A monthly review of what's happening in the crypto markets enriched with institutional research on the most important topics in the industry in cooperation with the Swiss digital asset specialist, 21Shares AG.
Markets flourished in November. The total crypto market cap increased by ~13%, month-over-month, with increased institutional interest in this burgeoning asset class. Stocks also had a comeback last month, with S&P 500 and Nasdaq recording their best performance since July 2022. Ahead of the historically calm holiday season, Bitcoin and Ethereum increased by 9.31% and 13.38% in November, respectively. The biggest winners of last month were Solana (+69.28%), Avalanche (+86.72%), and Uniswap (+42.34%).
In line with the market sentiment, Europe’s inflation dropped more than expected to 2.4% in November, down from 2.9% in October, the lowest over two years. The cost of living has eased with plummeting energy prices, but higher interest rates limit the economy's ability to grow. However, with a cooling inflation towards the ECB’s 2% target, markets are hopeful that interest rates will stop by April 2024. In the U.S., inflation data is coming out on December 12, with indicators like the personal consumption expenditures price index (+0.2% month-over-month) already pointing towards cooling inflation and potential interest rate cuts in 2024.
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Argentina’s new president
Bitcoin rallied back to pass the $37K mark as Argentina elected a pro-Bitcoin, right-wing president, Javier Milei. Although the president-elect made no promise to make Bitcoin a legal tender, the volumes indicate some hope that Milei’s appointment could mean economic revitalization for South America’s second-largest economy with the help of Bitcoin, a la El Salvador. El Salvador's GDP is expected to reach $33.4B by the end of 2023, a ~20% increase from when it declared Bitcoin as a legal tender in 2021. With an inflation rate exceeding 140% in 2023, Argentina’s GDP growth has been sluggish, averaging 0.51% from 1993 until 2023.
“The central bank is a scam. What Bitcoin represents is the return of money to its original creator, the private sector," Argentina’s president-elect said as part of his presidential campaign, vowing to shut down the central bank, replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar and embracing decentralized finance. Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3 (a startup scaling Bitcoin) and an advisor to El Salvador during its adoption of Bitcoin, has said he's planning to meet with Argentina's new president. Indicators of whether Milei’s plan will work in Argentina’s favor are yet to be discovered.
Bitcoin fees skyrocket while the network expands its utility
Bitcoin’s fees have increased by 593.94% over the past month, mostly driven by Ordinals, a protocol that allows users to inscribe digital assets akin to nonfungible tokens. Ordinals have had the most inscriptions since May 2023. With the backdrop of Ordinals’ success rate, Bitcoin developer Robin Linus introduced BitStream, a decentralized file hosting on Bitcoin, where users can upload unique files, enabling anyone to monetize their excess bandwidth and data storage capacities without relying on trust or heavy-weight cryptography. BitStream’s pay-to-download approach allows the server to charge for each download, ensuring that the revenue scales with the popularity and demand for the media, creating a balanced and profitable ecosystem.
This development is another expansion of Bitcoin’s burgeoning use cases and would onboard a diversified audience. With BitStream’s promise, Bitcoin can capture the total addressable market of data storage, which stands at at least $230B. Although BitStream’s pricing scheme is not clear yet, decentralized data storage solutions, like Filecoin and Arweave, have been proven to be a lot cheaper than Google Cloud, Amazon S3, and its other centralized peers, varying by usage.
Exchanges looking at Polygon for deploying their own custom blockchain
Kraken and OKX are strategically eyeing the Polygon network, aiming to capitalize on its CDK framework for constructing their individual blockchains. This strategic move aligns with Coinbase Base's remarkable success, amassing approximately $5.4M in profit since inception, translating to an annualized profit of around $20 million. Boasting 9M and 50M monthly users, respectively, Kraken and OKX processed a daily average of ~$1B in 2023 and would potentially foster substantial growth within the on-chain ecosystem. Both moves would contribute to Ethereum's revenue via anchored networks paying security costs to settle their transactions.
Additionally, leveraging CDK modules proves advantageous for Polygon, empowering network stakers to bond POL and enhance earnings amid escalating network usage - a positive demand loop for the POL token within the new Polygon 2.0 staking layer design. Notably, Polygon's efforts to onboard diverse companies are gaining traction, surpassing BNB and Ethereum in supporting new applications.
Lido is decentralizing its Node-Infrastructure operations
Lido DAO, the largest non-custodial staking provider, approved two proposals to adopt Distributed Validation Technology. DVT refers to a mechanism spreading out key management and signing responsibilities across multiple parties to reduce single points of failure and increase validator resiliency. That said, Lido will integrate DVT modules with Obol and SSV protocols, which is set to introduce a more diverse profile of node operators beyond its current list of 38 validators and help address a key concern around centralization. This is a key development as Lido stirred a debate since it’s close to accounting for a third of staked ETH; it could have undesired influence over the network’s validation process and block production. This implementation is crucial to ensure the diversification of the protocol’s node operators and increase their reliability in case of validator failures or censorship attempts. Conversely, SSV and Obol networks represent new primitives, so they must remain vigilant regarding any unforeseen vulnerabilities they could introduce.
Next Month’s Calendar
These are the top events we're closely monitoring in December:
