The 'Weekly Editor's Picks' is a 'functional' column of Odaily Planet Daily. In addition to covering a large amount of real-time information weekly, Planet Daily also publishes many high-quality in-depth analysis content, but they may be hidden in the information flow and trending news, passing by you.
Therefore, our editorial department will select some quality articles worth spending time reading and collecting from the content published over the past 7 days every Saturday, providing you in the crypto world with new insights from data analysis, industry judgment, and perspective output.
Now, let's read together:
Investment
A brief analysis of the dilemmas in crypto venture capital: $49 billion invested in projects since 2015, performance returns struggle against Bitcoin
Looking at the long time frame, the entire industry is in a state of loss. From 2015 to 2022, the $49 billion invested in Token projects created less than $40 billion in value, with a return rate of -19% (not accounting for fees and expenses).
Clearly, not all crypto venture capital flows into Token projects. Assuming venture capitalists collectively hold 15% of these Token's FDV. Based on the current market value, the venture capital industry theoretically holds $66 billion worth of Tokens. If we exclude SOL, this value would be $51 billion. Therefore, the overall investment in the entire industry before 2022 (not accounting for fees and expenses) grew by 34%, including SOL. Excluding SOL, it is essentially flat. These data are based on the assumption that the locked Tokens' FDV can be sold at current prices.
When comparing venture capital with liquid assets, the performance of the vast majority of funds is worse than Bitcoin, especially from the start of the trough. The current curve of cryptocurrency adoption is similar to that of Mag 7 in the early 2010s (or possibly even earlier), so there is still a large market to be developed. Currently, the scale of funds in cryptocurrency venture capital is 20 times that of mature institutional liquid crypto funds (over $88 billion compared to about $4 billion). Therefore, if things develop as I expect, the asset management scale of liquid cryptocurrency will surpass that of cryptocurrency venture capital.
What is the main theme of this round of crypto bull market?
PayFi connects the real world; AI Agent enhances the on-chain world; Meme = on-chain casino.
In conversation with trader Mason: After reviewing nearly a hundred cryptocurrency trading funds in the industry, I found that the characteristics of good traders are.....
When choosing funds and GPs, Mason mainly focuses on three core factors: performance (must have reliable data support), team (integrity, hands-on, holistic view, and continuous evolution), and strategy (needs to align with current market demands and industry development trends).
The industry is always changing, and the participants at each stage are different, so investment strategies are not fixed. There are three types of better strategies in this cycle: coin-based enhancement strategies (TVL games, quantification), discounted purchase of BTC or mining, and phase-specific strategies that outperform BTC, such as CTA.
In conversation with trader Sean: Money will move away from foolishly hardworking people
Sean has a complete Meme trading process: mainly relying on a smart address system and alpha community. The basic process is: understand the project background, observe the chip structure, formulate a trading plan, set stop-loss levels and trading patterns, take profits in batches (upward spikes, event Price in, expected valuation based on your trading plan), set up a large screen Dashboard to track hot coins in real time.
Entrepreneurship
The Web3 industry is entering a 'new era of compliance', are we pursuing the wrong 'Mass Adoption'?
The truly healthy and sustainable path to Mass Adoption in the industry must solve real problems, lower usage barriers, and create lasting value.
Devcon is coming, how should project founders build social influence?
Focus on one platform; specifically arrange creation time; utilize prompts and daily themes; seek team support; empower employees.
Monad founder to peers: You should not easily give away consultant shares
Entrepreneurs can actually get a lot of advice for free; try to solve problems on your own; do not overestimate the endorsement value of consultants; be aware that compared to full-time employees, the input of consultants is very limited; control expectations, don't be overly optimistic; the people most likely to provide you with valuable advice often will not become your consultants; consultants find it difficult to help solve core issues.
Data interpretation: Is the OP SuperChain a good business to make money?
From the data perspective, the current development status of OP SuperChain is still relatively early; only the Base chain has been launched, while other chains are still completely in their infancy.
Airdrop opportunities and interaction guide
This week's must-participate: Citrea testnet, OpenSea 2.0 pre-registration, Babylon and Morph's new Galxe tasks
'Web3 version of MapleStory' MapleStory Universe second pioneer test guide
Meme
The Meme craze: A new battleground for VC, opportunity or trap?
The average daily turnover rate of Meme is about 11%, while DeFi is 5%, Layer 2 is 7%, and Layer 1's average daily turnover rate is 4%. This ratio not only highlights the high liquidity of Meme but also indicates users' high interest and trading frequency in Meme.
As of the end of Q3 2024, the market capitalization of Meme in the entire crypto market has increased from 0.87% two years ago to 2.58% today, and there is still a growing trend.
Meme is a leveraged Layer 1, meaning that during favorable market conditions, it experiences around 5 to 10 times the increase of Layer 1.
Animal-type Meme and cult culture-type Meme are types worth long-term attention. In contrast, other categories of Meme are often related to short-term trends, their attention and popularity may rise and fall rapidly.
Some data metrics of Meme
Meme lifecycle reference table
Interpreting the Binance Meme report: The macro factors and value propositions behind the rise of Meme
The big picture: Global monetary supply expansion and investment behavior.
Small environment: Retail investors seeking new pathways for wealth growth.
Trend: Financialization of internet culture.
Risk considerations: Surviving by a hair, manipulation not reduced; market saturation, innovation stagnation.
Insight: Take the essence (key features such as fair issuance and low circulation token economics).
Outlook: Tokenized software business VS tokenized ideology.
Unveiling the top five crypto market makers' MEME holdings: Wintermute has a high probability of holding MEME when it goes live on Binance
Wintermute, GSR Markets, Auros Global, B2C 2 Group, and Cumberland DRW collectively hold over $120 million worth of MEME coins, with Wintermute being the institution with the largest holdings and covering the most popular projects, and several of its held MEME coins successfully launched on Binance.
Diamond hands, high profit-loss ratio? What are the winning factors for Solana Meme trading?
The most obvious characteristic that distinguishes top addresses from others is that their holding time far exceeds that of regular addresses, showing a significant positive correlation, approximately holding for 6-8 days, similar to the fermentation duration of top tokens on Solana. Another factor with a clear positive correlation is the stop-loss rate; as profits increase, stop-losses are also loosened, although the differences across intervals are not significant.
Surprisingly, profitability is not directly related to the address's earning capacity, indicating that the total profitability of an address is related to its 'win rate', meaning that accuracy and holding long-term are the sources of differentiation in address profitability.
Diamond hands are the core and key to achieving top-level profits. But for readers with limited capital, imitating such strategies may be challenging.
Meme cultivation manual: Rebirth, I want to be a diamond hand (Part 4) | Produced by Nanzhi
The deep evaluation system welcomes a new upgrade.
The Meme battleground under the US elections: No explosive growth, most encountered declines
Good news leads to bad news. Large funds choose to be more cautious during uncertain times in the market. The biggest beneficiaries of the US election may be mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin. The new MEME generation is too large, distracting the market's attention. Serious homogenization competition lacks real narrative ability.
Bitcoin ecology
Bitcoin market report: Major trends, insights, and bullish price predictions
Bitcoin on-chain analysis: Bitcoin exchange balances are at historical lows, indicating increasing confidence among holders, with more and more choosing self-custody.
Bitcoin ETF surge: In October, ETF inflows exceeded $5.4 billion, with BlackRock's IBIT leading the market. This reflects the increasing acceptance of Bitcoin in mainstream financial markets.
Mining dynamics: Russia and China are expanding their mining influence, while the US still maintains the largest share of computing power.
Ethereum
From a long-term perspective, the importance of EigenLayer for the future development of Ethereum
Eigenlayer has built a 'programmable security market' that allows Ethereum's core security resources to be allocated as needed, thereby enhancing Ethereum's market position as a secure settlement layer under the new trend of 'modular', 'chain abstraction'. To some extent, Eigenlayer strengthens Ethereum's external investment and influence system.
The logic of Ethereum's 'deflation' is no longer feasible and can only continue with the stacking of 'leverage' logic.
The importance of Eigenlayer's Rollup-Centric strategy for Ethereum in maintaining the 'technology first' consensus principle is crucial.
DeFi
Opportunities and challenges under Uniswap's innovation: Where is the path for DEX?
The three main directions recently promoted by Uniswap are Uniswap X, Uniswap V4, and Unichain.
With the development of DEX RFQ networks like Uniswap X and Arrakis, and modular DEX architectures like Uniswap V4 and Valantis, the landscape of DEX will enter a new phase. First, many issues within the AMM business process will be resolved, and the scope of business will be greatly expanded. Secondly, under the current intent landscape, many RFQ-related issues still need to be addressed. Finally, AMMs will focus on long-tail markets, optimizing the gradually dominant PMM structure.
Revisiting Ethena: After an 80% drop, does ENA remain in the undervalued hitting zone?
Ethena's business positioning is as a synthetic dollar project with 'native yield', meaning its track is similar to MakerDAO (now SKY), Frax, crvUSD (Curve's stablecoin), GHO (Aave's stablecoin)—all belong to the same track—stablecoins. The business model of stablecoin projects is basically similar: raise funds, issue debt (stablecoins), expand the project's balance sheet; utilize the funds raised for financial operations to obtain financial returns. When the returns from the project operations exceed the comprehensive costs of raising funds and running the project, the project is profitable.
In the past two months, ENA has rebounded nearly 100% from its low, and this is under the condition of ENA opening Season 2 rewards at the beginning of October. These two months have also been periods dense with Ethena news and positive developments. The coming months to a year for Ethena hold promising stories: with rising expectations of Trump taking office and the Republican victory (results to be seen in a few days), the warming crypto market benefits the perpetual arbitrage yields and scales of BTC and ETH, increasing Ethena's protocol income; more projects emerging within the Ethena ecosystem after Ethereal, increasing ENA's airdrop income; Ethena's self-operated public chain launch can also bring attention and staking opportunities for ENA, though this is expected to happen after more projects accumulate on the second chain.
However, for Ethena, the most important thing is that USDE can be accepted as collateral and trading assets by more top CEXs.
As a product with a clear Lindy effect (the longer it exists, the stronger its vitality), Ethena and its USDE still need more time to validate the stability of its product architecture and its survival capability after subsidy reductions.
Weekly hotspot review
In the past week, Trump won the election to become the new president of the United States (related election topic); Bitcoin hit a new historical high, reaching $76,400; crypto-related stocks surged; the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 25 basis points with no opposing votes; Elon Musk's net worth increased by $20.9 billion in one day, maintaining the position of the world's richest person;
In addition, in terms of policy and macro markets, US media: The 2024 US election has spent $14.7 billion, possibly the most expensive in history; Elon Musk: A complete reform of the US government is coming; US Senator Warren defeated crypto industry supporter John Deaton to win the Massachusetts Senate seat; Trump's team is considering nominating Robinhood's chief legal officer Dan Gallagher for SEC chairman; Singapore's Monetary Authority announced the advancement of a financial services tokenization plan; Russia introduced a regulatory framework for crypto mining, defining it as a legal activity and stipulating operational requirements for miners;
In terms of views and voices, Cathie Wood talks about the US elections and Trump's economic policies: The market likes tax cuts; analysts: Inflation in the US may rise rapidly after Trump takes office, and the Federal Reserve will change its interest rate cut plan; Arthur Hayes: During the US elections, Solana will be 'high beta compared to Bitcoin'; CryptoQuant CEO: Currently, stablecoins in this cycle are mainly used for non-trading purposes, and their supply growth is insufficient to boost BTC; Matrixport research: The new SEC chairman and the US strategic reserve may push BTC to break $100,000; Murad: The path for Meme coins' super cycle is now paved; Andre Cronje: Coinbase has repeatedly requested listing fees and is willing to make all evidence public for public verification; Jupiter founder: I have never sold a single JUP, and there will be significant news coming soon; Sotheby's vice president: The BAN token was deployed by me, I did not earn $1 million, and I destroyed 3.7% of the tokens;
Regarding institutions, large companies, and top projects, the Ethereum Foundation has released its 2024 report: Financial reserves of $970 million; two Ethereum researchers resigned from their advisory roles at EigenLayer due to conflicts of interest to focus on Ethereum; on November 8, SOL's market value surpassed BNB again to become the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization; Telegram will launch 10 new mini-program features including sending gifts and ad monetization; MakerDAO resolved to retain the rebranded Sky brand and plans to launch new stablecoins and expand projects; OpenSea CEO discusses the new version: We built a new platform from scratch; Lumoz airdropped 15 million esMOZ tokens to ZKFair users;
In terms of security, Truth Terminal founder: There are issues with the registered domain name, please do not visit; ZachXBT: The crypto betting platform Metawin may have been attacked with losses exceeding $4 million... Well, another week of witnessing history.
Appendix (Weekly Editor's Picks) series portal.
See you next time~
