This Week in Signal Teams — Tezos, IOTA, The Graph
Every week we comb through hundreds of FTX Signals to bring you the most significant team updates with brief analyses to help you understand the latest developments in blockchain.
Macro Crypto News This Week
- Spain’s largest telecom company, Telefonica, now accepts Bitcoin
- Eurasian Bank buys Bitcoin for the first time in Kazakhstan
- U.S. lawmakers introduce a bill to allow Bitcoin and crypto in 401ks
- Bitcoin trading volume in British Pound soars +1,150%
- FTX wins auction to buy Voyager Digital for $1.4 billion
- Bitcoin payments firm Strike raises $80 million
Top FTX Signals This Week
- Tezos Successfully Completes Forkless Network Upgrade, Kathmandu
- IOTA Launches Shimmer Network
- The Graph Adds New Feature: Block Timestamps
Tezos Successfully Completes Forkless Network Upgrade, Kathmandu
“The 11th Tezos protocol upgrade is now LIVE — Tezos has seamlessly upgraded with Kathmandu. Onwards to the 12th upgrade proposal!”
— Amer Justice, Community Director
Summary
- Kathmandu marks the eleventh successful upgrade on the Tezos blockchain and the third to occur this year alone.
- The Kathmandu upgrade contains several new features and optimizations, including Smart Contract Optimistic Rollups (SCORUs) as another Layer-2 scaling application for Tezos.
- This upgrade includes improved randomness for distribution of baking rights, event-logging, enabling off-chain systems to react to smart contract execution, validation pipelining to improve Tezos Layer 1 throughput and support for ‘Ghostnet’, a permanent testnet.
- Tezos also announced Blockxer, a meme-laden web-based beat’ em up style game on Tezos, Memecast, an upcoming NFT meme news marketplace, and a new Plenty Network with a new vote escrow model.
Significance
These next-generation rollups are plug’n’play solutions for running any software on Tezos in a high-throughput environment, opening the door to compatibility with EVM and WASM. It also demonstrates the success of the Tezos forkless upgrades, made possible by its proven on-chain governance.
Price at the time of FTX Signal: $1.47. View XTZ on FTX.
IOTA Launches Shimmer Network
“The Shimmer Network is finally here. With its $SMR token: Tokenize everything natively on Layer 1 without fees.”
— Thabata Dias, Social Media Manager
Summary
- IOTA has announced the official launch of the Shimmer network, the staging network of the IOTA ecosystem.
- Shimmer extends the DAG ledger with a composable tokenization framework, opening up new possibilities to tokenize everything (NFTs, real-world assets, stablecoins, fan tokens) natively on Layer 1 w/o fees.
- This framework is the foundational basis for Shimmer’s smart contract execution layer, which includes full EVM compatibility with the upcoming ShimmerEVM launch.
- Value can be transferred from one smart contract chain to another, enabling frictionless trade in a multi-chain network, without the need to build, audit, and maintain any dedicated bridges.
Significance
The ShimmerEVM will be the first network to start forming a multi-chain ecosystem based on the feeless, parallelized DAG ledger of Shimmer.
Price at the time of FTX Signal: $0.29. View IOTA on FTX.
The Graph Adds New Feature: Block Timestamps
“A new feature preview landed on the Subgraph Studio (and hosted service) last week that enables developers to easily gauge the freshness of a GraphQL query response: Block Timestamps. Soon also on The Graph Network. It removes the need of having an often centralised source to get block metadata.”
— Simon Emanuel Schmid, Solutions Engineer
Summary
- The Graph is a decentralized network serving web3 data. Disorganized data made the early internet difficult. Then came Google which indexed it all. The Graph does this for blockchain data with a decentralized, open system of APIs anyone can query.
- Before block timestamps, a subgraph consumer was only able to retrieve the block number of a GraphQL query. In order to gauge the freshness of a query-response they had to know how fresh that particular block was. This was usually done by checking another source for the latest block and its timestamp. That resulted in another request, usually to a centralized data provider.
- This new feature will likely land in the next Graph Node release v0.29.0 and be rolled out to The Graph Network then.
- The Graph also announced a partnership with Messari this week, which will provide new protocol metrics and Data Apps features aimed at creating web3 ecosystem-wide fundamentals data.
Significance
This new feature improves the usability of The Graph and should result in a wider base of users. The partnership with Messari will help give investors greater insights into the fundamental health of token projects.
Price at the time of FTX Signal: $0.10. View GRT on FTX.
Quotes of the Week:
“Cryptocurrency could be a major part of a “renaissance” as people lose trust in Central Banks.”
— Stanley Druckenmiller
“I love that it can’t be stopped.”
— U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis
Chart of the Week:
Bitcoin’s Short Term Holder Realized Price has finally crossed below Long Term Holder Realized Price. This means that short-term holders, in aggregate, now have a lower cost basis than long-term holders. This results as a combination of STHs buying on the way down, lowering their cost basis, as well as STHs aging into the LTH cohort creating upwards pressure on the aggregate LTH cost basis. All previous occurrences of this crossover have served as incredible market entry points.
HODL Waves is a Bitcoin chart that uses blockchain data to show the amount of bitcoin in circulation grouped into different age bands. It uses different colors to show the various age bands and how the amount of bitcoin in each of the bands changes over time, creating wave-like patterns.
Over 60% of the supply has not moved in one or more years and coins aged 3m+ now account for an ATH of 86.3% of all BTC supply. Bitcoin HODLers appear to be steadfast and unwavering in their conviction.
Thanks for joining us and we look forward to bringing you our top FTX Signals again next week.
Jason Hamlin
Ecosystem Insights @ FTX
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