Participants of the Arbitrum airdrop project received thousands of dollars in rewards. Review by Crypto Upvotes experts on how the sphere of earning tokens for activity in blockchain services is organized and what other projects can make an airdrop.

Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, organized an airdrop of tokens to encourage active users of this ecosystem. On March 23, token trading under the ticker ARB started on major cryptocurrency exchanges, and after a period of strong volatility at the time of listing, its price on trading floors stabilized at $1.2. Tens of thousands of addresses received between 3,000 and 10,000 tokens during this distribution. Thus, participants received significant amounts of incentives in dollar terms and caused a stir around other projects. Which in the future may make their own airdrops.

Airdrop is a new form of successful project launch ?

The idea of free distribution of coins to users is not new. The first airdrop, after which the term became popular, was invented by the developers of cryptocurrency Auroracoin back in 2014 at the stage of mass cryptocurrency market birth. According to their idea, every resident of Iceland was supposed to get coins. That project was quickly forgotten, but the concept itself became popular in the crypto industry and continued to evolve.

Now, airdrops serve as an effective method for blockchain services to attract an audience. It is also likely to increase the loyalty of users who receive rewards in the form of project tokens. Some ecosystem decentralized projects, in which investors see potential, conduct multimillion rounds of funding with the participation of famous funds like Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz.

What is Project Arbitrum. And why it’s the most expected airdrops of this year

A few years ago, crypto companies chose different forms of ICO (initial coin offering) to raise capital and liquidity. Now there is a risk that tokens will be classified as unregistered securities in the U.S. or Europe when raising funds this way. The free distribution of tokens helps create a market for crypto projects. At the same time, most of their supply stays with developers and investors. At the same time, it creates a financial base for the former and a source of profit for the latter.

Developers of blockchain services often do not announce a token when launching their project. But the experience of their competitors helps community members determine which projects will sooner or later decide to release their own crypto-asset. And which types of activities will be eligible for rewards.

This was the case with Offchain Labs: an infrastructure has already been built around Arbitrum – decentralized exchanges, NFT marketplaces, games, wallets, social networks and other services. All of them are at an early stage of development and need active users and testing. It is for activity in such projects that tokens are eventually distributed.

The company remained silent about its airdrop until recently. But the successful experience of large projects such as Aptos, Blur or Optimism ( the main competitor of Arbitrum) made it clear that participation in projects on the Arbitrum blockchain. Most likely, in the end, will not remain without encouragement from developers.

From which projects to expect launch of new Airdrops

The first obvious candidate is zkSync, an Ethereum scaling solution with a different technical approach than what Arbitrum or Optimism offer. In November 2022, zkSync developer (Matter Labs) led several investment rounds totaling $258 million. And LightSpeed, Andreessen Horowitz as well as major venture capital crypto funds – Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly took part in them.

The zkSync development team includes Anthony Rose, who led engineering teams at SpaceX, creating software for Falcon, Dragon, and Starlink. And Steve Newcomb, who founded Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft and later became part of the search engine Bing.

In one week before the launch of token from Arbitrum, users transferred $8 million in assets to projects in the zkSync ecosystem. According to DefiLlama, the amount of funds (total value locked) locked in the pool of the decentralized exchange ZigZag. Which runs on the zkSync platform, rose from $1.5 million to more than $13 million in just one day. In a comment for Coindesk, Martin Lee, head of analytics platform Nansen, says that it was the distribution of Arbitrum tokens that triggered the increased activity of “airdrop hunters.” They have attracted both new entrants and those who have participated in airdrops from other projects.

Other potential candidates for future airdrops include several other projects:

StarkWare – Ethereum scaling solution, similar to zkSync. The developer is the Israeli company StarkWare Industries, with an investment of over $150 million and an estimate of $8 billion.

Scroll – a similar Ethereum scaling solution. The project has attracted funding of $80 million with an estimate of $1.8 billion.

Fuel Network – an Ethereum scaling solution similar to Optimism or Arbitrum. The project’s developer, Fuel Labs, raised $80 million in funding in September 2022.

Aleo – DeFi-protocol with a focus on privacy. The developers of Aleo Systems raised $200 million from SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, Samsung Ventures and other funds.

LayerZero – a protocol for exchanging data between blockchains from different ecosystems. The company behind the development, LayerZero Labs, has raised more than $173 million, with investors including PayPal Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Other major projects without their own token include Sui, Celestia, Sei, Linera and others.

Terms of participation in airdrop from similar projects

As a rule, the developers of such projects do not name any criteria or conditions, fulfilling which it will be possible to get tokens in the future. Moreover, none of them guarantee the availability of airdrop for early users or the launch of a token. Activity sets are formed in the community based on the experience of predecessor projects. And when an airdrop is announced, the project team decides for itself each time who can claim their tokens and for what.

Some projects have even given away tokens for a single interaction with the ecosystem. And in the case of the Blur Marketplace, for example, a full-fledged multilevel airdrop strategy with a gamified approach was developed.

Risks from participation and scammers

Anonymity when using cryptoservices opens the door to manipulation. According to a joint study by journalist Colin Wu and the blog x-explore, about 150,000 addresses and at least 4,000 groups were identified in the Arbitrum airdrop.
Which are engaged in activity generation, which accounted for more than 253 million ARB tokens. And that’s about 22% of the entire airdrop.

There is growing evidence on the web that organized groups typically in countries such as Vietnam or Bangladesh – are scamming activity in blockchain projects. They use multiple accounts and wallets, working in offices on a schedule and getting paid. Our Crypto Upvotes experts managed to find several international groups in Telegram and Discord messengers. In these groups administrators offer services of “outsourcing” activity. Prices for the services range from $10 to $200 per account, depending on the project and activity set.

The growing popularity of cryptocurrency airdrop is being actively exploited by scammers. Interacting with blockchain projects implies a certain level of technical expertise. Therefore, inexperienced users often become victims of scammers. Tens of thousands of phishing pages appear on web that imitate sites of famous projects.

Sometimes these sites are designed with attention to detail and have high-quality design and convincing scenarios of interaction with the victim. It helps to avoid risks by interacting only with the official resources of the services. Where they also post links to ecosystem projects in which it is possible to participate, claiming a future airdrop.

You will only be able to buy NFTs through your Amazon account with a bank card. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

The Amazon NFT Marketplace will launch on April 24, according to TheBigWhale. At first, a service called Amazon Digital Marketplace will be open only to U.S. users. But in future, customers from other countries, including Europe, will have access to it.

At launch, the site will feature 15 NFT collections. It will only be possible to buy NFTs through an Amazon account with a bank card. This method of payment was chosen to make it convenient for customers to use the service in the traditional way. At the same time not tying cryptocurrencies like Metamask to it.

To host a marketplace, Amazon chose a private blockchain platform that is not compatible with Ethereum. Therefore, developers who want their NFTs to be available on the new platform will have to use blockchain bridges (tools to transfer tokens between different networks).

Our experts note that Amazon is preparing to launch its own NFT-platform, it was reported in early January. At the time, it was known that US online retailer was considering launching blockchain games. Participants in such games will be able to receive digital tokens, and it plans to hold at least one NFT airdrop.

Cryptocurrency platforms providing liquid staking services came in second place in DeFi sector by volume of funds sent to them

Staking platforms came in second in terms of funds in the DeFi sector, overtaking lending services. According to DeFi platform Llama, the volume of total blocked value (TVL). Liquid staking platforms exceeded $14 billion, while TVL in cryptocurrency lending protocols is about $13.7 billion.

Liquid staking, allows users to earn from Ethereum stacking without having to make a mandatory deposit of 32 ETH. Users can send any amount of ETH or other Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency coins to staking. Users will receive tokenized versions of their assets in return. For example, in form of stETH token in a 1:1 ratio. The latter can be used in parallel to generate additional income in DeFi-protocols. At the same time, you will not lose earnings from staking assets in the liquid staking service.

Decentralized exchanges (DEX) lead in terms of funds on DeFi-platforms. TVL on them is $19.3 billion. However, this category includes 716 services. While the staking services whose data is collected by the analytics platform are 71.

Over the last month, TVL of just one stacking protocol Lido increased by $1 billion to $9.3 billion, while this figure for leading DEX is almost twice as low: Curve has $4.9 billion, Uniswap has $4.1 billion, and Pancakeswap has $2.5 billion.

On February 25, the Lido team noted that it recorded the largest daily inflow of funds amounting to more than 150,000 ETH (about $245 million). According to crypto analyst Lookonchain, these funds were contributed by Tron blockchain founder and Huobi exchange chief Justin Sun.

On February 27, cryptoprotocol specialists from 0xScope noted that Sun continues to contribute funds to stake on Lido. Additionally, he sent another 88,000 ETH (about $144 million) there.

Reasons for growth

Our experts point out that the influx of funds into liquid staking protocols is caused by the fact that the Ethereum network is scheduled to start updating Shanghai in April 2023. Which will allow to withdraw previously blocked funds in ETH from staking. After it was revealed in January that developers had decided to focus on this particular upgrade feature, staking platform token rates soared by dozens percent and continue to rise.

Also, the growth in popularity of DeFi-protocols from this category was promoted by rumors about the possible ban on staking in USA. There has been no official confirmation of this yet. But the major U.S. exchange Kraken in early February closed stakng for U.S. customers at the request of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Our experts talked about trends in the cryptocurrency market. And pointed out several altcoins worth paying attention to

Start of 2023 was positive not only for Bitcoin supporters, but also for almost the entire cryptocurrency market. The leading coin has risen in price by 36 % since the beginning of January. And some alternative coins rose in price by tens of percent.

However, not all assets linger at their peak values after significant growth. Often tokens both reach new ATH and fall off.

Our experts told us what affects altcoin rates. And which coins look promising at the moment. And also what risks an investor who wants to invest in cryptocurrencies may face.

Promising altcoins

Cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP) and Monero (XMR) have the best long-term growth prospects among altcoins. At the moment, it is worth investing only in those assets that can grow in value over the long term.

Of altcoins worth considering for purchase, tokens related to artificial intelligence (AI) may be worth considering. He noted that the trigger news for this area was a statement from Bill Gates. Who said that AI is “a really big deal” and that AI projects are revolutionary.

Another trigger for the increased attention to tokens related to AI. Our expert pointed to a post by Elon Musk. The billionaire wrote on Twitter that 2023 will be the year of AI. However, such statements are partly provoked by the emergence of ChatGPT neural network. Although it does not meet the criteria of general artificial intelligence, it has created a lot of hype in a market.

In the opinion of our expert, it is worth looking at Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) and Fetch (FET) tokens. However, FET is already trading at local highs. And in order to enter it will be necessary to wait for its correction first. Which is likely to happen in February, our specialist warned.

Ocean Protocol is a data trading platform. Including those used in the work with artificial intelligence. The main goal of the Ocean network is to create a global data supply chain for AI. The OCEAN Protocol token rose 125% in a month, from $0.16 to $0.36. The current price is 81% below the all-time high of $1.93 shown in April 2021.

Fetch is a project to build a decentralized “economic Internet” infrastructure based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The goal of the project is to optimize the use of resources, to automate processes. As well as the development of algorithms for collective learning of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The FET token went from $0.095 to $0.28 in a month, up 194%.

Risky investments

Because there are no fundamental prerequisites for a long-term bullish cycle in crypto market yet. The current growth of altcoins is accompanied by high volatility. Our expert noted that this is the reason for their recent growth. We should expect the same significant correction in the next couple of weeks.

At the same time, the expert reminded that altcoins always have risks – it is even more risky asset than Bitcoin. When the market is nervous because of macro signals from regulators. The first thing investors do is to sell such excessively risky assets.

Launch of a new cryptocurrency, attached to Australian dollar exchange rate on Ethereum blockchain, scheduled for mid-2023. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

National Australia Bank (NAB), one of four major Australian banks, has created an AUDN stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain. It will be attached to the rate of Australian dollar (AUD), according to Australian Financial Review. Banks plan to launch this coin in mid-2023.

The goal of creating AUDN is to allow bank customers to make real-time blockchain-based settlements in Australian dollars, the NAB said. AUDN can also be used for a number of other purposes, including carbon credit trading and repo transactions.

NAB also intends to use AUDN for low-cost international transfers. According to the bank, the technology will avoid using the SWIFT system. And reduce dependence on complex and costly relationships with correspondent banks when sending money abroad.

For at least three months AUDN will not be available to customers. Because while the bank under the supervision of regulators is conducting internal testing. Including transfers between subsidiaries and branches.

AUDN is not the first stablecoin to be pegged to the Australian dollar. 9 months earlier, Australia-New Zealand banking group ANZ Bank issued the A$DC (“A dollar DC”) coin. Also Novatti payment system created the AUDD stablecoin on Stellar blockchain. And Ettle has launched AUDE token on Ethereum and Algorand.

There are also stablecoins linked to Australian dollar exchange rates such as AUDT, XAUD, AUDRamp and TrueAUD. Volumes of these cryptocurrencies are minimal.

Last month, Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe said that regulating stable coins should be a priority and should be treated the same as bank deposits. Our experts note that Australia is also actively developing legislation and introducing technology for other digital assets. For example, in the middle of last year, Australian Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate proposed accepting cryptocurrency in payment of municipal taxes.

ENS registrar reported that more than 80% of all addresses appeared in the past year. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

Last year, users registered more than 2.2 million addresses in the Ethereum Name System (ENS). This was reported by representatives of the ENS registrar in its official Twitter account. According to ENS Domains website, the number of .eth addresses exceeds 594,000.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum ecosystem, called ENS-domains the most successful application of NFT technology in an interview with WIRED.

An ENS domain is technically an NFT on a particular wallet. To make a transfer to this wallet, you can specify not its address in the usual format. And replace it with a conveniently readable address such as “vitalik.eth”. Such a wallet address can also be used for authorization in decentralized applications (dApps) and searches in blockchain browsers such as Etherscan.

Domains in the form of NFTs can be traded on leading marketplaces such as Looks Rare or OpenSea. However, the largest marketplace by volume is ENS.Vision, which specializes in ENS domains. According to the platform, the most expensive addresses were “333.eth” and “metaverse.eth,” sold for 100 and 99 ETH, respectively.

Domains are becoming a form of identification in the crypto community. And this provokes demand for short and easily recognizable addresses. Floor price for domains in the “999 Club” category, that is, three digit addresses consisting of numbers, is at 20.22 ETH.

Visa is using a proposal from Ethereum developers. It will allow automatic pre-scheduled payments from non-custodial crypto wallets

Visa has developed a blockchain-based autopay solution. A document published by this company details a new concept based on Account Abstraction (AA) technology from Ethereum developers. It will allow the implementation of automatic pre-planned payments using smart contracts in non-custodial users’ wallets.

Account Abstraction technology was proposed back in 2016. Since the core Ethereum network does not yet support AA. Therefore, VISA implemented its solution in StarkNet, a second-tier blockchain built on top of Ethereum blockchain. The account model in StarkNet just uses AA technology.

Whereas normal accounts check if a transaction is correctly signed for a specific address. With StarkNet, they simply verify that the transaction is coming from a given address. In addition, the introduction of Visa’s concept into this blockchain has not only enabled the deployment of a new auto-payment feature. But also increased transaction throughput.

Visa notes that it sees autopay as a key functionality that the existing blockchain infrastructure lacks. And it invites interested companies working in this area to work together on projects in the field of programmable payments.

Our experts note that payment companies from traditional financial industry this year began to actively develop projects related to blockchain and cryptocurrency. Also at the end of September, SWIFT and Chainlink oracle network announced joint work on a blockchain project. This project will allow traditional financial companies to conduct transactions on a platform that supports almost all blockchains.

Crypto-Upvotes experts conducted their analysis and told about prospects of NFT segment

Throughout 2022, application solutions with NFT have been actively developed in a variety of projects. The audience of the technology continues to grow at a tremendous rate due to the introduction of the technology by social media. This year, some tools related to NFT were implemented by Twitter (audience of about 400 million users), Reddit (audience of about 430 million users), Onlyfans (audience of about 175 million users).Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Youtube also announced their plans to implement NFT.

Based on these data, we can consider a long-term investment portfolio, taking into account the prospects for the development of NFT

We would suggest dividing the investment portfolio into two parts. The first would be a liquid backbone, the tokens of projects that provide infrastructure for NFT. Polygon blockchain turned out to be the most popular for application solutions. Therefore, as the audience grows, the entire ecosystem could get developed, so the demand for native blockchain tokens would grow accordingly.

Other top blockchains – Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain – may also get a comparable effect from the development of NFT.

Another interesting application of NFT is the Fragment platform from Telegram. It is likely that in the future the supply will expand and the demand for TON will increase.

We suggest forming the second part of the portfolio from specific tokens of various promising NFT tokens. In a growing market, which by all projections should occur in the second half of 2023 and all of 2024. Therefore, collections with high social capital could go up in price several times over.

When to buy ?

Today, terrific conditions for opening long-term positions for at least 1-2 years, better from 3 years or more. The ongoing scandals around centralized exchanges are constantly weighing on the value of the Binance exchange’s native token. And rumors around the potential centralization of Ethereum due to the move to PoS, with validators predominantly in the same jurisdiction, are also negatively affecting the price of ETH in the medium term.

The market as a whole continues to be in a global bearish trend, which opens up the possibility of buying any tokens at undervalued prices.

What is the right investment portfolio structure ?

• Polygon (MATIC) — 20%
• Toncoin (TON) — 20%
• Ethereum (ETH) — 10%
• Binance coin (BNB) — 5%

Another 5% can be allocated under ApeCoin (APE) acting as a native token in the company’s developed meta-universe. The company that owns the world’s most popular NFT-collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks and Meebits.

The remaining 40% can be distributed among different NFT-collections.

For example, find interesting offers among applied projects from social media, like collections from Reddit or Twitter.

Risks

The first part of the investment portfolio is quite conservative by the standards of the crypto market. It lists well-established, reliable projects that have many growth and development factors other than the NFT segment. Therefore, the risks in 3/5 of the portfolio do not exceed the overall risks of the market.

However, the rest are extremely risky investments. You have to consider that NFTs have several orders of magnitude less liquidity. And predicting the value of NFTs in the future does not differ in its essence from flipping a coin for luck. But, with all that, the investment can pay off many times over, given a lucky set of circumstances. For example, one appreciated token can potentially outweigh the value of all the others that will fall. But there is absolutely no guarantee that this will happen to you, to your chosen collection, with tokens owned by you.

That’s why it’s worth investing only as much as you’re willing to lose at least half of that amount.

Disclaimer

Crypto-Upvotes experts do not give investment advice, this material is published for introductory purposes only. Cryptocurrency is a volatile asset that can lead to financial losses.

Two exchange traded ETF funds raised a total of $73.6 million on the eve of their debut on Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Crypto-Upvotes expert review

Two exchange-traded funds (ETF) will begin trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) on December 16. They are based on cryptocurrency futures. These are the first funds of their kind in Hong Kong. CSOP Asset Management’s ETF invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum futures. Which are listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group) in the United States. They are the only cryptocurrency assets allowed by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC).

Two funds raised a total of $73.6 million before their debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The larger one, CSOP Bitcoin Futures ETF (3066.HK), raised $53.9 million, according to the management company. That’s more than the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, the first U.S. Bitcoin futures ETF. Which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in October 2021 with an initial capital of $20 million.

Crypto-futures ETF demonstrate that Hong Kong remains open-minded about the development of virtual assets. This is despite recent problems in crypto-industry, said Yi Wang, head of quantitative investment at CSOP. He noted that since ETF do not invest directly in Bitcoin and are traded on regulated exchanges in the U.S. and Hong Kong. Investors will have more regulatory protections than tokens traded on unregulated platforms.

The first futures-based Bitcoin-ETF were approved in the U.S. back in 2021. However, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has so far rejected all applications to launch a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF). SEC head Gary Gensler attributed this to the fact that applications for such funds do not meet the Securities Act’s standards for cracking down on fraudulent or manipulative practices.

Daily futures trading volume on DeFi platforms reached $5 billion. This is the biggest amount since Terra collapsed in May of this year. Crypto-Upvotes expert review.

DeFi platforms increased revenues amid the outflow of funds from centralized exchanges that occurred due to the collapse of FTX. On-chain data showed an increase in activity on decentralized futures trading platforms and an increase in revenue for DeFi protocols, Cointelegraph reported.

However, not all decentralized applications (DApps) and protocols show such a trend. Because some of them have financial ties to FTX and Alameda. But data on DeFi projects’ revenues show that at least three protocols have exceeded $1 million in the last seven days, including Ethereum and OpenSea Marketplace.

Decentralized futures trading platforms have increased their trading volumes to record levels. Their daily turnover reached $5 billion, the highest since the Terra token crash in May of this year.

Despite the increase in trading volume, the total value of locked-in assets (TVL) at DeFi only increased at seven networks. Gains Network, a futures trading platform on the Polygon network, showed the biggest increase. Its TVL increased 17.3% over the week. And inter-network protocol Ren saw its TVL drop by 50%. This is because Ren worked closely with Alameda. And received quarterly funding and stored its funds directly on FTX.

Blockchain’s profit growth comes on top of an unchanged number of daily active users. Compared to previous weeks, the daily profits of leading blockchains have increased by more than 300%. This suggests that transactions among existing users are occurring more frequently.

Despite growth in profits, only Ethereum made profits among PoS-based blockchains. Other leading networks such as Polygon, BNB Smart Chain and Optimism did not profit. Holders of these tokens suffered inflationary losses.