Notable Messari Intel Updates
Offchain Labs has released details about the Arbitrum network halt on Jan. 9, 2022.
The Polygon Zero team has introduced Plonky2, a recursive SNARK that the team claims is “100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum”.
The dYdX team has released information on the dYdX V4 upgrade, a new version of the protocol planned to be released by the end of the year 2022.
Celo’s Espresso hard fork has been scheduled for block 11,354,500 (estimated to occur on Feb. 8, 2022, at 20:06 UTC)
Notable Messari Governor Updates
Ren DAO submitted a proposal that aims to introduce the BurnAndMint transaction type and define its fee parameters.
Gnosis DAO has released a proposal that aims to rebrand the Gnosis Protocol and GNT token to CowDAO and COW token.
Indexed DAO has submitted a proposal aimed to use drained assets to fund litigation against the hacker who carried out a $16M exploit. Voting is currently active. To find more information or cast your vote, follow this link.
Balancer has submitted a proposal seeking to introduce subDAOS for Operations, Treasury, Partnership, and Marketing. Voting is currently active. To find more information or cast your vote, follow this link.
The Bankless DAO approved a proposal that aims to introduce a series of changes to governance that will help the community gather consensus before moving a proposal to Snapshot.
Sector Returns
This week saw losses across all sectors ranging from -0.48% to -7.50%. The Currencies sector remained the most stable, finishing -0.48% from the previous week. Web3 and Gaming, being the most speculative of the group, suffered the highest losses. They finished the week with similar returns at -7.5% and -7.1% respectively.
Top Assets
This week saw the top assets trade fairly close to each other even as they formed a U shape pattern. However, towards the end of the week, 7 out of the 10 top assets were able to recover lost ground and finished the week with positive returns. The top performer was Cardano (ADA) at 7.5% and the worst performer was Ethereum (ETH) at -5.2%.
DeFi
All DeFi tokens finished the week in the red. Although DeFi was one of the worst performers of the week (-5.76%), TVL has remained within a range ($223b-$259b) it has kept since the end of October last year (currently at $240b). Loopring (LRC) briefly spiked towards the end of last week but lost footing and started trading more closely to the other DeFi tokens, ending the week in the eighth spot with a -9.0% return. SPELL Token from Abracadabra lagged behind the rest of the tokens for most of the week, finishing last with a -15.3% return.
Smart Contract Platforms
The smart contract platform sector saw the most evenly distributed returns for the week, with half of the assets finishing the week with positive returns and the other half with negative returns, even though at the halfway point, all assets were in the red. NEAR (NEAR) was the best performer of the week, finishing on top with a return of 9.8% after announcing its $150 million fundraising round led by Three Arrows Capital. Algorand (ALGO) took the last place with a return of -6.5%; slightly above was Ethereum (ETH) with a return of -5.2%.
Currencies
Dash (DASH) was the clear leader of the week. DASH saw its trading volume more than double from its low of $165 last friday to $455m in just one day, allowing it to break off the pack and follow through to take the first place, bringing in a return of 16.3%. Aside from the one outlier of the group, the currency sector had similar returns, trading in unison throughout the week. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) took the last spot finishing the week at -4.5%.
Web3
Chainlink (LINK) was the only asset in the sector that finished the week with a positive return (5.4%), possibly due to the fact that it has been one of the most heavily bought Ethereum-based-tokens throughout this decline. The majority of the group (rank 2nd to 9th) traded with high correlation throughout the entire week, with returns within a 5% range. Similar to how LINK traded at a distance from the middle of the pack, Livepeer (LPT) did so in the opposite direction; lagging from the start until the end, it experienced the greatest drawdown with a -17.9% return.
Gaming
With gaming having the lowest market cap ($15.5b) of the sectors discussed, it is normal to experience weeks of high volatility, and this week was no different. As can be seen from the graph, gaming assets currently share much less correlation with each other, a sign of a young and high speculation driven market. Yield Guild Games (YGG) took the first spot this week followed closely by Enjin (ENJ) with 2.1% and 1.3% returns respectively. Dvision Network saw the most significant decline with an 11.9% drawdown.
