Coral Weekly Market Recap

As?Coral?continues to grow its investment platform, we believe it is important to keep you updated on what's going on in the crypto markets. In the midst of ongoing market development, here are some market updates from the last week:

?1) Vertex Protocol soon to launch on Arbitrum

?2) How Winechain can revolutionize wine ownership

?3) Animoca Brands continues to attract interest despite bear market conditions

Vertex Protocol soon to launch on Arbitrum

?Vertex Protocol is building a vertically integrated exchange product that takes the best qualities of CeFi and brings them on the blockchain to create an all in one experience for DeFi users. On Vertex, users can take advantage of cross-marginated spot and derivatives trading and an integrated money market.

Vertex plans to cater its product to both retail and institutional traders. Retail traders will benefit from simple on/off ramps that include allowing the user to deposit funds with a credit card. Vertex will implement single sign-up options (SSO) that are familiar to Web2 users so that retail can use an email or social media account to sign up and create a wallet.?Institutional traders benefit from the capital efficiency inherent in the Vertex design.?

While Vertex takes the orderbook approach to its product, it plans to use an AMM as a backstop for when liquidity disappears. AMMs support long tail assets to have liquid functioning markets while permitting LPs to earn yield from trading activity. The hybrid approach of an orderbook and an AMM should support Vertex to facilitate trading of emerging projects.

Vertex has also discussed the idea of NFT floor perps and perps linked to real world assets (RWA) as well as a predictions market if it were to amass a strong community. For those interested in a potential airdrop of the Vertex token (VRTX), you may want to consider playing around with its testnet.

How Winechain can revolutionize wine ownership

Winechain is a fascinating example of the intersection between Web3 and traditional industries. Here's how it works: Winechain partners with premier wineries around the world. Winechain's marketplace will allow any member to buy and sell wines from these wineries by using NFTs to represent ownership of wine bottles. When a member redeems (burns) the NFT representing ownership of a bottle, Winechain will ship the wine to his residence. This is a huge advantage for the member who can choose to store the wine via Winechain's storage membership program. When the member decides he wants the wine, Winechain handles the logistics in a transparent manner for the member to track and verify via blockchain technology.

What's great about Winechain is that it allows wine collectors to obtain foreign wines, which is a hurdle both logistically and economically. Rather than purchasing a foreign wine for a reasonable price, the buyer is hit with a handful of markups as the wine makes its way through the supply chain. Winechain ensures transparency and simplicity for the buyer throughout this process.

Wineries are also benefitting from joining Winechain. If Winechain succeeds in facilitating a wine marketplace, we expect wine investing to increase significantly. There are currently few avenues to wine investing. Some methods replicate the returns but do not pass along the wine whereas other methods require using a broker who takes a large percentage of the selling price. Winechain democratizes this process for anyone to participate. The wineries benefit from royalties on the NFT transactions as buyers and sellers engage in an open marketplace.

Animoca Brands continues to attract interest despite bear market conditions

This year, Animoca Brands held two funding rounds from prominent investors, including Temasek, a $400B Singaporean sovereign wealth fund (SWF). Animoca also launched its Japan division, further demonstrating interest in Metaverse products around the world. Coral had invested in Animoca Brands through a third party at a $1B valuation in 2021.

On December 6, Animoca announced a majority stake in Pixelynx, a music metaverse gaming platform founded by industry experts. Through Pixelynx, artists can reinvent the way music is developed and shared via a customized experience for community members. Over the past year, music NFTs have become a stronger topic of conversation, especially since the industry is difficult to break into for the average musician. On top of that, record labels have significant power over the rights to an artist's music which leads to less money for the artist. We went into analysis on music NFTs on a previous monthly primer you can find?here.

For more on Animoca's investment in Pixelynx and how Pixelynx plans to redesign the relationship between artists and their communities, check out this?article.?

It is generally harder to track progress in the Metaverse sector of Web3. On DeFi Llama, anyone can monitor statistics relating to DeFi protocols such as Total Value Locked (TVL), market cap ratios, inflows/outflows in various cryptocurrencies, yield opportunities, and more. A lot of the capital and allocation of Metaverse is still developing behind the scenes, but last week, Animoca shared its goal to set up a $2B fund for Metaverse companies. We are particularly excited to see how the nascent Metaverse sector unfolds over the coming decades, and we will be keeping a close eye on any opportunities that we believe will have staying power.