Crypto's Trojan Horse

Hey, it's Marc. ??

Telegram X TON: Crypto's trojan horse? Animoca Brands comes to Bitcoin. Roblox announces immersive ads. Blackrock invests in RWA company. Amazon's new genAI chatbot. Top charts & more.

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?? Top 5 Reads

• Consumer Crypto By The Numbers Q1 2024. By BlockchainBrett & Jon Gall. Link
• Why Web3 loyalty hasn’t taken off (yet). By Tareq Nazlawy.?Link
• The scenecoin opportunity. By Josh Cornelius. Link
• Investing in TON Network. By Paul Veradittakit. Link

?? See all top reads...

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? Web3 & Brands

TON x Telegram ??

TON (The Open Network), a Layer 1 network originally designed by Telegram and continued by the open source community, and its token (TON) have made headlines:

• Today, Pantera Capital announced its investment in TON. Link
• Recently Tether's USDT stablecoin was integrated into Telegram via TON, enabling peer-to-peer payments within the app. Link
• Telegram also enabled users buy channel advertisements with TON. The platform plans to share 50% of ad revenue with owners of public channels. Link

You can dive deeper in this X thread.

By the numbers: Telegram is the third biggest messaging platform, boasting 900M monthly active users, adding 36M users in January alone.

Meanwhile, TON has experienced remarkable growth.

• TON recently made its way into the Top 10 coins by market cap. Link
• TON’s total value locked (TVL) increased to $171M, almost doubling in April and the highest on record. Link
• Active monthly wallets on TON have increased six-fold. Link

Here's were it gets interesting:

• TON is more than a blockchain: it's becoming a super-ecosystem of thousands of apps, games, decentralized storage, website, and more –?all running on the TON blockchain.
• Meanwhile, TON has wallet integrations on Telegram apps, so you could accept crypto, trade coins, buy NFTs, stake, and literally everything from the chat interface.

This means: global, unrestricted P2P payments surpassing regional limitations of existing super apps.

... are you getting it?

Bitcoin Goes Consumer ??

• Animoca Brands, Hong Kong-based game software company, is coming to Bitcoin. Link
• In a partnership with Opal Foundation, they aim to create the largest Web3 ecosystem encompassing gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), entertainment, education, and culture.

What they’re saying:?“With the advent of Ordinals, Bitcoin made the giant leap from simply being a way to store value to becoming a store of culture for the Web3 age” –?Yat Siu, Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands

The big picture: Last year, the Ordinals (BRC-20) protocol brought NFTs to Bitcoin with over 66M inscriptions to date and a $2.65B?market cap. Recently, Layer2 protocols, such as Lightning or Stacks, picked up as well.

Recently, Bitcoin Runes introduces a new fungible token standard on Bitcoin, enabling a host of new innovations such as DeFi, Tokenization, Stablecoins, and more.

Punchline: Bitcoin is experiencing a “consumer” renaissance and is turning into a serious contender to other L1 smart contract chains.

More on Web3:

• Gatorade and Rumble Kong League collab on an NFT-driven basketball game on Avalanche. Link
• Mastercard is kicking off Season 2 of its music artist accelerator program. Link
• Roblox announces immersive video ads are now available for sale. Link
• OpenSea’s activity drops to lowest since July 2021. Link

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?? Crypto & Macro

Bulls & Bears ??

Weathering the bear within the bull market?:

• Digital asset investment products saw outflows for the third consecutive week totalling $435M, marking the largest outflows since March this?year. Link
• Despite the initial hype, the Hong Kong BTC & ETH ETFs had a lackluster debut. Link

Weekly Outflows (Source: CoinShares)

Yes, but: Consumer skepticism is dropping and adoption is happening.

• Major pensions are buying
• Morgan Stanley is prepping 15,000 brokers to recommend clients buy?
• BNY Mellon is reporting exposure

Kernel of evidence: The combined transaction volume of the top 3 stablecoins surpassed Visa’s 2023 monthly average. Daily BTC transactions hit a new ATH of 926,842 per day

Punchline: We’re in a period of consolidation, but broader crypto adoption is happening. Consumer sentiment is shifting while institutional interest is growing.?

More on Crypto:

• BlackRock leads RWA tokenisation platform Securitize’s $47M strategic round.
• BlackRock’s BUIDL is now the largest tokenized treasury fund, hitting $375M. Link

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??AI + Metaverse

• Worldcoin developer Tools for Humanity wants to partner with PayPal and OpenAI. Link
• Amazon releases its generative AI chatbot / automated assistant, Q. Link

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?? Money Moves

• Backed: Swiss tokenized asset issuer raises $9.5M round led by Gnosis
• Pantera Capital: VC firm looks to raise $1B for new crypto fund
• Natix: DePIN project focused on mapping data raises $4.6M ahead of token launch

?? Continue reading...

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