Market Overview (Aug 7 – Aug 13): Unmissable Announcements, Hot Trends, Insights

Key Points

• Notable highlights from last week include Binance Labs selecting top projects, PayPal launching its own stablecoin, and the emergence of the Friend Tech platform for content creators and users.
• Macroeconomically, CPI updates indicate rising inflation, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell struggled to explain the significance of the 2% inflation target.
• The upcoming trend to watch is the strong competition among Layer 2 solutions, indicating a bullish trend for L2 projects in the crypto space.

Dive into this market overview developments, from game-changing announcements to emerging trends and macroeconomic insights.

Last week’s highlights big news

Binance Labs announced the four top projects from its MVB program, including AltLayer, KiloEx, Kinza, and Sleepless AI. Meanwhile, GMX launched the beta version of GMX V2, and GNS announced that the commodity trading volume on gTrade had reached an ATH, exceeding $40M.

DYDX is evaluating the process of converting to gas token on the dYdX Cosmeos LI chain, while Trader Joe, the largest Avalanche DEX, announced the launch of onchain limit order function. SEI also announced that Mainnet is ready.

In other news, Aptos partnered with Microsoft to integrate blockchain with AI, resulting in a nearly 20% surge in the price of $APT. However, top Fantom SpiritSwap DEX officially dissolved due to the Multichain incident, while AMM protocol on Ethereum, Saddle Finance, announced that it will close and reimburse investors.

FED introduced new regulations to oversee crypto activities at US banks, while $FXS, Frax V5 will be launched this month, focusing on stablecoin products, participating in the RWA narrative, and announcing an in-house peg stability mechanism.

Valio, an on-chain asset management protocol, is set to launch on 07/08, while $GMX V2 is rumored to launch next week after several delays. Balancer is also rumored to deploy on Avalanche, and Palm Network will switch from Ethereum sidechain to Supernet Polygon ZK in the coming weeks. $SAND will unlock a large amount of tokens on 14/08, and the TVL of Mantle Network is increasing rapidly, with this new Layer 2 launched only a few weeks ago.

Finally, the deadline for BlackRock’s Bitcoin Spot ETF is 12/08. It is likely that the SEC will postpone its decision on this application again because Gary Gensler is not very favorable towards crypto.

Hot Trend of the Week

Twitter’s “X” platform is now allowing users to earn money from their content, similar to YouTube. To be eligible, users must have a verified account, 500 followers, and 15 million views in the last three months. After some community backlash, X reduced the view requirement to 5 million. This move offers a new opportunity for content creators to monetize their work, and it will be interesting to see how it develops over time.

PayPal announced its own stablecoin for payments and transfers. PayPal USD (PYUSD) will be backed by 100% USD deposits, short-term US Treasury bonds, and cash equivalents. The stablecoin will be issued by Paxos, the same company that issued BUSD. However, Paxos stopped supporting Binance after the SEC threatened to sue over concerns that BUSD was a security. It remains to be seen how the SEC will respond to PayPal’s stablecoin.

Friend.Tech specializes in the #SocialFi sector built on BuildOnBase. The good thing about Friend Tech is that users can join communities and connect with KOLs by buying “Shares” of those KOLs, which can be understood as unique “tokens” for each KOL.

When joining these communities, users can:

• Chat with KOLs -> Find insights or secrets
• Participate in trade deals
• View photo albums, videos, etc. (similar to Only Fans)

The “Share” price is calculated based on the number of tokens in circulation, with the formula Price = supply^2 / 16000 (calculated in ETH). This model creates a win-win situation for both KOLs and users, and it has the potential to attract new players to the market.

Macroeconomic

In macroeconomic news, the latest CPI updates indicate that inflation is on the rise. This month’s CPI is 3.2%, up from last month’s 3.0%, and the estimate is 3.3%. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, also increased slightly to 4.7%.

The rising inflation rate has raised questions about the Fed’s target of 2%, which Fed Chairman Jerome Powell struggled to explain during a recent interview. Powell stated that 2% is a percentage that all central banks agree on, but he could not clearly explain why it is important. This uncertainty is likely to continue as the Fed navigates the challenging economic landscape.

Next week’s review

The battle between L2s at the moment is extremely fierce, with new L2 projects being prepared to launch such as Manta in testnet, recently Mantle and Linea launched their mainnet, and L1 transitioning to L2 like Celo… Especially, the meme trend is hot for base layer, attracting a considerable amount of money.

This shows that the L2 trend will be a very strong trend in the coming bull run season. It is also worth paying attention to some L2s that have already issued tokens. If someone missed the price increase from #OP due to news from Superchain, OP Stack, there is still $ARB coming up, which will be used for fee payment for L3s on Arbitrum, which is a time to buy ($GMX TOP1 DEX, $RDNT is a Lending Protocol project operating on the layer 2 chain Arbitrum that seems to be undervalued. The amount of fees generated monthly is still high while the price is still decreasing. This protocol will soon expand to other EVMs).

This Week’s Market Prediction

In the weekly $BTC chart, the Width Bollinger Band indicator (measuring price volatility) has dropped to an extremely low level. The lowest since 2016 market.

Meanwhile, the Keltner Channel, an indicator measuring the deviation of EMA 20, also shows a similar trend between early 2016 and now. Prices have touched the upper range several times, then retested the middle line. This further confirms that we can partially rely on the market 2016 trend to play for this year.

DISCLAIMER: The information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to DYOR before investing.