The NEW Crypto Wallet for Gen Z 👀

Happy Monday, folks 👋🏻 GM. Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday to y'all. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's issue with meals and beverages. Hopefully, 2023 will be kinder to us all. One quick note. In 2023, Chain Catalyst will be "properly" launched. Expect a housekeeping email sometime this week from us. Thanks again to all of you for being our early supporters!

In Today's Email:

• Over the Weekend: FTX saga continues, SBF flies business 🤯

• Products: Doshi, crypto wallet for Gen Z 👦

• Charts: L2 TPS beats Ethereum, web3 credentials growth 📈

WHAT MATTERS

FTX Saga: Ellison-Wang Plead, SBF Sightings

We promise it will be quick. You're probably tired of the FTX saga also.

State of play: SBF was out on record bond payment. Alameda's Ellison and FTX's Wang have been working with prosecutors. Both plead guilty.

• Ellison stated that she knew of Alameda's special access to FTX's customers' funds since the beginning.

• Wang admitted that he had been directed to make the back door for the special privileges.

What's next: SBF awaits trial, but he seems to be running around freely now. He was sighted in the AA Business Class lounge with full access to a computer 🤡 - he has shaved and seemed to have changed his style a bit.

Our take: No one knows how exactly this will play out, but it doesn't seem like SBF is going to get a punishment as severe as Madoff. Ronnie Abrams, the district Judge who was supposed to oversee SBF's case, has withdrawn because of a potential conflict of interest. Her husband, Greg Andres, is a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, a firm that advised FTX in 2021.

GCR, the renowned trader who bet against the downfall of LUNA and is widely successful at many other predictions, has tweeted the following.

For builders: Nothing new that you haven't already known. We'll be back next week.

For investors: Nothing new that you haven't already known. We'll be back next week.

PRODUCTS OF THE WEEK

Doshi: The Web3 Wallet for Gen Z

What is Doshi: Doshi is a crypto wallet focusing on Gen Zs. It's a product optimized for teens and young adults. The concept is to be a thoughtful crypto wallet with educational, safe, and legal concepts at its core.

• The open-source nature of crypto often drew bad actors. Younger people are vulnerable to scams and impulsive gambling-related mistakes. Doshi aims to tackle this problem while creating a fun learning environment for young crypto enthusiasts.

• Doshi's features include creating wallets without seed phrases, NFT creation using AI, learn-to-earn, and fantasy trading competitions.

Other cool products:

• Revel, a web3 collecting, trading, and earning platform for creators.

• Pine Protocol, a permissionless NFT financing protocol.

• Cypherock, a self custody hardware wallet without a seed phrase.

• Tonsnipe, a gateway to seek pre-sale deals in the Ton blockchain ecosystem.

• Concordex, an institutional-grade DEX on the Concordium blockchain.

• LayerTwoLabs, a layer-1 for Bitcoin with a focus on Bip300 sidechain.

• Guard, a web3 inheritance platform.

• ShardStarter, a launchpad on Shardeum .

• UTILITI, a one-stop shop web3 infrastructure and tools for web3 developers.

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

L2s Process More TPS Than Ethereum

Layer 2 means any off-chain network built on top of Ethereum to help it scale. Many such projects started in the past 3-4 years, and we're starting to see the fruit of the labor. In October 2022, L2 chains processed more transactions per second than Ethereum in aggregate. These L2 include Arbitrum, Optimism, dYdX, and Immutable.

Our take: Builders and investors need to assess the impact of a crowded base-layer space in crypto, with multiple L2s and L1s existing out there. For builders, this includes where to build and how to keep your project as chain agnostic as possible. For investors, understanding the incentives and mechanism behind these chains will be crucial to properly size their bets.

To watch: ZKsync and StarkWare are high-profile L2 projects that have raised $200M and $260M respectively. Both aren't fully live yet, but they're poised to become significant players in the L2 space. further contributing to the growth and scalability of Ethereum, and the broader crypto ecosystem.

Credentialing-as-a-Service (CaaS) Growth

Galxe and Gateway are the two fastest-growing Credentialing-as-a-Service (CaaS) providers. Simply put CaaS are projects that aim to provide proof that you've done an activity, in a decentralized manner. This includes attending events, testing DeFi protocols, or owning certain NFTs. The premise is similar to how a person's trustworthiness and credentials are being tracked in the TradFi system via credit scores and other means.

State of Play: Galxe is the fastest-growing CaaS provider with 920,000 wallets, just behind the leading provider, POAP, with 1 million wallets. The idea behind CaaS is to create new crypto-native primitives, such as DeFi integration with real-world assets, without relying on centralization.

Our take: This is an already-solved problem in web2 with Identity as a Service (IDaaS). The only motivation of CaaS is to support a decentralized, on-chain native way of credentialing web3 users. Projects such as ENS have neat niche use cases, but the broader effort to do CaaS is overcomplicating an existing model and difficult to scale.

QUICK BITES

• Judge withdraws from SBF's case, citing potential conflict of interest.

• BTC mining companies close 2022 with $4 billion in debt.

• REN to mint 180 million tokens to fund v2.0.

• Brazil allows investment funds to invest in crypto.

• Hunting Hill Global Capital double down on crypto.

• BitKeep exploited for $8M.

MEME & NOTEWORTHY READS

• The Block's report on 2023 Digital Asset Outlook

• Messari's report on 2023 Crypto Theses.

• Zee Prime Capital's blog on "The Fappening".

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advice.