Crypto Fundamentals #012

Happy Friday folks! The pump continues with a median and average 7D increase in price of ~15% and ~26%, respectively. The crypto markets have been all green in 2023, with almost a ~50% median rebound in the L1 ecosystem since the start of the year.

Price / Activity WoW Change:

Aptos continues to lead this year’s egregious WoW price changes with a ~129% gain.

Other major gainers included FTM (up ~56%), OP (up ~33%) and MATIC (up ~24%) while TVL and Stablecoin volume have also seen inflows over the week (up an average of 7.3% and 1.5%, respectively).

TVL has seen a nice uptick over the past month, likely driven by increases in token prices across the board. FTM had the largest week over week change and continues to boast a TVL value of ~$514mm, meaningfully ahead of competitors including Solana ($264mm), Aptos ($58mm) and NEAR ($85mm).

Trading Volumes WoW Change:

7D Trading volumes have continued to grow versus the prior week with median 7D volumes of ~$8.2bn (excl. BTC) vs. prior week of ~$7.6bn. SOL and APT saw the highest levels of trading (excl. ETH), with $8.4bn and $7.8bn traded over the past 7 days, respectively, representing ~93% and ~270% of current circulating market cap. OP also saw a huge trading week with ~$2.8bn in volume, a whopping ~570% of its circulating market cap.

Developer / User Activity WoW Change:

The devs are back in full force with weekly commits and active devs up meaningfully across all blockchains that we cover (average increases of ~75% and ~48%, respectively). Solana saw the largest % increase in weekly commits we’ve seen in a while with ~319% WoW increase, as well as a hefty ~121% increase in weekly active devs. Solana is boasting the 3rd largest weekly active core dev ecosystem after Ethereum (427) and Cosmos (259).

On the other hand, usage activity has only incrementally moved this week (up average of 5.6% Wow), largely driven by Aptos. (~81% 7D increase in DAAs.) DAAs actually declined by 23% for FTM, with smaller drops for other major chains including Avalanche (down 7% WoW) and Optimism (down 6% WoW).

Other Crypto Newz

The Artemis team has been working on bringing you new insights from our Protocol Composition dashboard. Some interesting insights we’ve discovered in the past week:

Gas usage by category has shown us that Ethereum L1 blockspace has been utilized for pretty different products over the past few years. Over the years, we have seen DeFi, stablecoins and NFTs take the top spot in gas usage on Eth L1. How different would it look across other chains 😱

Protocol composition can help you catch new waves in product usage - check it out below identifying the growth in gas usage of Manifold 👁️🗨️

ecosystem highlights below 👇

Aptos

This was accompanied by an ~12% increase in TVL and ~7% increase in stablecoin volume, bringing the total ecosystem to $58mm in TVL and $51mm of stablecoin volume. Daily active addresses and transactions have also spiked, up ~80% WoW as folks have rushed into the ecosystem alongside the price gains.

Weekly commits and active devs have increased meaningfully, with ~49 weekly active devs as of this week. It looks like there will be more dev engagement in the coming week, with the highly anticipated Seoul Hackathon happening in the first week of February. More activity to come?

Despite the growth in these fundamental metrics, it clearly feels as though price has outpaced real developments on the platform. We can see that funding rate turned sharply negative once the price inflected above the ~$16 dollar range on Jan 25 and remains negative through today, indicating that there are still traders who expect the price to decline.

(note: funding rate is a term used in crypto perpetual contracts to describe whether it costs money to be long or short an asset. In the case that funding rate is positive - it means that traders are paying periodic interest payments to be long a token, and would benefit if the underlying price increases. If the funding rate is negative, it means that traders are paying periodic interest payments to be short a token and will benefit if the underlying price declines. Here is an article from binance going over some basics~ https://www.binance.com/en/blog/futures/a-beginners-guide-to-funding-rates-421499824684900382)

However, with more positive catalysts on the developer side and increasing fundamental metrics, it will be interesting to watch how the price and platform continue to perform.

Artemis Dashboard

Lastly, the gokustats.xyz website has now been deprecated and fully replaced by our new Artemis Dashboard!! We are thankful for all of the support from the community and are excited to enter this new chapter in our growth with all of you 🤝

That’s all folks