Notable Messari Intel Updates
- Voting is going to start on a proposal that outlines a 4-year restructuring plan for the Sushi organization and earmarks a budget of 6 million SUSHI to fund contributors, future hires, and strategy and project leadership during that time. The proposal expands the developer team from 4 to 10 full-time contributors.
- The Polkadot <> Acala bridge is now fully operational after the latest Polkadot runtime upgrade and XCMv2 activation.
- Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs, shared that automated security measures prevented an attack on the Ethereum <> Near Rainbow Bridge. The attacker deployed a contract on Ethereum to deposit funds and become a valid Rainbow Bridge relayer and attempted to send fabricated light client blocks. Bridge watchdogs were able to discern that the block submitted by the attacker was invalid and submitted a challenge transaction on Ethereum.
- The Yield Guild Games team announced a partnership with Laguna Games’ first blockchain game, Crypto Unicorns, a Unicorn pet-collecting, and farming game. YGG purchased 400 Unicorn Eggs during the genesis egg sale last year, where each egg has been hatched, revealing different unique traits.
- Juno v5.0.0 was released on May 5, 2022. This release fixes the gov IBC RouterKey, updates code formatting, and introduces changes for the Veritas upgrade, which will reallocate funds confiscated from the CCN validator to a community-controlled smart contract.
Notable Messari Governor Updates
- The Balancer DAO submitted a proposal that aims to freeze Treasury swaps for tokens other than ETH and stablecoins for at least three months, following an uptrend of protocols seeking to swap their governance token to acquire BAL and participate in veBAL. The goal is to promote the long-term viability of the DAO, the veBAL system, and ensure that protocols that want to join veBAL get their BAL tokens from the secondary market. Preliminary discussions are ongoing.
- The Bancor DAO submitted a proposal that aims to formalize the Bancor DAO MSIG (Multisig) as the governor of all aspects of Bancor V3 and grants the multisig responsibility for executing all decisions made by the Bancor DAO. The Bancor DAO MSIG also controls the “pause” function, which will pause the entire protocol in an emergency. Voting is currently active.
- The Frax DAO submitted a proposal that aims to deprecate the buyback and recollateralize functions in the Frax protocol and instead use Fraxswap and its Time-Weighted Average Market Maker (TWAMM) to expand/contract the FRAX supply and or burn FXS through a TWAMM Algorithmic Market Operations contract. Voting is currently active.
- The Balancer DAO submitted a proposal that aims to partner with BeethovenX to deploy Balancer on Optimism, including the contract deployment, frontend, infrastructure, and maintenance. Using BeethovenX to manage the deployment would mitigate the burden on the Balancer Labs team. The protocol fee split would be 50/50 between Balancer and BeethovenX. Voting is currently active.
- The Stake DAO has submitted a proposal that aims to initiate a 500,000 treasury swap of SDT for ALCX, Alchemix’s governance token. Alchemix will use the SDT to achieve the 1 million SDT requirement to use Stake DAO liquid lockers. Stake DAO can stake the ALCX to increase governance participation and DAO revenues. Preliminary discussions are ongoing.
Sector Returns
It is a red day as not just cryptocurrencies but the broader markets have suffered continued losses driven by Fed rate hikes. The global cryptocurrency market shed 7% of its market cap just this week, coming down from $1.8 to $1.67 trillion. The hardest hit sector was gaming, which posted a 10.12% loss for the week. Smart contract platforms had the least decline for the week as the sector has shown some resilience amidst the broader crypto market downturn.
Top Assets
The category of top assets by market capitalization was the second worst hit among the sectors covered. This was mainly due to the three smart contract platform assets which all took double-digit losses. These were Avalanche (AVAX) with -13.3%, Solana (SOL) with -14.9%, and Polkadot with -15.1%.
DeFi Assets
The DeFi sector declined by 5.85% this week, which puts it just above the middle of the pack compared to the other sectors covered. The sector had only one asset end the week in positive territory — Curve (CRV). The decentralized exchange’s token saw its price rally by 12% on Wednesday after Abra, a financial services company acquired 5.78 million CRV. Is this a sign of institutions stepping in to buy the dip? Kava (KAVA) on the other hand, took the heaviest loss of the sector and was the second worst performing asset within the top assets covered. The cross-chain DeFi platform’s token saw a 29.4% decline for the week.
Smart Contract Platforms
Even though the smart contract platform sector saw half of its top assets post double-digit negative returns for the week, one asset’s performance was enough to offset the damage to some extent. TRON (TRON) was the clear outperformer within the sector as it broke away from the pack early in the week and maintained its performance to the end. The TRON token ended the week with a 14.8% return.
Currencies
The currencies sector saw all of its top assets end the week in negative territory. Even though all of its top assets posted losses for the week, the sector came in second place in terms of least decline. Zcash was the laggard of the group as the privacy token had a rough start to the week and was not able to make a recovery. ZEC ended the week with a 14.3% decline.
Web3
The Web3 sector had a tough week as 9 out of the 10 top assets posted double-digit losses. Filecoin (FIL) and Audius (AUDIO) secured the penultimate and ultimate positions, respectively. FIL ended the week with a 23.2% loss while AUDIO declined by 25%.
Gaming
The Web3 sector’s top asset losses were humbled by gaming sector’s. Gaming was the worst performing of the sectors covered in the report. Eight of the top ten assets in the sector secured double-digit losses. Yield Guild Games (YGG) had the worst performance within all top assets covered, ending the week with a substantial 38.2% loss.
