Crypto Markets Persevere, Investor Appetite for Web 3 Grows, and More!

The banking default risk in the United States started spreading to European banks, taking down Credit Suisse with a takeover by UBS. However, for the second consecutive week, the crypto markets performed in the opposite direction of the macro headwinds. Bitcoin was the biggest winner of last week’s rally, increasing by 15.5%, while Ethereum increased by 3.9%. The biggest losers were Polygon (-6.72%), Maker (-26%), and Lido (-13.86%), which announced it would launch withdrawals of staked ETH by mid-May, two weeks after Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade.

Figure 1: Weekly TVL and Price Performance of Major Crypto Categories

Source: 21Shares, CoinGecko, DeFi Llama. Close data as of March 20.

Key takeaways

• Crypto’s market cap increases by 8.5%, despite the looming default crisis in traditional finance.

• Arbitrum unveils token, Cosmos launches Replicated Security

• Lido Finance anticipates mainnet withdrawals by mid-May; National Australian Bank conducts its first Cross Border transaction using its own stablecoin on Ethereum

• Saudi Arabian NFT marketplace “Nuqtah” raises seed funding from Animoca Brands and Polygon.

Figure 2: Bitcoin Options Open Interest By Expiry

Source: Coinglass.com

Spot and Derivatives Markets

Demand for Bitcoin options contracts has increased to levels we haven’t seen since 2021, inching close to $12B on March 19 alone, with Deribit enjoying the lion’s share of ~$10B. This could mean a trend of allocating investments in cryptoassets as a hedge against inflation and the default contagion risk going around in the banking sector.

On-chain Indicators

Figure 3: Ethereum’s Network Value to Transactions Ratio

Source: Glassnode

Analogous to the price to earnings for stocks, the Network Value to Transactions (NVT) Ratio can help track the realized valuation levels of an asset. As shown in Figure 3, an NVT ratio as high as 300 indicates that Ethereum may be overvalued since the network value, or market cap, is higher than the transaction volume. Whereas downtrends like the one seen in 2017 indicate that transactions are outgrowing the network value and investors may be buying Ethereum at a discount. Although the chart above indicates that the market cap outweighs the volume of transactions on the network, historically speaking the second-largest cryptoasset by market cap is still in a healthy valuation range.

Next Week’s Calendar

Source: Forex Factory, CoinMarketCal

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Research Newsletter

Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com

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