Blockstars weekly newsletter #21
What happened last week in the world of crypto, Solana and NFTs?
Ever felt overwhelmed by the number of things happening in the crypto, Solana, and NFT ecosystems? Don't have enough time to spend on Twitter to keep up with everything? Don't worry, we got you. The Blockstars newsletter is here with all the highlights from last week. Now Christmas-themed!
Index
Crypto and NFTs
🟡 The Binance situation. Are we in trouble? What do we know?
Solana
🔵 The state of the Solana ecosystem
🔵 $BONK, the first Solana meme coin
🔵 The Helius Solana NFT API
🔵 Dialect, the Web3 messaging dApp
Solana NFTs
🟢 Update on Taiyo Pilots
🟢 DeGods became the most traded Solana NFT collection of all time
🟢 Longing and shorting will completely change the NFT trading game🟢 DeGods & y00ts are leaving Solana
🟢 How exactly will bridging DeGods and y00ts work?
Blockstars Universe
🟣 We just released band practice!
Food for thought
🟠 The importance of social value
Interesting stuff
🔴 What can we learn from the best traders of the ecosystem?
Crypto and NFTs
General info about cryptocurrencies and NFTs
🟡 The Binance situation. Are we in trouble? What do we know?
Solana
Everything about the Solana ecosystem
🔵 The state of the Solana ecosystem
At the time of writing, the Solana price is $11.17. With a market cap of $4.1B, it ranks 16th among cryptocurrencies, behind Shiba Inu, Litecoin, Polkadot, Polygon, Cardano, and others.
Let’s look at some other metrics.
The SolanaFloor NFT index is a carefully selected basket of blue-chip collections based on multiple metrics that is reviewed monthly. If we look at it, we can see that the USD value is at all-time lows and it has been declining since April (the purple line) while the SOL value is at an all-time high and it has been growing since the FTX crash (the green line). While this event brought Solana down to 97% from its ATH, it gave the opportunity to many people to buy their favorite blue chip at a discount and this has been reflected in their SOL price.
Looking at the number of unique users we can see that it has been decreasing since May. Back then, we had 1.25M users, but that number has gone down to around 450 000 now. The last time we had this number of users was the start of the Solana NFT bull run back in September last year.
Related to the number of current users is the number of new ones. We are currently sitting at 80 000 weekly new users, almost a 90% decrease since January when we reached 750 000 weekly new users.
For more insights, have a look at
's Step Data Insights, which was the original inspiration for this section🔵 $BONK, the first Solana meme coin
The other day, many Solana users woke up with millions of $BONK coins in their wallets. We now have our own meme coin
🔵 Developers, here’s a Christmas present for you. The Helius Solana NFT API now allows you to access loads of information
🔵 Dialect, the innovative messaging system for dApp notifications and decentralized communication is now live. You can find a detailed review of it here.
Solana NFTs
What did your favorite Solana NFT project announce last week?
🟢 Update on Taiyo Pilots
Pilotlist is now closed, the raffle for Pilots in $SCRAP is live and the mint date will be the 29th
🟢 DeGods became the most traded Solana NFT collection of all time
With a total volume of 2.7M SOL, they just surpassed the previous king, Okay Bears, with 2.5M SOL. Behind them follow y00ts with 2M, t00bs with 1.3M, and ABC closes the top 5 with 1M SOL total volume traded.
🟢 Longing and shorting will completely change the NFT trading game
You now can have upside exposure to any blue chip asset without needing the capital required to own one. Or you can short NFTs and profit from betting on them to go down. Either way, you can profit from your knowledge of the market
🟢 DeGods & y00ts are leaving Solana
“Dear Solana community, thank you”. This is how Frank’s Twitter release began. What started with a morning tweet about moving to ETH after the FTX debacle and SOL price cratering has now become a reality.
“We’ve come to the realization that in order to grow, we need to explore new opportunities […] y00ts will be moving to Polygon, DeGods to ETH and DUST will be bridged to both Polygon and ETH”
This was one of the most controversial and divisive announcements of the year in the Solana ecosystem. And it's not surprising that it was met with a lot of backlash from crypto Twitter as it’s a major decision that could have significant implications for our ecosystem. Three of the four most traded NFT collections in Solana are moving to other platforms (DeGods, y00ts, and t00bs)
Ultimately, this is a business decision. They had been having the majority of the trading volume in Solana for months and they need to explore new markets in order to grow. It won’t be without risk, but that’s what DeGods is all about, experimenting.
Why do NFT collections have to be limited to a single blockchain? There's no rule prohibiting NFT collections from going multichain. But no one ever dared to move all of their assets to a new chain. Will it work? I have no idea. But what I do know is that it will be interesting to watch.
At this point, you might think that DeGods moving to ETH make some sense, but why are y00ts going to Polygon?
Buyers per day on Polygon have drastically increased over the last few months. With the biggest Web2 corporations and brands going there, it’s a no-brainer that the user base will increase further in 2023.
DeLabs is creating an NFT accelerator launchpad program and the points you earn by staking their NFTs will allow you to mint the collections they incubate. Consistent mints on ETH are expensive with gas fees, so Polygon's low fees allow them to utilize their tech more and generate more revenue (these last two paragraphs come from here)
And probably the biggest reason of them all, they received a grant. The exact amount hasn’t been disclosed but it is said to be in the millions of dollars.
However, there’s no reason to be angry at them. Instead of hating them for leaving, we should work harder to make them regret not staying here. If it’s a competition between blockchains, let the best one win.
🟢 How exactly will bridging DeGods and y00ts work?
Blockstars Universe
What has the Blockstars team been doing lately?
🟣 We just released band practice!
Food for thought
The most thought-provoking threads and videos
🟠 The importance of social value
Interesting stuff
Didn’t fit into any of the other categories, but still pretty interesting
🔴 What can we learn from the best traders of the ecosystem?
And with this, we close the last newsletter of the year. It has been an exciting year for crypto, NFTs, and Solana. We’ve had our ups and downs, but there has never been a boring day in this world. We close 2022 in the middle of a bear market but look forward things to getting better in 2023. Happy holidays to everyone!