MetaMask Monthly Active Users Hit 10M

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

August 31, 2021

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–Daniel Kuhn

Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

ANOTHER ACQUISITION: FTX.US is acquiring crypto derivatives firm LedgerX, a move that could pave the way for FTX to offer crypto futures, swaps, puts and calls to U.S. retail traders. Expected to close in October, the acquisition will see LedgerX become a wholly owned subsidiary of FTX.US – just the latest in a string of high-profile buys, including ad campaigns and stadium rebrandings, for Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto trading empire.

DIG THE DAO: Andreessen Horowitz led a $20 million Series A into Syndicate, a community-based investment system for building DAOs. Some 150 VCs, angels and founders, including actor Ashton Kutcher, rapper Snoop Dogg and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian also invested in perhaps the largest rubber stamp on DAOs from mainstream investors to date. DAOs are an ultra-modern way to create corporate-like governance structures around pooled assets stored on a public blockchain.

NFT VENTURE: Prominent venture firm Three Arrows Capital has launched an NFT-dedicated fund called Starry Night Capital. In a tweet today, pseudonymous non-fungible token collector Vincent Van Dough not only announced the fund but said Three Arrows would support an "NFT education portal," promote emerging artists and launch a physical NFT gallery space in a "major city" before the end of the year.

WALLETS, WOW! MetaMask, the non-custodial digital wallet that has become a key gateway to the world of DeFi, said its monthly active users hit 10 million in July, with the Asian market leading growth. Users increased from 545,080 monthly users in July 2020 to 10,354,279 in August 2021, representing growth of over 1,800%, according to ConsenSys, the Ethereum software company that owns MetaMask.

SERIOUS APPLICATIONS: China's state-owned Bank of Communications (Bocom) and China Construction Bank are discussing how the country's CBDC could be used to buy investment funds and insurance, the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday. The talks may lead to the currency finding a use outside the daily, low-value payments originally envisaged for the program.

–D.K.

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What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

El Salvador's finance commission will create a $150 million trust to facilitate exchange between BTC/USD (Bitcoin Magazine), while Salvadorans protest the novel currency arrangement (The Guardian)
Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum launches mainnet and raises $120 million in new funding (The Block)
Electronic Arts Dipping Toes into Blockchain Games and NFTs (Play to Earn)
An interview with Sam Bankman-Fried (Forbes), and one with Pantera's Dan Morehead (The Defiant – Video)

–D.K.

A Message from BlockBank

Looking for a crypto wallet with DeFi and CeFi coupled with banking and debit cards? Look no further, V2 of BlockBank's super application launches this fall, offering access to:

Custodial and non-custodial wallets
Digital bank accounts
Physical & Virtual Debit cards
Robo Advisor
Access to dApp

BlockBank has already obtained licenses for Estonian virtual currency service provider, and Australian digital currency exchange and payment service provider.

Stay updated and subscribe to the Beta testing.

Putting the news in perspective

The Takeaway

Why Everyone in NFTs Is Suddenly Talking About Price 'Floors'
EtherRock Price is a Twitter bot account that tracks the price of EtherRock, a collection of 100 pet rock JPEGs that live on a blockchain. Spun up on Aug. 6, the automated Twitter account arguably has more utility than the project it serves. It's a direct line into how people are valuing a series of worthless-on-the-surface non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Created in 2017, EtherRock is one of the oldest NFT projects, but it has only recently attracted buyers' attention. Currently, the cheapest rock, Rock ID 96, is listed for 678.88 ETH, or about $2.2 million. The owner of Rock 0 is asking for 10,000 ETH.

By its founder's own admission: "These virtual rocks serve NO PURPOSE beyond being able to be [bought] and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game :)" Indeed, apart from rank and small variations in color, all the rocks are identical reproductions of the same royalty-free, clip art image.

In a sense, EtherRock is the quintessential contemporary NFT project: The humor, the rabid fanbase, the self-aware, total conflation of value and price. No one can say for sure why a rock that sold for $50,000 at the beginning of the month is now worth millions – other than there's momentum behind these boulders.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the project's closely watched "price floor." A term borrowed and bastardized from commodities trading, a floor price is the lowest price at which an NFT can be bought for a particular project.

In commodities trading, the term refers to price controls imposed by governments or groups that set the minimum amount someone could charge for a good, commodity or service. It functions as a way to prevent a race to the bottom in pricing, often to buoy a particular industry.

In crypto, it's often one of the few hard pieces of data that accompanies an NFT project, and is somewhat comparable to bids and asks in traditional order book markets. But it also may not say much about the viability of a project.

In semi-liquid NFT markets, a hot project will have a rising price floor. But given the limited number of buyers and sellers on both sides of a unique digital asset trade, there's no guarantee the price can hold.

"A lot of this stuff just gets bid up very hard by speculators. But then there isn't necessarily liquidity on both ends," an NFT trader who goes by 0xSisyphus said in an interview.

Like all else in crypto, there's also a social meaning behind the numbers. A price floor also represents the weakest hands in a market – the lowest price at which a particular seller is willing to undercut other holders. In some communities, people are badgered into not selling at a given price.

Of course, price floors are not the only way to judge the value of an NFT. There's subjective readings of a project's community, there's an asset's programmable rarity, there's provenance and history. There's also more technical metrics like determining what percentage of a project's supply has been listed overtime – a cue into how many motivated sellers there may be.

Crypto is not unfamiliar with industry-specific ways to measure novel digital assets, which often do more harm than good. Take market capitalization: Derived by multiplying the total amount of coins in circulation by a cryptocurrency's price, the metric is essentially meaningless as a way to judge different assets with different circulating supplies. There's also "total value locked," or TVL. Specific to the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, this is a metric former CoinDesk reporter Brady Dale called "so simple it's confusing."

Given the absurdity of the moment – when the ground floor for getting into digital rocks is an astronomical $2.2 – it's not surprising that people are latching onto any metric they can.

Read this column on CoinDesk.

–D.K.

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