Gm friends,
Did you notice that the market has shifted dramatically from the previous bull run? Last cycle everything was going up 🤯
Today, success hinges on identifying the right narrative and making strategic moves in specific altcoin sectors.
Feeling like you’ve underperformed? Don’t worry. We’re on the cusp of a new bull phase, and this is your opportunity to thrive.
Can we go down more before the next parabolic move? Absolutely yes, but rest assured that the bull run is not over.
Thus, I’ve come up with a new way to give you an edge in this tough market.
👉 Introducing the Wealth Mastery Community: The Inner Circle.
Join a community where you’ll receive direct guidance from me and my team. We’ll help you spot profitable opportunities and enhance your investment skills.
Yesterday I opened the waiting list and it’s closing in 5 days. Don’t miss your chance to gain a competitive edge.
Cool! Now let’s see what’s in today’s issue:
- Sam shares his thoughts on Coinbase using AI, BTC and ETH ETF updates, Telegram’s crypto holdings, Singapore emerging as a top crypto adopter & Yuga Labs announcing “The Workshop” Dev team.
- Crypto Portfolio update for week 29.
- This week on chain.
- This week’s trending coins by Rebecca.
Looking for a reliable Non-KYC DEX in these turbulent times?
ApeX Protocol, Bybit’s official DEX partner, ranks among the top daily active users.
As centralised exchanges (CEXs) face increasing regulations in the UK, USA, Canada, Europe and beyond, it’s clear that DEXs are the future for seamless trading. ApeX was founded to address these challenges, ensuring secure and unrestricted trading.
Join ApeX from our link below to get discounted trading fees, and make a deposit to qualify for a $20 Deposit Bonus. Simply connect your wallet – no KYC!
Qualify for $20 USDC Deposit Bonus!
Coinbase Engineers AI to AI Crypto Transaction
One way AI can get even more interesting very quickly is if it starts carrying out monetary transactions on your behalf (or who knows, maybe even for itself), and this is an area where crypto might prove very useful.
To that end, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong last Friday published a Twitter article explaining that at Coinbase Developer Platform they had last week “witnessed our first AI to AI crypto transaction”.
According to Armstrong, AI agents used tokens to buy AI tokens (which are like units of data used in AI operations), in the process showing that transactional capabilities are viable.
Armstrong also detailed exactly why it’s a powerful shift for AI, giving practical examples such as AI agents making bookings for users, accessing paywalled online content, and using paid APIs in order to complete tasks.
Ultimately, payments open up a lot of doors, and while AI can’t control a bank account or a credit card, crypto wallets seem like a perfect fit.
Accordingly, Coinbase Developer Platform has specialized wallet resources for developers looking to enable AI models in this way.
But what do you think, will we see AI and crypto integrating more closely in the near future, and would you trust an AI assistant to make payments on your behalf? Reply to this email and let us know what you think.
BTC and ETH ETFs End August Underwhelmingly
The weekend brought an underwhelming end to the month for spot crypto ETFs in the US, as in the case of the BTC funds last week concluded with a run of four consecutive net outflow days, and the monthly data logged an overall net outflow of around $94 million.
However, this should be placed in the context of an enormously positive run since launch, which sees the BTC ETFs now holding assets currently valued at just under $54 billion, which is around 4.6% of Bitcoin’s market cap.
And for the ETF ETFs, it’s been an overall slow start since launching in July, and last Friday they experienced a flat day with no change in net value.
The funds cumulatively now hold assets valued just south of $7 billion (or about 2.3% of the ETH market cap), while trading volumes have been steadily cooling off since launch.
What’s more, September has a tendency to be bearish for crypto, often–but not always–bringing negative returns before the market picks up again in Q4.
That said though, there’s a positive catalyst coming up this month for the spot BTC ETFs, as Wells Fargo, which manages over $1.7 trillion in assets, is soon to allow its advisors to actively pitch the spot BTC ETFs to clients, although limits including a $1 million account asset minimum.
This move from Wells Fargo follows on from Morgan Stanley taking a similar line on the BTC ETFs last month.
Telegram’s $400 Million Crypto Holdings
Telegram has been in the headlines lately due to the French authorities arresting founder and CEO Pavel Durov, who is now out on bail, but in other notable news a recent report shows that the social media platform was holding on–as of the end of 2023–to around $400 million in crypto assets.
This information is made clear in the company’s privately-held 2023 financial report, which was viewed and reported on by the Financial Times.
According to Telegram Group’s balance sheet, it held just under $400 million in digital assets according to revaluations made at the end of December 2023.
This amount is significantly more than it held in cash and cash equivalents, with those more orthodox assets amounting to a value of just under $171 million.
What’s more, a breakdown of Telegram’s revenue for 2023 shows that its integrated wallet and the sale of collectibles were both core to operations, constituting over 40% of total revenue.
These are both crypto-related areas, as the integrated wallet is used for crypto assets, while Telegram collectables–including usernames–are traded and held on the TON blockchain, using Toncoin for payments.
Singapore Emerges as Top Crypto Adopter
A new report by Henley and Partners–a group that specializes in international residence and citizenship by investment–has delved into which countries lead the way when it comes to crypto adoption.
And according to this study, which is titled The Henley Crypto Adoption Index 2024, Singapore is the number one crypto-friendly nation in the world today.
The research methodology considers public adoption, infrastructure adoption, innovation and technology, the regulatory environment, economic factors, and tax-friendliness, and by these metrics Singapore hauls in a score of 45.7 out of 60.
Hong Kong is in second place, the UAE and USA both register scores above 41 in third and fourth places, and Britain pulls into fifth place, although that last one might come as a surprise to UK-based crypto users who rely on VPNs to access some crypto platforms.
Yuga Labs Announce “The Workshop” Dev Team
Finally, your favorite JPEGs may be way down on their 2022 peaks, but Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs remains busy, with co-founder and CEO Greg Solano revealing last Friday that a development division called The Workshop was established shortly after he became CEO in February.
According to a post from Solano, The Workshop is focused “exclusively on emerging products”, and he explains that success comes through “shipping content, tools, and gasoline on-chain, all the time”, while he also mentions taking a lesson from “Coinbase’s move to go all-in on Base”.
New releases from The Workshop are going to be happening on the Layer-2 ApeChain–which launched on testnet in July–and Solano talks about the deployment of new and reimagined products happening “in the coming weeks and months”.
Week 29 Crypto Portfolio Update
Just holding and chilling. Probably won’t make any new moves on this until I get my new tax residency sorted out.
See the 10x Portfolio breakdown and weekly history since inception HERE!
The spot BTC ETFs experienced negative overall flows across the whole of August, ending the month with four consecutive days of outflows, and a look at flow changes compared with price shows a correlation between the two.
This is most noticeable around March, when the price was climbing and the ETFs were in an explosive phase, but it’s also apparent looking at last week’s quiet period.
That said though, perhaps we shouldn’t get too caught up with ETF impact, since data shows that the ETFs only make up around 20% of the market at most, while what remains is the non-ETF-using majority.
That ETF share of the market is significant, but there’s still plenty happening beyond the new funds, which is good news if you’re concerned about a decentralized asset becoming overly aligned with Wall Street.
And if you were wondering who Bitcoin’s top holders are, one breakdown shows the top spot still belongs to pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, whose wallet holds 1.1 million coins that never move and are–assuming Satoshi isn’t planning a surprise return–effectively removed from the total supply, while In second place it’s Binance, and the top ETF firm is BlackRock in fourth spot, just behind the US government.
Moving on to take a look at Solana, while price action is highly volatile, monthly active addresses have hit a new all-time high approaching 40 million.
A new protocol that launched last month on Solana is prediction market BET, which was built by Drift Protocol.
BET provides competition for top decentralized prediction market Polymarket, which is on Polygon, but there was some strange data last week: looking at the charts, you can see that while trade counts grew towards the end of August, that increase looks gentle when compared to a huge single-day spike in trading volume on August 29th.
What exactly caused that huge jump while transactions remained steady isn’t clear, so it will be interesting to see where the BET data goes from here, particularly as prediction markets are a hot topic this year.
Meanwhile, Solana memecoin platform Pump.fun has smashed through $100 million in cumulative revenue, while of the 5,601 new tokens launched on Pump in the last twenty-four hours, only 76 “graduated”, meaning they gained enough traction to progress from Pump and trade on the Raydium DEX.
As for the above-mentioned Polymarket, it has continued to build on recent hype and keep growing, achieving monthly volume of over $472 million in August, which is up from the previous all-time high of $387 million the month prior, and–looking back across the year-to-date–a huge increase on January’s $54 million.
Moving our attention now to stablecoins, PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD, which was introduced in 2023, has now surpassed $1 billion in circulating supply, with a surge in that growth occurring since it expanded to Solana in May, having previously been only Ethereum-based.
Also, it’s notable that 62% of the PYUSD Solana supply is currently distributed to Kamino Finance, and a total of 81% is distributed among DeFi platforms that provide users with PYUSD-integrated token incentives.
And finally, on the topic of DeFi we can take a look at DEX volumes overall and see that there has been a small dip followed by a flat period after a major surge in activity back in March.
However, rewind a year to last August, and current volumes are still around three times greater than they were back then, so there’s plenty of room to be positive as we head towards the end of Q3.
Here are my key takeaways from the trends this week and there’s been a lot of milestones, launches and partnerships.
- Simon’s Cat is a memecoin on BNB Chain that’s seen its token jump 69% after being listed on Gateio and HTX and 10% of the total supply has been burned.
- Toncoin is a Web3 ecosystem within Telegram messenger that’s hit a new all-time high of 1.1 million daily active users after launching an open letter mini app to campaign for its CEO’s release from the French authorities.
- Zano is a privacy blockchain that’s seen its hashrate reach a new all-time high and has launched a token competition on X. Zano has announced a payment gateway for WooCommerce is coming soon.
- Dogs is a memecoin on Telegram that’s been listed on Bybit and OKX. The Dogs community has also been supporting the Free Durov campaign.
- Polygon is an Ethereum sidechain that’s due to launch its MATIC to POL token upgrade on September 4.
- Solana is a Layer-1 blockchain that’s been added to Robinhood Wallet and has seen PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin hit $1 billion in market cap—a 271% increase since launching on Solana.
- Bitcoin is continuing to consolidate around $60K as whales holding 100 or more BTC have hit a 17-month high.
- Sui is a Layer-1 blockchain that’s due to launch an Animoca-backed game called DARKTIMES in late 2024.
- Pepe is a memecoin that’s been one of the biggest losers for the week after dropping 19%.
- Aerodrome Finance is a liquidity marketplace on Base that’s currently the leading DEX on the network. Aerodrome also recorded its third-highest epoch ever after volume skyrocketed to $2.08 billion.
- Ondo is a Real-World Assets (RWA) platform that’s launched its USDY tokenized stablecoin on Arbitrum and has surpassed BlackRock’s BUIDL token by market cap.
- Notcoin is a Telegram-based game that’s seen $3.3 million in DOGS tokens distributed to 150,000 Notcoin users. But the NOT token is down 12% in the past 7 days due to the fallout from the Telegram CEO’s arrest.
- TRON is a Layer-1 blockchain that’s now available to swap through the Ledger Live wallet with supported TRC-20 tokens.
- Kaspa is a proof-of-work blockchain that’s just completed an event in Dubai and is getting ready for its Dublin meet-up in September and its appearance at Token 2049 in Singapore from September 18-19.
- Artificial Superintelligence Alliance is the AI merger between Fetchai, Ocean Protocol and SingularityNET. SingularityNET has announced a partnership with BNB Chain to advance decentralized storage.
Thank you so much for your support, and I truly hope that today’s issue will give you insights needed to help you master your wealth.
If you are reading this it means you are on the free version of the Wealth Mastery Investor Report, which is great for news and tips on the crypto markets.
If you really want to take advantage of fastest growing asset class EVER, I highly recommend that you check out my Altcoin course: Mastering Altcoin Investing
In this course we’ll teach you all about how to spot, choose and acquire the winning altcoins of the upcoming bull market.
Learn how to build your portfolio so that growth is ensured and risk is mitigated. Let me help you build a strategy that’ll change your life forever in the upcoming bull run.
See you next time!
Lark and the Wealth Mastery Team
🦧 APEX: #1 ON CHAIN TRADING 👉 GET STARTED NOW
💰 BINANCE: BEST EXCHANGE FOR BUYING CRYPTO IN THE WORLD 👉 10% OFF FEES & $600 BONUS
🚀 BYBIT: #1 EXCHANGE FOR TRADING 👉 GET EXCLUSIVE FEE DISCOUNTS & BONUSES
🔒 BEST CRYPTO WALLET TO KEEP YOUR ASSETS SAFE 👉 BUY LEDGER WALLET HERE
1️⃣ COINLEDGER: #1 CRYPTO TAX SOFTWARE 👉 IF YOU OWN OR TRADE CRYPTO YOU NEED THIS
Wealth Mastery (Lark Davis, and the Wealth Mastery writing team) are not providing you individually tailored investment advice. Nor is Wealth Mastery registered to provide investment advice, is not a financial adviser, and is not a broker-dealer. The material provided is for educational purposes only. Wealth Mastery is not responsible for any gains or losses that result from your cryptocurrency investments. Investing in cryptocurrency involves a high degree of risk and should be considered only by persons who can afford to sustain a loss of their entire investment. Investors should consult their financial adviser before investing in cryptocurrency.
You can find a full disclosure of all my crypto & venture investments here.
