$300B JPMorgan Blockchain Payments

Blur $200M NFT Lending | Binocs Crypto Accounting

Marco Manoppo & Karon Pangestu
June 26, 2023

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Good Morning,

It was a relatively quiet weekend in crypto. Total market cap remains above $1.2 trillion, but there wasn’t much movements. Old DeFi tokens rallied as market beta caught up. Let’s see what this week will bring.

In Today's Email:

What Matters: Blockchain payment settlements 🏦
Products: Binocs, a crypto accounting tool 🧾
Charts: Blur NFT lending soars, liquid staking stablecoin 📈

Narratives: Liquid staking-related stablecoin protocols. Assess who are the players and what sort of growth incentives you can capitalize on.

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WHAT MATTERS

Blockchain for Institutional Payments Settlement

Unsplash

State of play: JP Morgan is using its JPM Coin for settlements payment of their corporate clients in Europe; and SAP is now testing cross-border payments using USDC.

JPM Coin is only made available to its institutional clients.
The first transaction was conducted by Siemens AG in a Euro-denominated payment on the JP Morgan’s permissioned blockchain.
Transactions made using the JPM Coin add up to about $300B.
SAP’s experiment is being conducted on an Ethereum test network.
The funds cannot be used in the real world as it runs on a test network.

What’s next: Blockchain for payment settlement is the use case that has been working. What’s lacking is the mainstream adoption from everyday users.

Permissioned-based blockchain doesn’t benefit anybody except for the ones creating it.
It’s interesting to see that certain legacy players are choosing permissioned blockchain (JPMorgan), while others are using permissionless blockchain (Visa).

Our take: Crypto’s number one use-case is increasing the velocity of capital. As a truly digital money, capital can move at a much faster speed.

After the industry overcome technical and regulatory issues, traditional assets and currencies will undoubtedly be transacted on the blockchains.

For builders and investors: Companies that can solve crypto payment settlements for traditional business will unlock enormous value.

It remains to be seen how the world and the industry will balance government-effort digital money such as QRIS in Southeast Asia and China’s CBDC, with private-effort digital money such as USDC and USDT.
Companies that are building at this intersection and find ways to capture value will become a juggernaut.

Take a peek at our new referral reward at the bottom of this issue. Share this newsletter and receive our list of 100 smart crypto investors' wallet addresses 👇

PRODUCTS OF THE WEEK

Binocs: A Crypto Accounting & Tax Platform

Binocs

The Simplest Crypto Accounting & Tax Platform. Binocs is a crypto accounting and tax software that understands and manages all aspects of crypto transactions.

Binocs is able to provide a tax report in less than 30 minutes.
It also tracks return on investment, profits and losses and capital exchanges, as well as taxes for derivatives, lending and borrowing across CeFi and DeFi.
Binocs raised $4M in Seed Round led by BEENEXT with participation from Arkam Ventures, Accel, Saison Capital, Premji Invest, Blume Ventures, and Better Capital.

Other cool products:

Web3collectives, a free Web3 resource library.
Hedgehog, a crypto robo-adviser for digital assets.
Shrimpy Advisory, an autopilot crypto investment tool.
Valha, a DeFi API and widgets to integrate DeFi functionalities.
Tweetbank, a platform to easily mint tweets into NFTs for free.

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

Blur NFT Lending Growth

Dune Analytics

State of play: Blur launched its Blend NFT lending product in May 2023 and dominated the market share, with ~$200M in volume, in less than 2 months.

The daily loan originations have been matching trading volume.
As of early June, Azuki led the volume of NFT lending on Blend.
Blur currently has 90%+ market share of NFT lending volume.

Our take: Getting your market design right is key.

Blur really understands how to create markets for NFTs, even when critiques argued that Blur cause NFTs to be treated like altcoins, essentially turning them more fungible.

LST-Backed Stablecoin TVL Growth

@MessariCrypto

State of Play: Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) have quickly gained significant popularity as collateral assets in stablecoin protocols.

Lybra is leading the pack with ~$190M (~100K ETH) in TVL.
The entire TVL is ETH as of June 2023 is ~150,000 ETH, or approximately $270M.
We’re also seeing these lending protocols starting their own stablecoin’s to capitalize on the growing opportunities.

Our take: The utilization of LSTs as collateral in stablecoin protocols (and DeFi in general), is further prove of the shift of narrative from normal DeFi to LSDfi (liquid staking finance).

QUICK BITES

Coinbase celebrates win at US Supreme Court.
JPMorgan starts Euro blockchain payments for corporates.
First Leveraged Bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC.
SAP tests cross-border payments using USDC.
IMF says banning crypto assets may not be effective long-term.
SEC to forego BlockFi’s outstanding $30M penalty, for now.
Belgium orders Binance to stop services.
Hedera launches ChatGPT plugin.

MEME & NOTEWORTHY READS

Our Network’s read on decentralized physical infra networks.
David Phelps’ read on the economics of love.
Crypto Viktor’s read on zkSync potential airdrop.

— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan)
3:26 AM • Jun 25, 2023

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advic