Rapture: Mattison Asher's Crypto Takes

We are undoubtedly within the eye of the storm period. Not much is happening. The market is (still!) trying to decide whether we go to goblin town or attempt take another shot at surpassing new highs, and many teams are heads down in buidl mode. Still, there was one major

More and more protocols are either producing their own reports on their treasuries or are hiring outside firms (Messari, Llama) in order to compile a report. Continuing this trend, Joe Flanagan, the Co-Founder of Maple, recently published a quarterly report that covers the revenues and expenses of the Maple DAO.

Clearly, the industry is moving towards producing consistent financial reporting for protocols. Last week, Llama produced a report on Aave for the month of February. I covered the report in a Rapture newsletter [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-185/]. Today, Messari released their Q1 2022 report [https://twitter.com/jerrysun_/status/

Increasingly, the BTC rise to $47,500 is looking like a bear market rally. While I would like to see a drop below $37,500 for further confirmation, the fact that the market has dropped on significant bullish news such as Do Kwon's/Saylor's recent $2

Recently, Llama, a DAO service provider focused on treasury management, released their February 2022 financials for Aave [https://llama.xyz/reports/aave/Llama_-_Aave_February_2022_Financials.pdf]. Soon, they will also be compiling a quarterly report for Aave's financials. This report largely covers the Aave market

While the markets and SSV have been taking up much of my time lately, I had a chance to go through Gemini's 2022 Global State Crypto Report [file:///C:/Users/matti/Downloads/Gemini%20-%202022%20-%20Global%20State%20of%20Crypto.pdf] . Much of this report covers a survey

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I am still bearish on the market. Yet I am preparing for upwards continuation of the most recent trend we have had since late January. Thus, I have begun compiling a list of assets that I like in the scenario of a

I am still not convinced we are in a bull market and have escaped the tumultuous nature of evolving macro events. Many areas of the market are signaling the global economy has significant issues. My base case is that recent price action is a bear market rally. Bearish headwinds The

Today, two committees in the European Parliament came to a cross-party compromise [https://blockworks.co/eu-parliament-committees-vote-to-crack-down-on-crypto-transfers/] for an upcoming vote on a proposal that will create new burdens for the crypto industry. Under this proposal, crypto companies, such as exchanges, would need to have information on all users that interact

Welp, I am glad I am no longer staking AXS via Ronin. Yesterday, the market discovered that Ronin network was exploited to the tune of $625 million worth of ETH and USDC. AXS and SLP were not targeted. The size of this exploit makes it the largest to date according

For all of you crypto short term bulls, I tip my hat to you! In the past 48 hours, both BTC and ETH have sustained a breakout of their previous ranges. BTC broke out from its $35,000 - $45,000 range, while ETH broke out from its range of

Since Yuga Labs is undoubtedly one of the most important players in the NFT ecosystem, I wanted to dive through the latest pitch deck they used to raise $450 million round at a $4 billion valuation led by Andreesen Horowitz. If you are interested in going through the pitch deck

Earlier this week, I did a presentation on Optimism and other scaling solutions that have come to market. In case you missed it, I also covered many of these scaling solutions in writing here during Rapture #161: Different Scaling Solutions [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-161/] and Rapture #162: Optimistic vs.

What a wild play by Do Kwon. For those of you who live under a rock, Do Kwon, the Terraform Labs (company behind Terra) CEO, announced yesterday that the Luna Foundation Guard has raised $2.2 billion that Kwon intends to convert to BTC for a bitcoin reserve. Furthermore, Kwon

Without a doubt, the largest crypto event to happen this year will be the Ethereum mainnet merge with the beach chain, which is dubbed "the merge" for short. The merge is set to happy by June [https://www.banklesstimes.com/news/2021/10/18/ethereum-merge-set-to-happen-by-june-2022/] of this year,

In the past couple of days, there have been a few huge announcements from leading financial institutions. Goldman Sachs executed its first over-the-counter crypto transaction [https://blockworks.co/goldman-sachs-makes-milestone-crypto-trade-with-galaxy-digital/] (finally), Ray Dalio's Bridgewater, the largest hedge fund in the world, will soon be investing in a crypto fund

On March 17th, ApeCoins were airdropped to holders of the BAYCNFTs, MAYC NFTs, and more. This airdrop represents the first major ERC-20 token distribution based on a collection of top tier NFTs. While the ApeCoin DAO is sperate from Yuga Labs, the creator of BAYC, the developers of BAYC did

A couple days ago, Aave launched their V3 [https://governance.aave.com/t/introducing-aave-v3/6035]. Yet again, Aave continues to display that the lending protocol is a leader in innovation. There were four major updates in Aave V3: portals (facilitates cross-chain transactions), high efficiency mode (unlocks higher borrowing power), isolation

Rarely do I come across a new data tool that adds a significant amount of new value to my research process. Yet after reading through Robin Ji's post [https://twitter.com/robindavidji/status/1504486727800434698?s=20&t=ZouwxiYxLXRHoEMVUBVN8Q] on SAFEs + Token side letters, I learned of a

Today was the big day! While Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell did not surprise the markets, there was some interesting information that could be gleaned from today's FOMC meeting. Both crypto markets and equity markets moved in complete lock step today, as both dipped during the meeting only

Always nice when you wake up to your stock options roughly doubling in value overnight (predilution of course). In the past 24 hours, ConsenSys announced a new $450 million Series D raise at a $7 billion valuation. Interestingly, a sizeable amount of the proceeds will be converted to ETH in

The last time I covered an update on Axie Infinity, SLP was on a quick 300% increase because of economic changes [https://rapture.ghost.io/rapture-134-market-responds-to-axie-infinitys-economic-changes/] imposed by Sky Mavis. Despite the quick rise, I warned that the increases in SLP did not look sustainable and consequently I was waiting

Recently, I have been looking at DAOs as business entities. DAOs are real players now. In aggregate, they hold approximately $8 billion [https://deepdao.io/organizations] worth of assets in their treasuries. There are over 1.8 million total governance token holders across all DAOs, and nearly 550,000 active

Over the next two weeks, BTC will likely tell us what direction the next short term trend will be take. We have effectively been in a crab market since January 7th, with BTC oscillating in a range between approximately $35,000 and $45,000. Furthermore, price volatility has been decreasing

On March 9th, President Joe Biden signed an executive order [https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/09/fact-sheet-president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-innovation-in-digital-assets/] touching the responsible development of digital assets. While the executive order did not have much meat on the bones, the sentiment expressed in the order is quite significant. Lets dive