📈 $25B Nasdaq Doubles Down on Crypto

Synthetix Perps $3B Volume | Crypto For Grandmas

March 27, 2023

GM, folks 👋🏻 - Happy Monday.

It was a quiet weekend. No complaints though, given what has happened in the past few weeks. Lots of hearing on bank failures this week, so brace for that. Also, Coinbase wants to incubate a non-fiat pegged stable.

Let's dive into today's issue 👇

In Today's Email:

What Matters: Nasdaq's crypto strategy 💱
Products: SphereOne, one-click checkout for web3 🛒
Charts: Arbitrum vs Optimism, Synthetix $3B Perps Volume 📈

We plan to start a Saturday issue breaking down crypto businesses. Checkout our issue from yesterday covering Etherscan, here.

Reply to this email to let us know what protocols/companies you want us to cover!

Narratives: Many AMMs are launching on Arbitrum or having their own resurgence moment like Trader Joe. Pay close attention into how these AMMs compete.

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WHAT MATTERS

Nasdaq Doubles Down on Crypto

State of play: The 52-year old exchange operator is doubling down on crypto. Nasdaq awaits approval from the NYDFS to offer crypto custody to clients, which is expected to come by the end of June 2023.

What’s next: After custody, Nasdaq wants to build execution and liquidity services.

Our take: Nasdaq's angle is trust. As an established player, Nasdaq believes that it fits the role. Post FTX (and 2022 overall), the crypto industry can benefit from an entity that's still willing to take up the mantle and prove the legitimacy of the asset class 🤞

For builders: While there's no further details to Nasdaq's crypto involvements, this move might be the short-term liquidity and sentiment injection that crypto desperately needs.

For investors: A growing number of TradFi players like BNY Mellon and Fidelity have slowly entered the market. While it might not directly serve crypto's ethos of decentralized and self-custody, any new liquidity entering the market is a good thing 🤷

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

SphreOne: 1-click Checkout for Web3

SphereOne

What is SphereOne: SphereOne is a 1-click checkout tool for web3. They want to make it so easy for people to use crypto, even your Grandma can do it. The goal is to make global crypto payments as simple as possible 🛒

SphereOne raised $2.5M in January 2023.
SphereOne will support multiple blockchains, starting with Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon.
Its product include mobile payments via QR codes, integration with point-of-sales system, FIAT swapping, one-click checkout, and many more.
It's now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
SphereOne realizes its biggest opportunity is in the emerging markets where crypto payments rail have thrived in the absence of TradFi offerings.

Other cool products:

Remanent Scan, a web3 identity and risk checker.
SphereOne, a cross-chain crypto payments tool.
Mozart Game SDK, a tool to integrate web3 infrastructures in games
Goal3, a decentralized sportsbook on zkSync.
Binaryx, a tokenized real estate platform.

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CHARTS OF THE WEEK

Arbitrum vs Optimism

Delphi Digital

As an L2, Arbitrum’s closest competitor is Optimism. As of today, the $OP token has a market cap of ~$680M and a FDV of $9.4 billion. However, as of the recent months, and especially after the $ARB token launch, Arbitrum is winning.

Arbitrum has 3-4x the number of daily transactions and daily active users.

Our take: Arbitrum has a few dApps that really generate traction, but the big fish is GMX.

Optimism needs to incubate more dApps to show its capability, which might be a bit difficult as it fumbled the OP token launch and panicked when the price fell.

To watch: Synthetix. The OG DeFi protocol is expanding hard into the Optimism ecosystem. Its derivatives product has been live for 3 months and has generated $3B+ in trading volume.

Synthetix needs play the role that GMX plays for Arbitrum.

Synthetix Derivatives Volume Growth

Our Network | Token Terminal

State of Play: Synthetix perpetuals product recently surpassed $490M in daily trading volume. It was launched in December 2022. In 3 months, Synthetix perps has generated $2.9B+ in volume and $3M+ in fees.

Data from Dune shows that Synthetix perps has 2,500 traders and ~60 in daily active traders.

Our take: Deteriorating trust in CEXs catalyzed growth in on-chain alternatives. Combined with increasing regulation, traders that don't need CEX level liquidity are moving to on-chain venues. dYdX was the only player in town, but things have changed.

QUICK BITES

Nasdaq eyes crypto custody launch by end of Q2.
Binance experienced two-hour spot market outage.
Chinese Banks court crypto firms in Hong Kong.
Euler Hacker sends back 51,000 stolen ETH.
Amazon teases NFT plans.
zkSync Era (first zkEVM) goes live.

MEME & NOTEWORTHY READS

Our Network's read on DeFi derivatives.
Chamath Palihapitiya's read on advice to startup founders and employees.
Kevin Warsh's opinion piece on why the US needs economics regime change.

Twitter these last few weeks
— High Yield Harry (@HighyieldHarry)
3:20 PM • Mar 26, 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 advice.