Two Degens (resources, interviews, on all things crypto and some AI)

5 Minute Crypto ⏳ - Animoca finances; North Korea hackers; Goldman Sachs crypto survey; Uniswap fees and more!

Two Degens - Crypto and web3 investing and building from Asia

Howdy everyone — this is the 5 minute crypto update for Sunday May 21

We’ve got DefiLlama stats, Animoca finances, North Korea hacks, Goldman Sachs survey on family offices, and more

Let’s get it on!



As of this recording...

Bitcoin is slightly up at $27200
ETH is holding at $1820
Quite interesting to see Lido’s staked Ether, or STETH, as a top 10 token with a market cap of almost $12B. Again all roads lead back to ETH



Metrics update
For today’s metrics update, I wanted to take a look at top projects by fee revenue on DefiLlama



On to the news

https://www.animocabrands.com/animoca-brands-update-on-financial-position
Animoca Brands released an unaudited report on its finances:
-cash + stablecoin reserves of $194M
-liquid digital assets of $566M (inclusive of Sandbox’ utility token SAND)

https://www.theblock.co/post/231039/solana-sees-surge-in-new-users
Solana has seen 305K new addresses, the highest 7 day average for a year now
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/05/09/litecoin-transactions-hit-record-high-as-bitcoin-fees-surge-amid-brc-20-frenzy/
Similarly, Litecoin transactions hit record highs of 525K this month, double Litecoin’s bull market peak reached in January 2018

https://dailyhodl.com/2023/02/09/north-korea-linked-crypto-theft-surpassed-600000000-in-2022-shattering-all-time-high-report/
https://coingeek.com/north-korea-stole-1-2-billion-from-japan-vietnam-elliptic
Did you know North Korea’s hacker army has stolen over $2B of crypto?
The most affected country was Japan, followed by Vietnam, the US, and Hong Kong

https://decrypt.co/139695/gaming-dominates-on-chain-transactions-in-april-as-arbitrum-users-surge
Blockchain gaming makes up 38% of all crypto transactions
This is among almost 700K daily active wallets - which means 250K of those wallets are playing blockchain games

https://www.gsam.com/content/dam/pwm/direct-links/us/en/PDF/onegs_familyoffice_eyesonthehorizon.pdf?sa=n&rd=n
Goldman Sachs surveyed 166 family offices - basically high net worth families, 70% of whom have net worths above $1B
26% hold cryptocurrencies, a rise from 16% in 2021, but the number who have not invested and have no interest has also risen from 39 to 62%, perhaps because we’re in the depths of a bear market

https://www.theblock.co/post/231317/osmosis-axelar-and-akash-fund-mesh-security-model-for-cosmos-ecosystem
Cosmos has a few competing visions for how to share security across blockchains

https://milkroad.com/news/big-price-moves-coming
Celsius has requested to unstake 428k stETH (~$780M worth) from Lido’s  liquid staking  platform. 
For perspective, there are 18M+ total ETH staked, so that’s around 2% of all staked ETH

https://blockworks.co/news/ripple-cbdc-xrp-ledger
I’m not a fan of Ripple, but they are often in the news and they still have a top 10 coin, so I feel obligated to report
Ripple stated in 2021 that around 80% of countries were reportedly exploring a CBDC. Recent reports suggest that this number has now increased to 90%.

https://blockworks.co/news/uniswap-governance-fee-proposal
Uniswap - the leading Ethereum DEX - may finally charge a small fee to liquidity providers, and the revenue generated would accrue to a treasury that presumably would then flow back to UNI token holders



That’s it for today! All the links are in the show notes. You can follow @twodegenspod on Twitter and subscribe for more!

For our outro clip…we’ve got the Chopping Block podcast talking about L1s and how they compete with Ethereum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgvMBaTjxm4

People on this episode