Cryptoassets of the Month: AVAX, BNB, and More

Every month, our research team will present the cryptoassets of the month that increased or dropped in value by more than 15%. With a data-driven approach, we highlight the most important developments and events causing price movements.

Figure 1 – 30-Day Performance: Cryptoassets of the Month vs. Traditional Asset Classes

Data Source: 21Shares, Messari, and Yahoo Finance, from 30-Nov-2022 to 31-Dec-2022 (Close Price)

Avalanche (AVAX)

Avalanche’s native token AVAX traded down 17.19% over the past month, despite an exciting network upgrade dubbed Banff 5. Banff 5 rolled out Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM), enabling Subnets to communicate with each other easily and creating a natively composable blockchain-enabled ecosystem. In addition, Core – Avalanche’s all-in-one Web 3 wallet – integrated Coinbase Pay, giving users more ways to deposit cash and convert it to crypto.

Binance Coin (BNB)

BNB traded down 18.13% over the past month amidst a series of events surrounding the Binance crypto exchange. On the week of December 12, Binance saw $13.7 billion of outflows, with CEO Changpeng Zhao stating that he welcomed the ”stress test.” On December 16, French auditing firm Mazars said it was temporarily ceasing all work for its crypto exchange clients, including Proof-of-Reserves reports for Binance. In addition, Binance US attempted to acquire bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital’s assets a few days later. However, the SEC objects to Binance.US’s deal to buy Voyager Digital. On a more positive note, Flipside Crypto data revealed that as of December 16, BNB Chain was the Layer 1 blockchain with the most daily active addresses, at 1.1 million.

Polygon (MATIC)

Polygon’s native token MATIC traded down 18.76% over the past month despite exciting developments. On December 1, Polygon zkEVM (i.e., a virtual machine compatible with Ethereum and zero-knowledge-proof computation) began an audit to evaluate its security. With the audit underway, Polygon launched the final testnet before mainnet on December 21. This milestone is significant as zkEVMs have the potential to scale Ethereum’s network capacity by orders of magnitude, accelerating Web 3 adoption. Polygon’s NFT ecosystem also saw clear traction – on December 25, y00ts, a popular NFT project on Solana, announced that it would officially bridge to Polygon in Q1 2023.

Fantom (FTM)

Fantom’s native token FTM traded down 19.09% over the past month despite ecosystem traction. From December 12 to January 2, the Fantom Foundation leveraged Gitcoin’s grants protocol for an initial funding round for projects building within the Fantom ecosystem. Through the partnership, Fantom builders secured 300,000 FTM or over $65K as of writing, donated by 16,344 unique contributors across 85 projects. On another note, on December 12, Dune Analytics – a community-driven platform to access crypto data easily – integrated the Fantom blockchain.

Chainlink (LINK)

Chainlink (LINK) traded down 27.66% over the past month. On December 6, LINK staking went live to bring a new layer of security to the decentralized oracle network, locking 7 million tokens valued at $51 million within the first 30 minutes. In addition, Chainlink launched ”NFT Floor Price Feeds” in collaboration with Coinbase Cloud on Ethereum to provide a robust measure of an NFT collection’s floor price. Via these feeds, Chainlink’s time-tested oracle infrastructure could help integrate NFTs with DeFi applications.

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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

Disclaimer

The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.