State of the Opera – February 2022

Welcome back to the State of the Opera. February was a truly memorable month with a wave of news to pour-over. On the discussion board for this edition; Harry Yeh and tomb/2omb/3omb, Andre Cronje’s ‘Solidly’ launches, and crypto’s role in international affairs. Also, have you taken the $OATH? 

We here at Lrn.Fi hopes everyone is safe while the world continues to adjust during these uncertain times. 

The team would love to hear from you so for any questionable queries, quizzical questions or to chat with some quirky quipsters please join us at our Discord or get in touch via the contact form at the bottom of the article. Check out the Byte Mason’s Learn website for protocol overviews and past editions of the State of the Opera. 

State of the Opera 

Tomb, 2omb or 3omb? What the fork is going on?

For those not in the know, Tomb is a seigniorage algorithmic stablecoin backed by venture capitalist Harry Yeh. February has been Tomb fork season with numerous protocols hitting peaks of popularity with many jumping in on the Tomb naming convention. 2omb and 3omb launched in January but sky-rocketed in popularity in early February catching the attention of Harry Yeh, even going so far as to enter the Discord of the protocol and threaten legal action, amongst other things. 

This followed on from a post in the Tomb Finance Discord in which he announced the removal of Tomb Finance from Github and his intentions to “‘go after every fork with the full force of the law and when necessary, with law enforcement”. This caused massive controversy within the community as members discussed the ethics of claiming ownership of open source code. Others pondered about who should have the power to decide what constitutes a ‘proper’ Tomb fork.

In less than a week from his original discord post targeting Tomb forks, Harry Yeh and Tomb Finance announced their partnership with 2omb and 3omb and have since released documentation and applications to support the integration. Tomb Finance has seen a massive loss in TVL as seen in Table 1 with over $500M leaving the protocol for calmer waters. 2omb Finance followed closely with a peak TVL of $80M during the month and ended with just under $30M.

Solidly Launches 

Andre Cronje’s new project, Solidly exchange, launched this month. Solidly is an automated market maker (AMM) that improves on Uniswap V2. It is built to allow low-cost, near-zero slippage trading on uncorrelated or tightly correlated assets/pegged assets like stablecoins. The protocol incentivizes fees over liquidity. Users who provide their liquidity in a whitelisted Solidly pool receive liquidity mining rewards in the form of SOLID, the governance and revenue token for the Solidly protocol.

Solidex has partnered with Solidly to act as a ‘boost aggregator for $SOLID on Fantom’ and posted ‘All about Solidily’ to help explain the AMM, its tokenomics, as well as fees and emissions.

BEETS Wars 

Beethoven X is a friendly Balancer fork with tech positioned to offer great returns on parked liquidity. The protocol currently has over $300 million in TVL and offers a unique twist on staking. If users stake their ‘The Fidelio Duetto’ investment pool they will receive fBEETS. 30% of Beethoven X protocol revenue is used to buy BEETS/FTM 80/20 off the open market and is redistributed as Fidelio Duetto BPT to holders of fBEETS. Users can then stake their fBEETS in the BeetsBar for more fBEETS. 

The protocol allows users who have fBEETS staked or in their wallet to vote where 30% of $BEETS emissions is allocated via gauge votes. Voting takes place every two weeks with users able to visit here to check out BeethovenX proposals. These emissions can be highly valuable for other protocols, who are willing to bribe $fBEETS holders to point their votes in the direction of their pools. These bribes can come in many different forms such as bounties in tokens or NFT airdrops. Protocols have found that using bribes to gain higher emissions has been very capital efficient. The result has been increased activity on Beethoven-X and greater interest in the BEETS token.

For a more detailed overview on becoming a BEETS bribe lord, check out our article here.

Taking the $OATH

The launch of $OATH has exceeded expectations with over 6,500,000 FTM raised during a three-day liquidity generation event. Users could participate in the event by navigating through an other-worldly three-dimensional environment from within their web 3 connected browser. By default, $OATH could be purchased with a 90-day vesting period. Users could also participate with a 50% discount if they chose to vest the tokens over 4 years. Additionally, it was announced that holders of certain NFTs from across the Fantom network would have the opportunity to get $OATH with a variety of discounts and vesting periods. This provided a multitude of different options to get involved. Participants took a share of 80,000,000 tokens at the conclusion of the event. A further 13.2 million tokens were sold during the liquidity bootstrapping pool before launching on the open market.

Interested in knowing more about taking the $OATH? Check out our post here.

Coinbase goes to the Super Bowl

Coinbase exploded onto the mainstream media stage after purchasing 60-second ad space for $14 million during this year\’s Super Bowl. The Coinbase ad was sparse, featuring a lone floating QR code that linked to the exchange with an offer for $15 in free bitcoin. It caused a surge in traffic as the exchange reported over 20 million hits on their landing page within one minute, briefly crashing the application. 

Crypto’s involvement with sports media has hit new peaks recently with the home of the LA Lakers renaming to Crypto.com Arena late last year at a speculated cost of $700M for a 20-year deal. 

Trudeau says no-no to Crypto

Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau has enacted Canada’s Emergency Act. This gives the government powers to suspend ‘all funds, including those held in a bank account and sent to cryptocurrency wallets’ according to a government notice. This move was in response to the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests and specifically targeted funds donated towards the protest group. These powers allowed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to freeze bank accounts funding the protesters without acquiring a court order. 

The Crypto community was quick to condemn Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeting his concern, as well as Vitalik Buterin who questioned the removal of due process and the level of financial control.

Ukraine vs Russia 

Moscow’s war on Ukraine and the ferocious financial backlash are causing ripple effects felt around the globe. Recent reports have suggested that Russian crypto wallets hold a significant portion of the crypto market with the price of the Russian Ruble hitting record lows.

Ukraine’s official Twitter account posted crypto wallet addresses were and it is accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC donations. At the time of writing this article, over $30M in crypto assets has been donated to Ukraine.

DeFi Snapshot

Outside the Opera 

Now to peer outside the theater and see the state of other popular L1 chains.  

Institutional investors have continued to show interest in Avalanche according to CoinShares Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly report. The report tracks investment inflows and outflows of popular crypto-asset investment products and noted that Avalanche enjoyed its fifth consecutive week of inflows. However, the report noted, “as this inflow represented trading on one single day it is too early to tell if this represents broader appetite for the altcoin”.

Binance has announced that it has renamed its blockchain ecosystem and changed the name of the native BNB token. Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) will now become BNB Beacon Chain & BNB Smart Chain. The coin BNB (formerly known as Binance Coin) will now stand for ‘Build and Build’, removing the exchange\’s name from both instances. 

“The BNB ecosystem is bigger than Binance, and has transcended Binance in terms of use cases,” said BNB Chain ecosystem coordinator, Samy Karim.

 The announcement included intentions for BNB Chain to explore “advancements to benefit users, projects and developers within the BNB Chain community” while also considering development on additional layer one blockchains. BNB Chain will embrace large-scale applications, including GameFi, SocialFi, the Metaverse as well as ‘MetaFi’. What all this will mean for the newly rebranded BNB Chain is yet to be seen. 

Crypto is neutral but Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin is not. He has expressed concerns regarding Canada’s attempt to block protesting truckers from accessing bank accounts and crypto funds. Vitalik has also condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine claiming “An attack on Ukraine can only harm Russia, Ukraine, and humanity”. Ethereum has had an explosive growth rate of new non-zero addresses created since 2021. Despite this increase, the percentage of wallets actively engaging with the service has decreased to 0.86% as of the 13th of February. In terms of TVL, Ethereum remains the most popular smart contract platform and has recently replaced Walmart to sit at 25th place on the list of most valuable assets in the world. 

Terra has had a stellar month almost doubling its TVL from January as seen in Table 4. The non-profit organization is known as the Luna Foundation Guard recently completed a private sale of LUNA and raised $1B. These funds will go towards forming a decentralized UST Forex reserve denominated in $BTC. The capital raised will be used to create a ‘release valve’ for UST redemptions during selloff periods in the crypto market. Terra has also formally announced their new sports sponsorship deal with Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals in what can only be the first of many sports sponsorship deals voted via a DAO. Terra is now the second-largest crypto chain for TVL.

Polygon continues its trend of hosting partnerships with popular brands. This month, Italian fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) announced the launch of its NFT community, DGFamily on Polygon-powered NFT marketplace UNXD. The line offers a unique combination of digital, physical, and experiential rewards for successful bidders. Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has invested $450 million in the Polygon network as part of a larger effort to fund Web3. It wasn’t all good news as Polygon’s native stablecoin platform, QiDAO, suffered an exploit with hackers getting away with $13 million in various tokens.

Solana faces more trials as multi-chain bridge Wormhole reported that smart contract hackers exploited a bug within the platform. The hackers were able to mint 120,000 wETH ($321 million USD) on the Solana network. This resulted in wETH which was not backed 1:1 by ETH, which had the potential to make all wETH on Solana valueless. Jump Trading Group, the trading firm behind Wormhole, was quick to fully refund losses. In spite of these challenges, the Solana blockchain has recorded the most development activity in the last three months amongst blockchain projects on the software hosting site, Github.

Featured Project – The Granary

Our featured project this month is The Granary, a new decentralized, user-driven borrowing and lending liquidity market inspired by AAVE. This protocol\’s primary goal is to provide users with a safe and transparent lending experience while providing competitive yield. 

The Granary plans to serve the Fantom, Harmony, and Avalanche communities. The Fantom network will host the first stage of Granary v1.0 which will encompass a vanilla AAVE fork. Upon release, users will be able to lend and borrow from a multitude of Fantom assets. 

Stage 2 of the launch will introduce revenue sharing with the model benefitting from improved gas efficiency and changes to tokenomics that aim to increase the longevity of the Granary Protocol. For more info on Stage 2, check out front-end developer OxFantomMenances Medium.

The Granary considers protocol safety a top priority with v1.0 strictly employing battle-tested AAVE source code. The team has also enlisted the illustrious ByteMasons Security advisory team to assist with protocol security.

As always remember to do your own research and start by checking out The Granary docs, Discord, Twitter, or our handy protocol overview

Key Metrics 

Market Cap 

Fantom February is cooling off as the market cap dips under $4B before ending the month just north of that figure. Greater world economic instability (to be discussed below) has led to massive movements in all markets generating high levels of uncertainty. Lows for both the TVL ($7.79B on Feb 22nd) and the market cap ($3.7B on Feb 23rd) followed Vladmir Putin’s speech in which he recognized the independence of two pro-Russian regions in Eastern Ukraine on the 21st of February. Economic sanctions from NATO and the subsequent ‘special military operation’ launched on the 24th of February have caused ripple effects across the globe and in the crypto-verse. 

Super Bowl fans were introduced to crypto in the form of halftime show advertisements by FTX and Crypto.com. Recent Fantom native project launches have helped to drive investment into the network in the form of Andre Cronjes Solidly and Solidex releases this month as well as the recent announcements of previously rival protocols forming new partnerships. The specifics of these have been detailed above.

Price movement

Fantom, alongside many L1 chains, suffered double-digit drops due to escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine with many registering double-digit downturns in price as Russian troops entered Ukraine. As seen in Table 2, signs of recovery occurred towards the end of the month but investors remain wary during uncertain times. 

User Engagement

User engagement has begun to slow down after the explosive growth of last month with most measured metrics showing small to moderate growth. The exception is total distinct FTM addresses as users flock to engage with Solidly and Solidex posts on their recent releases. 

Reaper Farm

Reaper Farm has experienced its own growth spurt increasing from 33,114 to 36,751 unique total users at the time of writing this article. Following the announcement of the $OATH token on February 15th, interaction with the auto-compounding yield farm skyrocketed, practically doubling the average number of contract interactions and interactive users on the platform. 

Top FTM Senders and Receivers 

Once again, Spooky Swap maintains the highest percentage of FTM received at the end of the month, bumping up from 21% to 24%. Geist has lost some traffic, dropping down from 16% to just over 6% with Tarot making a fresh appearance with close to 2% of Fantom received in the final week of February going to the promising protocol.

Top Tokens by Transaction Count

WFTM and USDC continue their dominant streak of tokens with the highest transaction count on the network. SOLID, SEX, and TOMB share the next stops and can be attributed to the massive amount of media attention and user interest surrounding these projects. 

Top Tokens by Unique Wallets

USDC has continued its streak of being the top token traded on the FTM network between unique senders and receivers. TOMB knocks out OxDAO from the third place this month as seen in Figure 3. 

Pulse of the Network

This section will hope to aggregate and compound your own interest within the FTM network space. If you’re looking for some research to claim as your own or just the headlines for all the latest news and gossip this is the Pulse of the Network, the information you don’t want to miss out on.

FTM Headlines

What is Solidly exchange? – The Coin Pope – In-depth article regarding Solidly

Inside the Curve Wars – A helpful article to help contextualize the Curve Wars, DeFi bribes and Governance

Artion – Fantom NativeNFT Marketplace Received V2 upgrade 

FTM listed on Poloniex 

Fantom Transactions Surpass Ethereum – Users seeking solutions for maximum yield farming

Binance adds automated DCA for FTM – Set and forget your favorite investment strategy on Binance

VeDAO and 0xDAO – Wars end with peace and a powerful new alliance

Stader Labs brings Liquid Staking to Fantom – Unlock the value of your staked FTM!

Coinstats now supports Fantom – A leading Crypto portfolio management solution that integrates Fantom

Beethoven explains LBP launches – The kind folks at Beethoven X explain the latest crypto abbreviation

The Rumour Mill

Several Twitter users reported issues with the initial Solidly launch 

Uber CEO ‘Is Uber going to accept crypto in the future? Absolutely, at some point’

FTM Podcasts and Videos 

CVX and the Curve Wars – Literally everything you need to know in video form

Nick Drakon discusses what is Solidly Exchange – Concise and well-informed overview of Solidly Exchange

Nick Drakon with another quality video regarding BEETS Wars – Nick talks about BEETS wars strategy in multi video educational series 

FTM Unchained Episode 22 – The team discusses a ‘Harry’ situation 

FTM Unchained Episode 24 – BEETS Wars raging! Bebis talks BEETS

Justin from FTM Alerts – A brief summation of Bribes and how to get involved

FTM Foundation and Industry Reports

FTM Foundation announces sponsorship of Scuderia AlphaTauri for the 2022 Formula 1 season

“The Next Mega Trade” – Crypto Hedge Fund Report from Pantera Capital 

FTM Community/Fan Content

Reddit User u/JL978 creates a tool to analyze gas spending across different blockchains

Mark Zuckerberg\’s sister, Randi Zuckerberg has published a song about crypto and web3