Welcome to the Crypto.com Monthly Research Roundup Newsletter!
1. Collaboration
In August, Crypto.com partnered with DataMesh to survey Australian merchants and consumers about the future of transacting in cryptocurrency. In the report, we tested their attitudes towards one of the key use cases still to be overcome – using cryptocurrency to pay for everyday goods and services.
Key insights include:
- There is significant interest in having the ability to make and receive payments directly in cryptocurrency: over half of Australian consumers (55%) and merchants (54%) say they want to transact in cryptocurrency.
- Almost half (47%) of merchants are accepting crypto or ready to accept within one year. With regards to making crypto payments, the ratio is 58% for consumers.
- Both merchants and consumers prefer to transact in Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, there is a significant demand from consumers for an Australian dollar stablecoin.
Check out the full survey report here.
2. Alpha Navigator
This institutional-focused report dives into macro trends, market-neutral pair trades, style-factor screens, thematic baskets, and event driven ideas. Read the full Alpha Navigator report here.
We highlight our price correlations matrix for the top tokens by market cap below. Tokens that are strongly correlated with each other can be potential candidates for market-neutral pair trades.
3. Research Wizard
What Are Fractionalised NFTs?
Despite its unprecedented success, the NFT market remains illiquid. The ERC721 token standard is what represents most NFTs, making tokens non-interchangeable and trading them difficult.
What you will find: This wizard report provides insight into how fractional NFTs aim to solve these issues. It will walk through what exactly fractional NFTs are, their origins, and how they work. Then, it lays out the incentives for fractionalising NFTs, why it’s a potential solution to illiquidity, and how it will make NFT ownership more accessible.
Check out the article here.
4. Feature
Monthly Feature Article | Peeling Away the Layers: Investigating the New Layer-1 and Layer-2 Blockchain Landscape
Read the high-level discussion here.
The new layer-1 and layer-2 landscape has evolved to tackle scalability. We introduce new layer-1 technologies, optimistic and zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups, the Blockchain Trilemma, and more.
Key takeaways:
- Cryptocurrency adoption is growing at an exponential rate, and so are the number of transactions. This presents a scalability challenge as the network capacity on blockchains struggle to keep up.
- A new generation of layer-1s is emerging, built with innovations that address the Blockchain Trilemma. These new layer-1s like Cronos, Avalanche, Aptos, and Sui integrate multiple solutions to improve scalability while maintaining a high level of security and decentralisation:
- Cronos: Its innovations include EVM compatibility, Cosmos integration, interoperability, and proof-of-authority (PoA).
- Avalanche: It implements the novel leaderless consensus protocols, introduces the Subnets, and uses DAG to organise transactions.
- Aptos: The main novel parts of Aptos include its consensus algorithm (AptosBFT), parallel execution framework (Block-STM), and the Move programming language.
- Sui: There are some similarities between Aptos and Sui, but Sui adopts additional creative ideas, such as a split of simple and complex transactions, a dual consensus mechanism, and Sui Move.
- Metrics in scalability, decentralisation, and security are compared among these new layer-1 blockchains in our private report, and the conclusions are:
- Cronos is promising in this multi-chain party because of its ecosystem support, interoperability, and great payment use case. From a technical perspective, Sui and Aptos are worth looking forward to.
- The future development of a decentralised network infrastructure should have these features: modularisation, parallel execution, and a secure programming language.
- With the emergence of new technologies, blockchains will continue to evolve and find the best way to develop.
- Layer-2 blockchains exist to relieve congestion on layer-1 blockchains (e.g. Ethereum and Bitcoin) by helping to speed up transaction processing. Currently, most layer-2 solutions aim to reduce the transaction load on the Ethereum blockchain.
- Gas fees (i.e. transaction fees) are usually much lower, while transaction speeds are higher, on layer-2 solutions as compared to layer-1 blockchains. The two most popular technologies currently used by layer-2 blockchains to process transactions are optimistic rollups and zero-knowledge rollups.
- We also compare other metrics such as total value locked (TVL), security, and smart contract functionality in our private report. Some of our key findings are that:
- One notable outperformer is Optimism, which more than tripled its TVL from US$0.3B on 1 March 2022 to $1.1B on 14 August 2022.
- In general, optimistic rollups and ZK-rollups are considered to have high security, as they inherit the security from the Ethereum Mainnet.
- The EVM-compatibility of optimistic rollups makes it convenient for developers to migrate existing smart contracts from Ethereum to the optimistic rollup chains.
- On 20 July 2022, the Polygon team officially introduced Polygon zkEVM (mainnet launch in 2023), which offers both the scalability benefits of ZK proofs and EVM-compatibility.
Interested to know more? Join us and check our reports for Private Member and Exchange VIP exclusive reports:
VIP Article 1 | Evolution of Layer 1 Solutions
VIP Article 2 | The Layer 2 Landscape
5. Crypto Conference & Economic Calendar from Market Pulse
Check out the latest Market Pulse update for more insights.
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Best regards,
Research & Insights Team
