DeFi Talks - Airdrops analysis
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Let’s start…
INTRO:
There are moments that have a significant impact on the DeFi space whether good or bad, an event that played an important role was the $UNI airdrop from the popular Uniswap DEX.
Consider that this airdrop came to be worth around 18024 thousand dollars at some point and was one of many factors that contributed to the so-called “DeFi summer”, which saw a surge in innovation and investment in the space.
Now, as the DeFi space continues to evolve, a new event may be on the horizon.
The Arbitrum airdrop could be just the catalyst needed to spark a new wave of innovation and maybe mark the beginning of a DeFi summer 2.0…
FLASH NEWS:
Finally, the long-awaited Arbitrum airdrop is here! $ARB token will be claimable on Thursday 23th, check if you are eligible here;
After the Credit Suisse flop, UBS, their ultimate rival, offered to acquire them;
GUIDE OF THE WEEK:
It’s finally here, only one day before $ARB is released so let’s understand the implications of an event like this by backtesting what happened with $OP:
Optimism it’s a Layer 2 like Arbitrum which airdropped their token to early users of the chain last May.
The airdrop was 5% of the total supply of $OP which is 4.3B, so a total of 215M tokens at a starting price of 0.85$ aka $183M.
The next two days after launch price rose to $1.66:
And then plummeted to $0.40:
Only to recover and from there on it never touched that low again…
We can recap all this in three main patterns:
-Initial FOMO pump;
-Actual airdrop dump;
-Recovery and price discovery;
Now we don’t actually know how $ARB will play out but we can make some projections on his future value and adjust our intention accordingly.
Looking at current data Optimism market capitalization sit around $850M with a fully diluted valuation of $11.5B, from the Arbitrum side we know that the max supply will be 10B token of which 1.1B will be airdropped to users.
Consensus seems to be agreeing on a price of around 1$ which will put $ARB market capitalization at 1.2B at the start resulting in a higher valuation of $ARB compared to $OP which seems fairly reasonable given how Arbitrum metrics performed:
In terms of volume, Arbitrum has been always slightly up than Optimism until the start of 2023 where it heavily outperformed it with a weekly average volume of 1.9B(!) vs 270M;
ARBITRUM:
OPTIMISM:
Furthermore from a daily transactions (DTs) point of view Arbitrum is still ahead with a DTs maximum of 1.3M vs 800k and an average transaction per day always above Optimism,
Finally, it’s important to note that the remaining 87% of the supply will be distributed to the team/investors and this, even though is vested, sparked much controversy in the community for the disproportional allocation.
That’s it for today, remember to let us know in the comment if you got the airdrop and how much of it!
MACRO TALKS:
Something wild is happening in the markets, and it's got everyone talking. A bank in California declared bankruptcy and left a massive $151 billion hole for its customers who had deposited their money. This created a ripple effect that affected the crypto world too.
The company "Circle," which issues the stablecoin $USDC, had deposited about $3 billion at the bank, and this caused the stablecoin's value to drop to $0.9 cents on Sunday, March 12th.
The next day, the Federal Reserve had to intervene to support the failing bank to prevent financial contagion. This was because banks are often interconnected, and the failure of one could affect others. The Fed provided short-term loans to the bank through the Discount Window, which is a mechanism that allows banks to borrow money from the central bank.
It's interesting to note that the situation with the failing bank affected stablecoins like USDC, which are pegged to the US dollar. Stablecoins are meant to provide a stable and reliable store of value for users, but this situation showed that they aren't immune to risks.
The Fed's decision to support the banking system by lowering requirements for accessing the Discount Window shows how challenging the financial system is during this time. The Fed's move can be seen as an effort to provide support to banks during a time of uncertainty and volatility.
In short, it's essential to keep an eye on developments in the financial system and to understand the risks associated with different financial instruments, including stablecoins.
Jerome Powell's task is not easy, a fragile banking system with sticky inflation.
INTO THE RABBIT HOLE:
Just one billion away from 50B of total DeFi TVL, it’s been a rollercoaster but we are still here and grinding up million by million, let’s see where we will end up… is this the start of a new cycle or just an upward correction?
Deep green for almost every chain following the huge move of BTC last week who caught almost everyone off guard, overall we can see the two Ethereum L2 doing the best performance in terms of TVL as well as Mixin with a whopping +22% on 7d, something is brewing or is just noise?
Support us:
Donate using any EVM-compatible crypto: 0x1db2bC5951A75C61E12C1A5e8C0475FBb9df95eD
And don’t forget to follow us on:
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