Crypto Alpha Trades You Might Have Missed

This is a new publication, let us know if you do NOT want to receive weekly ‘well-researched’ updates about the crypto markets.

On January 5, 2023, we pointed out that the crypto market structure was improving and that “Ethereum could rally by +27% into the March Shanghai upgrade”. Our previous “Alpha Trades You Might Have Missed” report pointed out that several protocol specific positive catalysts and there is no surprise that the crypto market has rallied during the last 10 days.

🚩 In 10 bullet points:

👇 1) Decentraland rallied +69.8% last 1w upon reports that Apple will release its combined virtual and augmented reality headset as early as spring, which has reignited hype around metaverse development. Decentraland is also once again broadcasting the digitally augmented Australian Open tennis tournament in the metaverse from Jan 16th-29th which has helped the token to surge further. Mkt cap $1.3bn;

👇 2) Sandbox rallied +41.7% last 1w following their large land plot sale on Jan 13th. The land sale event was held to celebrate Sandbox’s partnerships with multiple Hong Kong firms across the music, entertainment, finance, acting, real estate and gaming sectors who will build experiences in the new cultural hub ‘Mega City’. The sale was open to users interested in purchasing LAND near the announced partners in Mega City. Mkt cap $1.1bn;

👇 3) Solana rallied +39.2% last 1w following the launch of the memecoin ‘Bonk’ which specifically supports the Solana community as it had released an airdrop of half its token supply, allocated to top Solana NFT developers, investors, and collectors. The release of Bonk also indicates recovering developer activity on Solana, with daily NFT traffic and number of active addresses having also rebounded to pre-FTX collapse levels. Mkt cap $8.6bn;

👇 4) Shiba Inu rallied +35.4% last 1w upon the announcement of the imminent beta release of the layer-2 network Shibarium. The Shibarium aims to reduce costs and increase transaction speeds for improved scalability. The network will be secured via validators and delegators who will stake tokens in return for BONE (governance token of the ShibaSwap DEX) and the unreleased TREAT token. Furthermore, all transactions on the network will now require some SHIB to be burned as part of a new burning mechanism, thus putting new deflationary pressure on the SHIB supply. Mkt cap $7.3bn;

👇 5) Aave rallied + 31.5% last 1w as the upcoming V3 cloud launch draws closer. The V3 upgrade will reportedly introduce many new features such as community tools, cross chain asset functions, high-efficiency mode, L2 designs and more. It will also utilize a gas optimization model which aims to reduce transaction costs on Aave by 25%. Mkt cap $1.2bn;

👇 6) Filecoin rallied +23.9% last 1w upon Filecoin Foundation’s announcement of plans to deploy a decentralized file system, the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), in space. The mission is set for 2023 aboard Lockheed Martin’s spacecraft. The IPFS launch is aimed to speed up long distance communications, with longer term goals entailing exploring how IPFS can improve interplanetary communication and data transfer. Mkt cap $1.7bn;

👇 7) Bitcoin rallied +18.6% last 1w as investors return to riskier assets such as cryptocurrencies upon the release of promising CPI data indicating easing inflation and possibly slowing rate hikes by the FED. Bitcoin’s resurgence has allowed it to maintain above the $21,000 price level over the past three days, completely recovered from its losses following FTX’s collapse. Mkt cap $412bn;

👇 8) Tezos rallied +18.3% last 1w as Nomadic Labs unveiled a proposal for Tezos’ biggest upgrade to date. The Mumbai upgrade proposal aims to reach new levels of scaling capabilities and enhance transaction efficiency through the integration of features such as smart rollups activation, reduction of block time to 15 seconds, ticket transfers between accounts, as well as the arrival of Epoxy to the mainnet for faster finality validation mechanisms. Mkt cap $941m;

👇 9) OKB rallied +17.4% last 1w upon OKX’s launch of a new copy trading tool which enables users to replicate strategies from top traders by viewing a detailed breakdown of their trading habits and real time updates of their latest moves. OKX also announced another new feature ‘Gas Station’ which will allow users to trade seamlessly on the OKX DEX without having to continuously transfer native network tokens between wallets to pay for gas fees. Mkt cap $8bn;

👇 10) Cronos rallied +17.3% last 1w following the successful completion of its mainnet upgrade ‘Galileo’ on Jan 18th. The major improvements the Cronos v1.0 promises includes mempool prioritization to scale transaction speeds, optimized node storage, reduction of node start-up time by 50%, as well as new functionalities for greater future EVM/Cosmos interoperability. Mkt cap $1.9bn;