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2 December 2022

In this issue

Weekly price tracker || New kids on the block || Crypto’s Three Musketeers

Hello, If it were up to us, we would like see SBF swiftly jailed for his monumental fraud and whatever possible investor money recouped from FTX asap, so we can swallow the loses and move on.  But no. Instead, the Ghost of Crypto Past is lurking around making silly excuses all over the place, whether it is at NYT’s DealBook conference, on Good Morning America, or on a stage-managed Twitter Spaces early this morning.Can we, please, please, get to the part where SBF is behind bars and forgotten? There are other things which need our attention, like building and investing in solid crypto projects. As Bitcoin saw a rebound this week breaching 17k, and strong signals of crypto adoption continued to come in (Stripe is launching its own fiat-to-crypto on-ramp, allowing customers to exchange dollars for cryptocurrencies), the bad news from the FTX contagion and ongoing crypto winter continued to flow in. More companies are declaring their exposure to FTX, and Kraken announced a pretty big layoff. Despite all this, we agree with what BlackRock’s CEO believes – the technology under the hood of the crypto bandwagon still has promise. So, forget SBF, let’s build. The future of crypto shines bright because the technology has a lot to offer, and is inevitable. And what we want to enable you to do is understand emerging crypto technologies better, so you can invest accordingly. This week, we analyse the progress of three promising projects – Polygon, Cardano and Polkadot.

The newsletter is put together by Giottus Crypto Platform and The News Minute’s Brand Studio. You can read all the previous issues of Cryptogram here.

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WEEKLY PRICE TRACKER

Price movements from last Friday

BTC:  3.2% with BTC going under accumulation phase for 3 weeks nowETH:  8% as ETH bounced from strong support from bullsDOGE: 

21% as Elon Musk has hinted heavy crackdown on bots and scams especially crypto related

MATIC: 

10% as Polygon's zkEVM testnet has been making progress according to its co-founder Sandeep

LINK: 

 13% as LINK staking is expected go live on December 6

NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

Project to watch out for:Spin - decentralized trading platform built on NEAR network. Snapshot to be taken for airdrop.Coins to watch out for:FIL - crypto asset that powers the Filecoin network, a decentralized peer-to-peer file storage network that aims to let anyone store, retrieve, and host digital informationAZERO - proof-of-stake public blockchain based on Zero-knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and secure Multi-Party Computation (sMPC)

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THE BIG STORY

Crypto’s Three Musketeers

Beyond Ethereum, the most decentralized Layer 1 blockchain, many blockchains compete to be considered the leading alternative. Today, we analyse and compare three such – Cardano, Polkadot and Polygon – operating on proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.TL;DR:Polygon is leading in terms of key metrics thanks to its marketing & partnerships – also due to it being a top scaling solution to Ethereum. Its token, MATIC, has outperformed both Bitcoin and Ethereum in the last one year.Cardano’s smart contract capabilities are still being developed while its path to being highly decentralized might find it being favoured over the next cycle.Polkadot’s parachain strategy is a novel idea that can build a vast and connected ecosystem in the future though needs more adoption in the short term.Let’s get nerdyHere’s a comparative analysis of all the three projects with a quick snapshot of key metrics. As you can see, Polygon adoption is way, way ahead of others.

But Polkadot’s price is pretty high compared to the other two now, simply a function of tokenomics – far fewer DOT tokens are in supply.

What’s hot about Polygon (MATIC)

• Polygon chain hit the record in active wallets per month. This value reached 8,225,916 as of October 2022.

• The average number of unique active crypto wallets per day has increased by 55% in October.

• The Polygon network is currently performing 34.5 transactions per second, with an average of 2.8 million transactions.

Key theme: Inorganic growth through partnershipsBecause of its high throughput and multi-chain transactions, as well as smooth user experience, Polygon has become one of the most sought-after ecosystems for companies in Web2 and Web3.Polygon made headlines in August as the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, announced support for the blockchain in its new Seaport protocol. OpenSea said it made the move in order to avoid high Ethereum gas fees. This move is expected to save $460 million annually for the NFT marketplace.In September, the brokerage Robinhood announced an exclusive partnership with MATIC, which made Polygon the first supported blockchain on its Web3 walletStephane Kasriel, head of commerce and financial technologies at Meta, revealed that Instagram businesses will soon be able to mint and sell their own NFTs. This service would first launch on the Polygon blockchain, before expanding to others, including Solana.Partnerships with Starbucks, Nike, Reddit’s Avatar NFTs and enabling first JP Morgan’s DeFi transaction has also boosted Polygon’s presence in the metaverse.Tech updates and roadmapPolygon is building a suite of scaling solutions including Polygon Midgen, Polygon Zero, Polygon Avail, a tool for every possible use case, which is similar to what Amazon Web Services offers to Web2 developers.In January, Polygon unveiled a major breakthrough in the ZK realm by introducing Plonky2, which is a proving system that generates lighting fast zero knowledge proofs and recursive proofs. Recursion is basically allowing a large set of transactions into a single transaction and Plonky2 can generate a recursive proof in 170 milliseconds, which is 100X faster than any existing alternatives. 

What’s hot about Cardano (ADA)

• The Vasil upgrade happened on September 22nd, which makes the network more reliable and scalable by minimising security risks. After the previous Alonzo hard fork, Cardano introduced smart contract compatibility back in 2021.

• The University of Edinburgh and Input Output Global (IOG), the builder of the Cardano network, have teamed up to create a blockchain decentralization index. When launched, the EDI will provide live tracking of assets “underpinned by a continuously calculated and reviewed methodology.

• Emurgo Pte. Ltd., one of the founding entities behind Cardano, also announced the first fiat-backed stablecoin on the network, USDA, which will launch in the first quarter of 2023.

Tech updates and roadmap

As the Vasil upgrade takes Cardano further into the BASHO phase of its roadmap, the blockchain enters its final phase before true decentralization. With the next phase, Voltaire, Cardano should be ready to achieve high adoption among its community.

What’s hot about Polkadot (DOT)

• On 30 Nov, Polkadot ecosystem announces the formation of Polkadot Alliance that establishes a code of ethics for the community. Founding bodies include Acala, KILT Protocol, Moonbeam, Astar, Subscan, Interlay, and Phala

• Earlier this month, the network released an update highlighting some developments such as XCM v3, OpenGov and Polkadot Fellowship that may lay the foundation for its 2023 progress.

Tech updates and roadmapBecause of its interoperability strength, Polkadot is considered as a blockchain of blockchains. Most blockchains operate independently of each other. These networks are closed-loop for a variety of reasons, with security being the top priority for most decentralized networks. Polkadot allows for trustless communication between blockchains. From Kusama, Chainlink to Sushi, Astar, the ecosystem is associated with 185 projects as per dotmarketcap.com.When the chain becomes fully operational, they are expected to handle 1,000,000 transactions per second (TPS). The network currently operates at an average speed of 1000 TPS, compared to 10,000 TPS of Cosmos (ATOM) and 100,000 TPS of Bitgert(BRISE).Following the Polkadot's parachain consensus protocol launch in December 2021, Parathreads is the logical update of the parachains feature. This will enable developers to be able to upload their code to the relay chain without worrying about auctions.Parathreads is an easy and more accessible entry for launching Layer 1 chains on top of Polkadot with the same benefits as participating in the parachain auction. The estimated launch of Parathreads is Q1 or Q2, 2023.If you intend to be long-term investor in crypto, we suggest that you closely watch the development of these three projects.

That’s all we have for this issue, see you next week! 

If you have any questions or feedback for us, write to us at [email protected]. You can check out the previous issues here.

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