An altcoin is bucking the bear

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. PayPal is giving in, finally. It will now allow users to part with the crypto stored in wallets. You can now move your Bitcoins to other wallets or even sell them to other traders outside this network. It even has plans to launch its own stablecoin. Ambitious!

Metaverse Cashin’ In

Altcoins crashed in 2021. But there was one category that bucked the trend. The metaverse. Metaverse tokens saw a 400% growth between 2021 and 2022. Sandbox rose 470%, STEPN was up 746%, and Axie Infinity zoomed 511%.

Going virtual A Kraken report says that there are a bunch of factors for metaverse’s rising popularity: 

• A pandemic-led rise in online data consumption.

• Rise in mobile use, leading to play-to-earn games getting popular.

• Decentralised setup where one person doesn’t control the network.  

Users have spent $1.9 billion on metaverse NFTs since 2020. Daily active wallets have risen 3,455%. 

There are economic reasons too. A $13 trillion revenue opportunity awaits metaverse users. As its utility grows, so will the value of crypto assets. 

Token economyThe NFT boom in 2021 popularised the crypto metaverse. Despite a sluggish altcoin market, metaverse tokens rose 400% as of May compared to the previous year. And a lot more is happening: 

• Jumping 131% Y-o-Y, metaverse awareness globally touched 74% in March 2022.

• About $2.5 billion was raised for blockchain games and metaverse projects just in Q1 2022. 

• Play to Earn (P2E) and metaverse-related projects could add $10 billion by the end of 2022. 

• Tokens of STEPN, which jumped 746%, and AXS, which rose 511%, were the biggest winners in the metaverse.

Where is the moolah?The total market of the metaverse will be physical-world activities moving to virtual land in addition to the internet revenue. A Citi report said that there are five main growth areas:

1. Operating systems that connect people and content.

2. Blockchain for a decentralised economy.

3. User interfaces such as voice control and gestures.

4. Extended reality headsets, including AR+VR. 

5. Cloud networking solutions. 

Companies such as Meta, Apple, Nvidia, and Intel could be the big gainers from this switch to virtual. With technology firms taking up space, users are interested too. It’s not just HODLing on Bitcoins, crypto investors have gotten smarter. 

ETH’s Dress Rehearsal

Ethereum is doing a final rehearsal of sorts. The crypto’s transitioning to an eco-friendly proof-of-stake (PoS) model. And it will face its last test on Wednesday. The Merge The Ropsten testnet is Ethereum’s oldest, almost identical, proof-of-work (PoW) experiment chain. It’ll merge with ETH's newer PoS test chain called Beacon. 

Here’s all you should know about this testing:

• PoW mining is energy intensive. To earn crypto, miners need to solve tough math problems ‌quickly. But PoS just requires contributors who are staked/invested in the network to validate new transactions. 

• Ropsten is popular in the Ethereum ecosystem. The merger will nudge Ethereum developers to upgrade to the PoS model automatically.

• There will be checks on the software verifying the transactions 

• To avoid hacks, the merger will begin when Ropsten reaches a Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) of 50 quadrillion.

Once the merger is complete, Beacon will function as a single PoS network. If everything goes right, the final transformation will happen in August 2022. 

RBI Hikes, Again 

With inflation on its mind, RBI has hiked rates again by 0.5%. Repo, the rate at which banks borrow from RBI, is now at 4.9%. The RBI had hiked rates by 0.4% just a month ago. 

What’s the hurry?RBI is serious about the price rise. It has predicted a 6.7% inflation for this financial year. And higher rates would help curb it.

1. A repo rate hike means banks need to pay more to borrow.

2. Banks pass on these costs as higher interest rates. 

3. The cost of home loans, auto loans, and even personal loans go up.  

4. Consumers will decide not to spend because EMIs will be high.

5. Inflation comes down because spending decreases. 

Now, what?Your EMIs will go up immediately. RBI is moving away from being accommodative, meaning there are chances of further rate hikes. The stock market, however, was expecting this decision. So, realty stocks weren’t impacted. 

SHIB’s Bull Ride

The OG memecoin Shiba Inu is being destroyed. But only to boost its value. Investors are razing SHIB to reduce its circulating supply and push its price up. Over the past 24 hours, the coin’s burn rate soared over 190%.

Fireproof?The burn isn’t yielding any big results yet. SHIB’s value rose just ~1.4% and is still trading well below $0.01. In the past 24 hours (till Wednesday, 5:30 pm IST), ~116.86 million SHIB tokens have been burnt. 

This, however, had been coming. Its founder Ryoshi has vanished from the internet. The hope is that there are a few things that will drive growth. 

• After much delay, Europe’s largest exchange, Bitstamp, greenlighted Shiba Inu trading. 

• Brazilian football giant São Paulo FC is now accepting payments in SHIB tokens. 

• Of the top 10 coins presently preferred by crypto whales, SHIB ranks fifth.

However, regular SHIB HODLers are quickly losing their trust in the coin. Sliding to record lows, only ~1.17 million addresses currently hold the coin. 

And that’s it for today. If this email was forwarded to you, please consider subscribing. It’s free. We’ll never show you an ad or charge you for this. We swear.

Who are we? There is a lot happening in our world. Everything has layers, and each layer has to be carefully peeled so you, the reader, know how the world of money is changing every day. That’s our promise. Help you unpeel the onions, which are the public markets in the US, India, and crypto, so that you know just a little more.