The Investor's Guide to Polymarket
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This Week in Bitcoin Market Journal
Analyzing the Top Crypto Companies by Active Loans
One of the key metrics we use to analyze winning crypto investments is active loans. In our new guide, you’ll learn how they work, and some of the top projects with high active loan balances, including Aave, Spark Protocol, Morpho, Compound, and Venus.
What are active loans? On lending protocols, an “active loan” refers to an outstanding loan that has yet to be fully repaid. Typically, the loan recipient provides collateral in the form of other cryptocurrencies.?
As an analogy, think of a margin account, where you can borrow money from the broker to buy more stocks than you could with your own cash. However, you must put up some of your own assets (stocks or cash) as collateral.?
The broker lends you money, and you repay it with interest over time. If the value of your stocks drops too much, the broker may require you to add more collateral or liquidate your assets to repay the loan, protecting their downside risk.
In this guide, we’ve rounded up the top crypto companies attracting the most loan activity to help you find the next category winners.
The Investor's Guide to Polymarket
Polymarket is a “prediction market,” which really means “gambling platform.”
Thrust to prominence due to the U.S. presidential election, you can bet real money (in the USDC
stablecoin) on the outcome. You can also bet on practically anything, including the next James Bond actor, whether the US will confirm aliens exist, and whether bitcoin will hit $250,000. (See links in article.)
Polymarket has become a societal phenomenon, quoted by mainstream media and tweeted by Elon Musk, who claimed it is more accurate than polls, since real money is on the line. Built on Polygon, it is one of the first bona fide mainstream crypto products.
In this guide, we’ll explain how it works, the difference between gambling and investing, and the real investing opportunities in Polymarket’s massive growth.
Should You Invest in Ethereum (ETH)? Charts, Stats, Analysis for 2024
In 2013, while most twenty-somethings were planning their weekend parties, a nineteen-year-old programmer named Vitalik Buterin was dreaming of revolutionizing the digital world.?
Nestled in his modest apartment, surrounded by empty energy drink cans and the soft glow of multiple monitors, Buterin wasn't just writing code—he was reimagining the future.
Buterin loved bitcoin, but he also saw its limitations. He yearned for a platform that could support not just financial transactions, but entire applications. But when he pitched the bitcoin core development team on the idea, they weren’t interested.
Vitalik formed a supergroup of developers, including Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin, to create the core of what would become the Ethereum founding team. Each brought unique skills and perspectives to the table, from Buterin's programming prowess to Wood's expertise in formal verification.
Their concept for Ethereum was a "world computer" that could run any program imaginable, limited only by the boundaries of human creativity. Bitcoin was designed as digital money, but Ethereum would be like an operating system for crypto.
Launching an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2014, they raised $18 million to fund their digital dream. A year later, on July 30, 2015, the Ethereum network roared to life, its genesis block marking the beginning of a new era...
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Future Winners Portfolio: Q3 2024 Update
Our Future Winners Portfolio began three years ago, in response to our readers who wanted an all-crypto portfolio.
The portfolio began outperforming the S&P 500 in the first quarter of 2024. Today, this all-crypto portfolio has been delivering superior results to traditional stock market investors.
In our latest results, Future Winners are beating stock market investors by roughly 3%.?In this updated brief, we'll explain the drivers behind this performance.
Premium Members?can download the Q3 2024 report here, with tips on how to get started investing in this portfolio today.
Not yet a Premium member??Sign up here?and get in on the action -?get access to our ongoing portfolio updates, investor scorecards, and more!
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Must-Reads
(Bankless) - Ethereum layer-2 (L2) networks have surged in 2024, but the growing demand is pushing their limits. Upgrades like Danksharding and PeerDAS are essential for scaling, but there are concerns. Here are the current scalability problems explained for ETH investors.
(MarketsMedia) - Starting in 2025, banks in North America, Europe, and Asia will conduct live trials of digital asset and currency transactions via the Swift payments network, a massive milestone in integrating traditional and crypto networks. For long-term blockchain believers, this is a huge step forward.
(Visa) - Visa is launching the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) to help banks issue and manage fiat-backed tokens on blockchain networks. Expect the floodgates to open to new DeFi investing opportunities, now that any bank can start to tokenize any asset they hold.
(Pantera) - U.S. policy on blockchain is finally evolving, with endorsements from Vice President Harris and growing political acceptance. Investors stand to benefit from this growing political backing, as it can lead to a more favorable environment for blockchain innovation, which should be a huge boost for crypto in general.
(The Defiant) - Babylon, a bitcoin staking protocol, saw users deposit $1.42 billion in BTC during its second deposit window, reaching nearly 23,000 staked BTC in under two hours. Babylon aims to develop a bitcoin-powered Proof of Stake (PoS) marketplace, expanding bitcoin’s use case beyond a store of value.
Chart of the Week
To survive over the long term, a company must be profitable. Crypto companies are no different.
While some projects might run at huge losses for multiple years -- consider Amazon in the past or OpenAI currently -- the eventual goal is to make profits for the company and its investors.
Since blockchain is so new, many companies are still in the early development phase, where profits are elusive. But that's not true for all companies.
The nine companies featured in our chart are the creme de la creme - although even in these top projects, the profits tend to be volatile, just like the associated tokens.
However, a handful of blockchains have been able to maintain consistent profitability.
Base?is one of these, and lending protocols Ethena and Lido Finance have also been delivering consistent profits. The other sector clearly able to generate profits is layer-2 protocols, such as OP Mainnet, Arbitrum, Blast, and zkSyncEra.
If you're looking for crypto companies with the most profits, consider focusing on the lending and layer-2 spaces.
ICYMI
In case you've missed our recent newsletters, here are links to the September 30 and October 7 newsletters, as well as the most recent BMJ investor content:
In our updated?Guide to Top Stablecoins,?you'll learn why Tether has completely untethered from USDC.
Is the GRT token still worth your investment??Read our complete analysis.
In this guide, we’ve rounded up the?top crypto companies earning the most fees.
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