🔍 DEEP DIVES

Four Crypto Projects To Watch As the Industry Recovers

Being in crypto isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. We all know this from the seemingly endless hacks, collapses, regulatory attacks (see below), and volatility prices.

Sometimes, it’s like the world doesn’t want crypto to exist.

And it appears there might be some truth to that sentiment. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 75% of Americans who have heard of crypto are “not very or not at all confident that cryptocurrencies are reliable or safe”.

In other words, the vast majority of the country is skeptical of our decentralized internet money.

Which is a shame because crypto is actually on the upswing right now. Just think about the wins we’ve had so far this year:

Couple that with fundamentals that are as strong as ever, and there are plenty of reasons to be bullish on the future of crypto.

But, if you’re still feeling the bear-market blues a bit, we’ve got you covered in this article with four projects to be excited about going forward.

Gridless
At CoinSnacks, we love crypto projects with a real-world use case. That’s because they are dispelling the myth that crypto is purely a game of speculation. In reality, crypto is already helping people worldwide in their day-to-day life.

Gridless is another one of these projects.

What Gridless is doing is using bitcoin mining to give electricity to the 770 million people in the world currently without power. It does this by building and operating bitcoin mining sites alongside small-scale renewable energy producers in rural communities that are extremely inefficient and often financially unsustainable. Now, when these communities purchase energy, whatever energy that is left-over (that would be otherwise wasted) is used to mine bitcoin.

As a buyer of last resort, Gridless helps monetize the full capacity of these mini grid energy producers, in addition to serving as an anchor for new energy generation.

Thus, the rural communities gain access to more efficient energy, the energy-producer can then profit through the bitcoin mining, and the legacy media can shut-up about bitcoin mining being the worst thing ever invented. Win-win-win.

While Gridless is still in its early stages, the team – with surprisingly not much competition – was able to bag $2 million in seed funding from Jack Dorsey-founded Block and VC firm Stillmark last December.

Rocket Pool
With the completion of Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade that enables users to easily withdraw their staked Ethereum, the process is now safer, more accessible, and more attractive than ever before.

But, even though users can now withdraw their staked ETH, that doesn’t mean liquid staking protocols will lose popularity.

Liquid staking protocols take a user's staked token and issue them a liquid version of it. A liquid staked token is simply a tradeable representation of the staked token. This allows investors to maintain control of their assets while continuing to earn a staking yield. It’s a simple idea that has become wildly successful, as over $16 billion worth of ETH has been locked into liquid staking protocols.

The two leaders in this field are Lido and Coinbase, but there is another liquid staking protocol gaining ground fast – Rocket Pool.

Rocket Pool is a fully decentralized alternative to both Lido and Coinbase, already has 450,000 ETH staked, and is gaining traction quickly.

Rocket Pool is also more accessible than its peers as users only need to put up 8 ETH to run a staking validator node instead of the usual 32. And if you don’t even have 8 ETH, you can still stake into someone else’s node with as little as 0.01 ETH.

It is for these reasons that, although we’re bullish on liquid staking in general, we are especially bullish on Rocket Pool.

Backed Finance
The invention of stablecoins utterly transformed the crypto industry, allowing users to be in crypto without being subject to its daily volatility.

For this reason, on Ethereum alone, users hold more than $70 billion in stablecoins. And that was all well and good when Federal interest rates were 0%. But with the interest rates north of 4%, those stablecoin holders are missing out on more than $2.8 billion annually.

So, if you weren’t using stablecoins to transact in and out of other cryptoassets, the question becomes, why would you hold and use USDC or any other token when you can earn the safest 4% yield in the world with USD?

It’s a valid question, and the answer is you shouldn’t.

But what if there was a way to get all the benefits of holding stablecoins while also receiving the yields you could get in US Treasuries. Enter projects like Backed Finance.

Backed Finance is an on-chain treasury management solution that tokenizes securities to provide attractive yields. In English, Backed allows users to invest in traditional assets like Treasuries or even popular equities like Google or Apple with their crypto.

Sounds pretty good, but why would you invest in traditional assets on-chain, instead of just buying them on Fidelity or something? Well, there are a few reasons why on-chain assets are superior:

Beyond just the use for retail traders, companies like Backed would allow for crypto companies to better manage their treasuries.

Send Globally
We’ve spilled a lot of ink on CoinSnacks talking about remittances, and for good reason. They are one of crypto’s greatest use cases.

While crypto critics in developed nations often belittle the technology as not useful in a world of credit cards and Paypal, they are ignoring the billions of unbanked people around the world.

Sending a remittance through traditional finance requires an average fee of 6.3%, with countries such as Nigeria spending nearly 1% of their GDP on remittances alone.

That is why the massive $700 billion remittance market is absolutely ripe for disruption, and why people are so excited about crypto’s potential here. But there is just one problem. Crypto is still tough to use, and many people still want their money in fiat, not bitcoin or ether.

Which is why we believe Strike’s Send Globally service is a project to watch. The idea behind Send Globally is to use the Bitcoin Lightning Network to facilitate cheap and easy international money transfers. And, best of all, the users never have to actually use crypto. The money is always sent and received in currency form, with BTC only acting as an unseen intermediary.

The result is a form of transferring money far superior to the traditional exploitative remittance system.

Putting It All Together
In addition to those listed above, there are promising projects being built in decentralized social media (Farcaster and Nostr), blockchain analytics (Arkham and Nansen), wallets (Uniswap Wallet and Rainbow), gaming (Immutable), and mobile (Solana Saga phone).

Thus, there is still plenty of reason to be bullish on crypto’s long-term prospects. The developers are still developing, the fundamentals are still immaculate, and adoption is still steadily growing.

We are as confident as ever that we’re all going to make it.

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🏛️ REGULATORY FRONT

The Regulatory Crackdown Continues

As has been the case in 2023, this week was a week chock-full of regulatory news. And, as is usually the case with regulatory news, none of it was particularly good for our beloved industry.

Alas, at CoinSnacks, we bring you both the good and bad. Thus, let’s break down what mischief the regulators subjected us to this week.

A New Stablecoin Bill
As frequent readers of CoinSnacks know, stablecoin regulation is nothing new. So, you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes at another stablecoin bill

This is an area that the powers-to-be have wanted to get their hands on for a while now, publicly to prevent another collapse a la Luna, but privately because stablecoins present a threat to their CBDC dreams.

So, nobody was really surprised when the House Financial Service Committee came out with a new stablecoin bill.

The main things you need to know about the bill are:

So, in summary, the big winners of this proposed bill are the big centralized stablecoins like USDC, while the losers are decentralized stablecoins like DAI, as they will have to either get licensed and risk centralization, or cease to exist.

It is still very early-days as this bill is still just a draft, but it is interesting to see where Congress’s head is at pertaining to one of crypto’s largest verticals.

The SEC Warpath Continues
SEC chair Gary Gensler really seems to have made up his mind. He is going to kill crypto in the United States or die trying, because his horde of blood-sucking vampires took further actions this week to strangle crypto.

First, the SEC confirmed that their proposal last year to widen its view of securities exchanges will include decentralized exchanges. If accepted, this would put the entirety of DeFi under Gensler’s iron grip, and would likely cause most decentralized protocols to seek safe haven elsewhere. It’d be a catastrophe for US crypto development.

Next, the SEC sued crypto exchange Bittrex for violating security laws, despite Bittrex already announcing they are leaving the US because of the regulatory environment. In the suit, the SEC specifically alleges that omise go (OMG), algorand (ALGO), dash (DASH), tokencard (TKN), i-house token (IHT), and naga (NGC) are securities. This is particularly rich considering that Gensler himself previously waxed poetics on the genius of Algorand.

Thankfully, it appears that some in Congress are getting sick of Gensler’s antics, as Congressman Warren Davidson is now calling for his removal.

Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired
This regulatory crackdown is beginning to take its (intended?) toll on the US crypto industry. Increasing amounts of crypto companies are now setting their sights on friendlier waters overseas. Even Coinbase, the premier US crypto company, is not ruling out leaving the US if the regulatory situation doesn’t become clearer.

And that’s the sad part here. The US crypto industry doesn’t want a free-pass, they want clear rules. So far, the government has failed to oblige. Instead, they send Wells Notice after Wells Notice and cut off the industry’s banking access.

It’s an untenable situation, and one that unfortunately appears increasingly likely to end in crypto innovation happening outside the US’s shores.

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