📝 #72: Crypto's Trojan Horse

Telegram X TON: Crypto's trojan horse? Animoca Brands comes to Bitcoin. Roblox announces immersive ads. Blackrock invests in RWA company. Amazon's new genAI chatbot. Top charts & more.

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May 03, 2024

Hey, it’s Marc. ✌️

Telegram is building a crypto trojan horse – and the numbers are exploding. Plus: Bitcoin is experiencing a consumer renaissance with Animoca Brands joining the ecosystem.

📚 Top 4 Reads

Consumer Crypto By The Numbers Q1 2024. By BlockchainBrett & Jon Gall. Link
Why Web3 loyalty hasn’t taken off (yet). By Tareq Nazlawy. Link
The scenecoin opportunity. By Josh Cornelius. Link
Investing in TON Network. By Paul Veradittakit. Link

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✨ Web3 & Brands

TON x Telegram 💬

TON (The Open Network), a Layer 1 network originally designed by Telegram and continued by the open source community, and its token (TON) have made headlines:

Today, Pantera Capital announced its investment in TON. Link
Recently Tether's USDT stablecoin was integrated into Telegram via TON, enabling peer-to-peer payments within the app. Link
Telegram also enabled users buy channel advertisements with TON. The platform plans to share 50% of ad revenue with owners of public channels. Link

You can dive deeper in this X thread.

By the numbers: Telegram is the third biggest messaging platform, boasting 900M monthly active users, adding 36M users in January alone.

Meanwhile, TON has experienced remarkable growth.

TON recently made its way into the Top 10 coins by market cap. Link
TON’s total value locked (TVL) increased to $171M, almost doubling in April and the highest on record. Link
Active monthly wallets on TON have increased six-fold. Link

What’s interesting: Distributing ad revenue in TON introduces Web2 creators to crypto-based income streams.

Why it’s important: TON enables TG to offer global, unrestricted P2P payments surpassing regional limitations of existing super apps.

Punchline: Telegram's massive user base and demand for seamless payments position TON as a bridge to Web3 adoption.

Bitcoin Goes Consumer 🎮

Animoca Brands, Hong Kong-based game software company, is coming to Bitcoin. Link
In a partnership with Opal Foundation, they aim to create the largest Web3 ecosystem encompassing gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), entertainment, education, and culture.

What they’re saying: “With the advent of Ordinals, Bitcoin made the giant leap from simply being a way to store value to becoming a store of culture for the Web3 age” – Yat Siu, Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands

The big picture: Last year, the Ordinals (BRC-20) protocol brought NFTs to Bitcoin with over 66M inscriptions to date and a $2.65B market cap. Recently, Layer2 protocols, such as Lightning or Stacks, picked up as well.

Recently, Bitcoin Runes introduces a new fungible token standard on Bitcoin, enabling a host of new innovations such as DeFi, Tokenization, Stablecoins, and more.

Punchline: Bitcoin is experiencing a “consumer” renaissance and is turning into a serious contender to other L1 smart contract chains.

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🌎 Crypto & Macro

Bulls & Bears 🦬

Weathering the bear within the bull market :

Digital asset investment products saw outflows for the third consecutive week totalling $435M, marking the largest outflows since March this year. Link
Despite the initial hype, the Hong Kong BTC & ETH ETFs had a lackluster debut. Link

Yes, but: Consumer skepticism is dropping and adoption is happening.

Major pensions are buying
Morgan Stanley is prepping 15,000 brokers to recommend clients buy
BNY Mellon is reporting exposure

Kernel of evidence: The combined transaction volume of the top 3 stablecoins surpassed Visa’s 2023 monthly average. Daily BTC transactions hit a new ATH of 926,842 per day

Punchline: We’re in a period of consolidation, but broader crypto adoption is happening. Consumer sentiment is shifting while institutional interest is growing.

🧠AI + Metaverse

Amazon releases its generative AI chatbot / automated assistant, Q. Link
Worldcoin developer Tools for Humanity wants to partner with PayPal and OpenAI. Link

💰 Money Moves

Backed: Swiss tokenized asset issuer raises $9.5M round led by Gnosis
Pantera Capital: VC firm looks to raise $1B for new crypto fund
Natix: DePIN project focused on mapping data raises $4.6M ahead of token launch
InfiniGods: Gaming firm raises $8M series A with Pantera Capital funding exclusively
Immutable: Secures $50M for Web3 gaming rewards program

That’s all for now, folks. Thank you for being part of the journey.
Talk soon & happy weekend,

– Marc

PS: Follow me on LinkedIn and X for shorter insights.

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A guest post by

Jacy L. Youn

Aloha! I'm a strategy + content consultant in Web3, working with some of the best brands and builders in the space. Let's connect 🤙🏾