dollar industry that primarily focuses on farming tokens that are named after weird food. The narrative in the dApp industry has changed completely.

NFTs also exploded as the space generated over $22 billion in trading volume last year. At the same time, the top 100 most valuable Ethereum collections were estimated to have a $16.7 billion market cap. NFT artists like Beeple, Pak, and Fewocious took NFTs to the mainstream stage. Collections like CryptoPunks and BAYC became a cultural phenomenon with the power of attracting celebrities and brands into the space. With NFTs enabling ownership and authentication, the potential of this blockchain use case was revealed.

So after assessing the current situation and contrasting it with 2018’s, a crypto winter is most probably upon us – despite the impressive maturity of the dApp industry and the accelerated expansion of the Web3 community. Having said this, it is nothing the community and the broader market have not seen before. Turbulent times do not mean the end of times, as 100% of Durlston Partners’ clients are still developing, innovating and most importantly – HIRING!

Written by Danny Placinta

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