Crypto Weekly Wrap: Aug 16 - 22

Looking for Cardano's Uniswap

It was another bullish week for the crypto market with Bitcoin nearing the 50k mark and a number of altcoins seeing some major gains over the past week. Notable gains came from Avalanche (up over 130% in the week) and Solana (up over 65% in the week). ADA (Cardano) also hit a new all time high of $2.55 after surging about 20% on Aug 20. Like last week, the main catalyst driving the price of ADA is the upcoming Alonzo hard fork (or network upgrade) which will occur on September 12. This long-anticipated upgrade will allow for the implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications, which will spark massive activity on the network in the DeFi space (decentralized finance). Coinpad views the upcoming Cardano upgrade to be among the most influential event to happen in the crypto world this year.

All around it was a positive week in crypto-land. At the beginning of the week, US retail giant Walmart posted a job listing saying it was seeking an experienced crypto expert who can develop and drive a digital currency strategy and product roadmap for the firm. Later in the week, US exchange Coinbase announced that it will expand its cryptocurrency holdings on its balance sheet by a $500 million allocation and invest 10% of profits, another bullish signal for the market.

Below are some of the other top crypto news stories that Coinpad has been monitoring over the past week, followed by the coins that we have been eyeing or buying over the week. But first, our disclaimer needs to be noted: the information provided here, as well as on our website (coinpad.io), does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice and you should not treat any of the content as such. Do your own research and invest at your own risk!

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Weekly news wrap

More institutional adoption is occurring, which seems to be going in tandem with wider retail adoption (crypto adoption is an important trend to track as obviously this drives up demand):

Wells Fargo Files to Launch a Bitcoin Fund

Bitcoin's race to $50K heats up as solid institutional backing continues

Missouri mayor suggests giving residents up to $1K in Bitcoin

Brazil’s central bank president endorses crypto regulation

On regulatory matters, the main news coming out this week is that Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange (which has been hit by a number of regulatory hurdles worldwide) is now rolling out mandatory KYC requirements for all users of all of its services on the platform. The exchange revealed that these changes are a result of ongoing reviews of its products and services to determine the necessary changes and improvements needed as the regulatory environment continues to evolve rapidly.

Here is an interesting story out of Australia combining crypto news with Covid-19:

Australia: Bitcoin for Those Who Get COVID-19 Vaccine

And finally, a survey conducted by the multinational professional service provider Deloitte revealed that 73% of senior executives at financial institutions fear their companies will fall behind in terms of development if they fail to adopt virtual currencies and blockchain technology. 76% believe that digital assets will replace fiat money in the next 5 to 10 years.

Coinpad’s plays:

In anticipation of Cardano’s upcoming Alonzo hard fork on 12 September, which will allow for the implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications, we are focusing our investments over the near term on upcoming decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that will launch on the Cardano network. As seen with Ehtereum’s Uniswap and Binance Smart Chain’s PancakeSwap, the token of a network’s dominant DEX will be a highly valued asset. So our investment thesis is simple: Invest early in any Cardnao DEX contender as one of them should eventually reach a market capitalization (marketcap) somewhere in between PancakeSwap (roughly $5 billion) and Uniswap (roughly $16 billion). Let’s call it $10 billion. Right now, the highest marketcap among any of the contenders is roughly $470 million (ERG, see more below). This means a potential 21X (a $1,000 investment will be worth $21,000 if our investment thesis proves correct). Yet, the Cardano DEX race is by no means “a winner takes all” scenario; likely there will be numerous DEX’s in the ecosystem and we believe that likely the top 3 or 4 will have a marketcap of at least $1 billion each. As a result, we are casting our crypto net wide and buying several of the main contenders now while their marketcaps are still miniscule. So, which ones are the main contenders? In no particular order, these are the ones we are eyeing and buying:

CARDSWAP (CSWAP): This is a highly speculative play in a token launched by Cardstarter, the first insured project accelerator for Cardano (we were an early investor of their native token Cards and got most of our CSWAP from mining it). While the initial plan was that the Cardstarter team would be launching a DEX (Cardswap), there are community rumours that the team is either merging or forming some sort of partnership with Sundaeswap - one the frontrunners to emerge as the dominant DEX on Cardano. The speculation (and we stress this is only speculation and that there has been no official announcement) is that CSWAP holders will somehow be rewarded, possibly through an allocation of Sundaeswap tokens at a set conversion rate. Again, this is a highly speculative play and in our view the token will either explode or implode. At the time of writing, CSWAP trades at around $0.16 with a market cap of about $45 million.

The only place to buy CSWAP at present is on Uniswap. We use Uniswap V3 (using the USDC-CSWAP liquidity pool). You will need to add / import the CSWAP token to see it on Uniswap by pasting CSWAP’s token address, which you can find here on Etherscan. If you need further help or questions, there is a CSWAP group on Telegram that is typically helpful (t.me/CSWAP_Chat).

Next on our list is ADAX. They have a sleek demo of their DEX here. The ADAX token is listed on Coinmarketcap and has a current marketcap of about $32 million. You can read more about the product here. Like CSWAP, you can only buy ADAX on one platform for the time being, yet it is a much simpler process than Uniswap. The platform is ExMarkets, a leading crypto crowdfunding platform. ADAX is up over 100% over the past week, but that’s just a drop in the hat if the project succeeds.

Wrapping up our list is ErgoDEX, which will be the first cross-chain DEX on top of Ergo and Cardano blockchains. The DEX is merely one part of the Ergo ecosystem and there is no separate DEX token; thus the way to invest in this DEX is by investing in Ergo’s native coin, ERG. Ergo is a revolutionary UTXO-based blockchain protocol built to be an efficient and secure financial contracts platform. In our assessment, Ergo stands out as unique project trying to solve the many problems in Bitcoin's blockchain regarding security and scalability and creating an efficient and secure way to implement financial contracts. The fact that they are coming out with a DEX is merely icing on top of the cake (indeed we are bullish on ERG even without the DEX). For more on the ErgoDEX see this recent article. With a marketcap of about $4570 million, we believe Ergo has the potential to become a top ten coin by marketcap (which would place its maketcap at over $22 billion at current rankings).

That’s all for this week folks. If you found our information helpful and you have not already subscribed to our site, please head over to coinpad.io (registration is free) and / or follow us on Twitter @coinpadhome.