21Shares Monthly Review is Out: Insights from January 2023

Easing inflation in the US hyped market sentiment in crypto’s favor in January, despite some headwinds brought by Genesis’ bankruptcy and a law enforcement action against Bitzlato, accused of laundering $700M, with Binance being the last destination for the funds. Over the past 30 days, Bitcoin and Ethereum have increased by almost 40% and 30%, respectively. The outlier of last month’s rally was Solana, up by 140%, which may be attributed to the hype created by the meme token called BONK. Optimism stood out within the realm of scalability solutions, increasing by 132%. As for decentralized applications, staking-as-a-service platform Lido, increased by 117% over the past month; users have been allocating billions to collect rewards.

Figure 1: Price and TVL Development of Major Crypto Sectors

Source: 21Shares, Coingecko, DeFi Llama. Data as of January 30.

Key takeaways from this report:

• Former CEO of troubled crypto exchange FTX pleads not guilty, and crypto lender Genesis files for bankruptcy,

• Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade still on schedule, Polygon zkEVM mainnet launching soon, and Fantom to introduce account abstraction in its next upgrade.

• Liquid staking protocols experience tremendous growth, DeFi continues to embrace the onboarding of Real World Assets (RWAs).

• NFT marketplaces and GameFi protocols continue migrating to Polygon; Seoul is launching a metaverse for its public services by 2026.

Spot and Derivatives Markets

Figure 2: Total Liquidations

Source: Coinglass

Over the past month, we have seen the largest short squeeze in months of over $2.57 billion liquidated on Binance, OKX, and Bybit. This dynamic is an indication that there were more funds betting against Bitcoin and the recent positive rally disappointed their positions. The recent price action is simply a regression to the mean. We are back to levels where we were post the LUNA debacle and pre-FTX. However, it is important to note that this rally may not be long-lasting as we may face mispriced headwinds.

On-chain Indicators

Figure 3: Inflation Rate of Bitcoin versus Ethereum

Source: Glassmode

Since the Merge of September 15 last year, Ethereum’s supply change is now nearing -3K ETH, according to data collected by Ultra Sound Money. That means that ETH is gradually becoming a deflationary asset, thanks to a post-Merge mechanism that removes a portion of ETH that has been spent on transaction fees. That is in comparison to its rival cryptoasset, which has also progressed on the deflating front on the back of Bitcoin’s halving slated to happen next year. The fact that Bitcoin’s native, unaltered, underlying technology is bringing its inflation down, is very telling of Bitcoin’s core value proposition akin to gold: scarcity.

Next Month’s Calendar

Source: 21shares, Forex Factory

Read full report here

Research Newsletter

Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com

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The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.