Rapture: Mattison Asher's Crypto Takes

Rapture #239: Arbitrum Commentary, Flashbot Revenue, and Binance Removes USDC as Tradeable Asset

Wild price action in the markets right now. ETH desperately wants to break out in anticipation of the merge, but BTC's heaviness will not allow it to do so. Clearly, BTC price action is being affected by the deteriorating macro environment, with the two largest most recent items

Rapture #238: Survey on Institutional Adoption of Crypto and Sudoswap Token Distribution Announcement

Research wise, the last few days have been incredibly exciting. I have discovered some incredibly interesting new projects that I will likely write about in the future. Yet for today's newsletter, I am going to cover some insights I garnered from an institutional report I read and some

Rapture #237: More Research Resources and Conflict Brewing at MakerDAO

This past month, I have been devoting a much larger amount of my time to research. In fact, the only period when I was doing more research was in 2018 and the first half of 2019. The best time for uncovering the next 10 - 100x in crypto is in

Rapture #236: Market Update, Major Retirements, and Compound V3

The key turning point I mentioned in Rapture #230 is now behind us. As hypothesized, the crypto's bear market rally ran out of steam and BTC currently sits close to its low point thus far for the bear market. The catalyst for this breakdown was Jay Powell'

Rapture #235: NFT Update

Since it has been a while, I wanted to give a quick update on some of the latest data and news items coming out of the NFT ecosystem. Overall, NFT based activity has been steadily decreasing for months now. That being said, NFT adoption by larger corporations has accelerated. Let&

Rapture #234: Market Dumps, Trad Hedge Funds Seek Crypto Talent, FTX News, and Potential BAYC Liquidations

So far, the market is continuing to match my hypothesis (most recently touched upon in Rapture #230 and Rapture #233) that the bear market is indeed not over and we have more pain to come. I won't consider the hypothesis to be confirmed unless BTC breaks to new

Rapture #233: Regulatory Changes in Canada, BitGo Acquisition falls Through, and Research on Insider Trading at Coinbase

Interesting movements in the markets today. Could always be wrong, but I think this gyration might be the beginning of the next down leg in crypto. My base stance is still bearish, as I have iterated before, and crypto seems to sputtering despite the rebound in equities. We shall see.

Rapture #232: SEC Sues Dragonchain and the Rise of SudoSwap

I am still mostly watching the market in anticipation of the next wave of volatility, which I think will happen shortly. Interestingly, the S&P 500 has continued to rally (now down only around 10% from its ATH) while the crypto rise has largely stalled out. While I wait,

Rapture #231: Lightning Network Update

It has been years since I have written about the lightning network. In fact, I have not looked at statistics in terms of tracking LN adoption for probably 6 months. Recently, I saw Brian Armstrong tweet out at an excellent blog the Coinbase team wrote regarding LN adoption, so I

Rapture #230: Reflection

Well, we are approaching one of these key turning point moments in the market again. I believe we will shortly know whether this macro bear market was just a short term scare or if we are in for more sustained pain, which is my base case. The big event that

Rapture #229: US Treasury Sanctions Tornado Cash

The big news of the week so far has undoubtedly been the US Treasury's coming out sanctioining the most renowned coin mixer, Tornado Cash. Let's examine the content of the announcement and its potential implications. Tornado Cash added to OFAC list OFAC, which is the US

Rapture #228: Disturbing facts about Solana, ETH/BTC Regulated as Commodities, and TradFi is Actually Coming this time

As mentioned in my previous Rapture, today I will be discussing some of the major announcements and news items that occurred over the past 3 weeks. Specifically, I will discuss some disturbing facts that came out about Solana, a Senate bill that looks to treat BTC/ETH as commodities, and

Rapture #227: I'm back!

I took a lengthy 3 week hiatus, as I just got back from traveling in Europe. While in Paris, I attended EthCC, though I only attended one talk as most of my time there was devoted to meetings. A lot has happened since I left. BTC is up more than

Rapture #226: Tweets from Zhu on the run, Big Raises for VCs, and More

Man, only in crypto do you have the manager of a multi billion dollar imploded fund shit post his liquidators while on the run. This space is crazy. I am constantly amazed. In addition to briefly covering Zhu's tweets and what they specifically were referencing, I also want

Rapture #225: Lawsuit Against Celsius and Blockchain.com hit by 3AC Debacle

More and more news continues to come out regarding the fall of 3AC and Celsius. Yet another major lending company took a big hit because of 3AC bad debt exposure and a past employee of Celsius is suing the company, claiming that they were actually operating a ponzi like scheme.

Rapture #224: Aave Stablecoin and Anonymous DeFi

Some nice price action these past few days for crypto. Both BTC and ETH are now up more than 30% from their bear market lows. I mostly attribute this bounce to the new SBF put narrative (i.e. SBF will save the market), equities bouncing, an arising consensus that the

Rapture #223: Update on NFT Marketplaces

Some interesting trends are forming within the NFT marketplace interesting. I wanted to take some time to dissect some of these emerging trends. Solana NFT marketplaces growing despite bearish environment Driven largely by MagicEden, NFT volumes on Solana have absolutely exploded YTD. Magic Eden currently has approximately 17,000 DAUs,

Rapture #222: Market Update

For those who celebrate, hope you have been enjoying the 4th of July weekend. In today's Rapture, I want do discuss my market outlook. While I am still bearish for now, I do believe there could be some respite in the future depending on June's inflation

Rapture #221: Down

More news on the 3AC and BlockFi front. I feel like I have been writing about these two companies for weeks now, but the fates of these two firms have serious implications for the rest of the industry. Additionally, there are some rumors I would like to relay. Let'

Rapture #220: Ethereum Rollups Knocked Down and More Updates on Contagion

In bull markets, nothing can go wrong. In bears, nothing seems to go right. Over the past few weeks, the supposed solutions to Ethereum's scaling woes, rollups, have been hit with quite a few setbacks. Optimism RPC, StarkWare, and Arbitrum all had serious issues that I will discuss

Rapture #219: BlockFi Equity Potentially Going to Zero and Gensler Comments

Welp, the bad news is piling up for crypto. This bear market continues to ravage the heroes of the previous bull market, and more pain is likely to come. Alex Mashinsky, CEO and Founder of Celsisus, was allegedly stopped by US authorities from leaving the US, though the company has

Rapture #218: Increasing Solana Adoption

While many, including myself, have loved to snark a bit about how often Solana goes down, the emergent network is continuing to gain legitimate adoption. I entered the space specifically because of my intertest in Ethereum, but I am by no means ideologically tied to the first smart contract platform

Rapture #217: More Contagion Issues

Unfortunately, I do not think the daisy-chain blow up of leverage in crypto is over. While SBF has been swooping in to save crypto companies on the brink of collapse, likely with devil's bargains, even the current king of crypto himself might not be able prevent the implosion

Rapture #216: DAO Problems and Value Gets a Bid

Builders in DeFi will often tell you that one of the benefits of accessing the financial services they offer is the removal of the counterparty risk. Their arguments will often center around the fact that a bank can withhold your money at any time if they so choose, meaning that

Rapture #215: Brutal Drawdown Continues

Recent market action continues to captivate me and the rest of the industry. Earlier today, BTC clearly broke $20,000, bottoming out at approximately $17,760 before rebounding to a current price of $19,000. For the first time ever, BTC has broken below the ATH set in a previous