Going digital while markets recover

​

The Coronavirus pandemic is still an omnipresent topic around the world. It effects people and markets heavily around the globe. Since people in crypto are especially watching the volatile markets, we’ll cover price developments a little more extensively in Blockchain Insights April 2020 than usual. Since mid of March, there is a significant correlation (0.4+) of daily returns between Bitcoin, stocks and Gold. This correlation is definitely something to watch out for in the coming months.

The crypto industry hosted a number of great online events and conferences and made many of these events freely accessible for more people compared to local conferences. The long-awaited halvings of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV were rather unspectacular and the crypto industry is still very much awaiting Bitcoin Halving on the 12th of May and the launch of new blockchain protocols.

Prices across asset classes in traditional and crypto markets recovered quickly from the March selloff. The best performing crypto assets with more than 5 Million USD trading volume in April were Tezos (83%), Chainlink (82%), Stellar (80%), Steamr (70%), Cardano (74%). Bitcoin’s price rose 37% over month while its volatility decreased significantly from more than 170% to 70% – getting much closer to stocks volatility at the end of April. In fact, many people aimed for low volatility and went into stablecoins: The aggregated market capitalization of stablecoins rose steadily from 6B USD at the beginning of March to more than 8B USD at the end of April. Overall, Crypto volumes have steadily risen in the past year, peaked in March and stayed very high throughout April.

Interesting research

Blockchain research April 2020 focuses on currently trending topics: Cryptocurrency markets, Bitcoin and DeFi.

• PwC Global Crypto M&A and Fundraising Report – April 2020
• Q1 2020 Cryptocurrency Spot Exchange trading volume increased by 104% quarterly
• Bitcoin Maturation Leap – Bloomberg crypto outlook
• The Q1 2020 DeFi Report by Alethio Analytics
• DeFi usage numbers

Updates about protocols on BC

• Celo announced a large community grant program and launched its mainnet
• Block rewards were halved from 12.5 to 6.25 in Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV
• Waves protocol leader Sasha Ivanov shared an insight into 4-years of Waves
• Ontology enables NFTs, launches a first campaign and 9-month program for it
• Different NEM entities are moving into a single governance framework – NEM group
• ETC Cooperative released a review of 2019
• Ethereum Foundation provided a research & development update from various teams
• Dash had its Yearly Emission Reduction of 7.14% & DASH core group hosted its Q1 summary call
• Polkadot is nearing its mainnet launch & having security audits while teams building parachains such as Acala Network or Plasm Network are also about to launch.

More important News

• Andreessen Horowitz announced their Crypto Fund II which has a volume of 515 million USD. In their announcement, they highlight next-generation payments, the store of value narrative, web 3, new business models, DeFi, and gaming as interesting areas.
• Reddit starts experimenting & adding community points (ERC-20) & additional collectibles to two subreddits: Cryptocurrency & Fortnite (See here).
• Luxo is introducing a new kind of ICO “The reversible ICO” to make funding ICOs safer.
• A 25M USD hack exploited the DeFi protocol DForce. 99,95% of total user funds were lost but returned 3 days later by the hacker. Twitter user Gun Sal Lo explained the attack in this tweet and security problems within DeFi. Blockchains and DeFi protocols are safe but the combination of many different protocols bears risks and those depend on the implementation & composability checks.
• The marketcap of DeFi projects rose to more than 1B USD and discussions and standards for integrating on-chain prices, off-chain oracles and protocol composability are emerging.
• Bitcoin is being enabled for DeFi on Ethereum. Various startups are working on this currently.
• Many crypto projects are supporting the fight against Covid
  • The Giving Block
  • 250K USD Gitcoin grants & many more fundraisers
  • Various blockchain projects aim to enable privacy-preserving tracking apps

We share monthly updates about the blockchain industry to help you keep track of the progress. Sign up to the newsletter and these updates are sent directly to your inbox.