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Jason Bailey and Marguerite deCourcelle take the reins of CoinDesk’s newest show, which debuts today.

More NFT wash traders lost money than made money in 2021, according to Chainalysis’ data.

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Market moves: Bitcoin remained largely flat, while its spot volume reduced further.

Technician’s take: BTC buyers have consistently lost ground to sellers.

Catch the latest episodes of CoinDesk TV for insightful interviews with crypto industry leaders and analysis.

Prices

Bitcoin (BTC): $37,004 -.03%

Ether (ETH): $2,666 -1%

Top Gainers

Asset
Ticker
Returns
Sector
Internet Computer
ICP
+8.3%
Computing
`

Top Losers

Asset
Ticker
Returns
Sector
Cosmos
ATOM
−9.8%
Smart Contract Platform
Solana
SOL
−7.8%
Smart Contract Platform
Polkadot
DOT
−7.3%
Smart Contract Platform

Markets

S&P 500: 4,477 -2.4%

DJIA: 35,111 -1.1%

Nasdaq: 18,878 -3.7%

Gold: $1,806 -0.1%

Market moves

Bitcoin ‘s (BTC) price late Thursday was roughly flat after dipping in earlier in the day, while spot trading volume remained muted.

After a more than 4% drop on Wednesday, bitcoin’s selling pressure was mostly gone during U.S. trading hours on Thursday despite the continued price plunge of Meta Platforms’ shares following the former Facebook’s disappointing earnings results and outlook. A sell-off on tech stocks also eased during late trading after shares of Amazon.com and Snap soared on their quarterly results.

At the time of publication, the oldest cryptocurrency was changing hands at $37,000, roughly where it was 24 hours earlier, according to CoinDesk data. Bitcoin’s trading volume across major centralized exchanges continued to drop from a day ago.

The reduced spot trading volume has been a trend in crypto for most of January, according to data provider CryptoCompare. January’s spot trading volume for the crypto market across major exchanges reached their lowest level since December 2020, CryptoCompare wrote in a report published on Feb 3.

In the broader cryptocurrency market, most of alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) were also in red on Thursday. Ether, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was trading at about $2,660, down approximately 1% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk data.

Technician’s take

Bitcoin Capped Below $40K Resistance; Support at $35K

Bitcoin (BTC) buyers and sellers are at a stalemate, evidenced by low trading volume and muted price action over the past few days.

The cryptocurrency is trading in a tight range between $35,000 support and $38,000-$40,000 resistance. Most technical indicators are neutral, which means BTC could remain in a narrow price range going into the Asia trading day.

Buyers have consistently lost ground to sellers given the persistent downtrend since November. Based on the overwhelming selling pressure, the downward-sloping 100-day moving average on the four-hour chart has been a useful gauge of downtrend resistance.

Still, initial support at $35,000 could stabilize the current pullback. Stronger support is seen around $30,000, a critical price zone that could determine a shift from a bullish to bearish price trend.

Important events

3 p.m. HKT/SGT (7 a.m. UTC): Germany factory orders n.s.a. (Dec. YoY)

3 p.m. HKT/SGT (7 a.m. UTC): Germany factory orders s.a. (Dec. YoY)

9:30 p.m. HKT/SGT (1:30 UTC): U.S. labor force participation rate (Jan.)

9:30 p.m. HKT/SGT (1:30 UTC): U.S. unemployment rate (Jan.)

CoinDesk TV

In case you missed it, here is the most recent episode of « First Mover » on CoinDesk TV:

The Sandbox Co-Founder Responds to Meta Acquisition Rumor, IRS Offers Tezos Staker Refund on Rewards Tax in Break From Current Policy

« First Mover » hosts spoke with Sebastien Borget, The Sandbox chief operating officer and co-founder, about a rumor that Meta is considering acquiring his company. Paxful CEO Ray Youssef explained his company’s latest effort in bringing bitcoin education to the masses in El Salvador. Plus, First Mover covered market insights from Bitbuy CEO Michael Arbus.

Headlines

Social Media Site Stocktwits Taps FTX to Launch Crypto Trading Service: The move marks Stocktwits’ first foray into offering trading on its platform.

Jump Trading Backstops Wormhole’s $320M Exploit Loss: Sources: Wormhole’s parent company has stepped in to prevent chaos across the Solana DeFi landscape, three people tell CoinDesk.

Boston Fed, MIT Publish Open-Source CBDC Software: The white paper caps off nearly two years of research.

Loopring Names CTO Steve Guo as CEO, Replacing Founder Wang: Guo replaces Daniel Wang, who will work as an adviser to the firm and focus on developing its layer 2 strategy.

US Lawmakers Reintroduce Bill to Provide Tax Relief for Small Crypto Transactions: The legislation by a bipartisan group of House representatives would exempt realized crypto gains under $200.

Texas Crypto Miners Shuttering Operations as Winter Storm Approaches: Riot Blockchain is among the companies on storm watch and looking to help protect the state’s power grid.

Longer reads

This Super Bowl, Don’t Trust Celebrity Crypto Endorsements (Don’t Trust Yourself, Either): Sure, you can “do your own research. » But first make sure you understand what that actually means.

Today’s crypto explainer: Crypto Arbitrage Trading: How to Make Low-Risk Gains

Other voices: DAOs want to reshape fashion. Here’s what brands need to know (Vogue Business)

Said and heard

“The level of forgiveness has gone down. When boards come to their shareholders to confess their sins, they’re just not going to be pardoned with one Hail Mary.” (FNC Capital Management CEO Daniel Genter to The Wall Street Journal) …. “It is inappropriate for the Fed to make credit decisions and allocations based on choosing winners and losers. Banks choose their borrowers, not the Fed.” (Sarah Bloom Raskin at confirmation hearing to become the Federal Reserve’s top regulator) …. « Dan Olson, the Canadian videographer behind the ‘Folding Ideas’ YouTube channel, has an important message for the world: NFTs are all fundamentally flawed. » (CoinDesk columnist Daniel Kuhn) … « The wormhole network was exploited for 120K wETH. ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1. More details to come shortly. We are working to get the network back up quickly. Thanks for your patience. (Blockchain bridge Wormhole tweeting)

In a metaverse often criticized for being devoid of things to do, the poker tables in Decentraland’s ICE Poker virtual casino have never been busier.

The play-to-earn poker platform from Decentral Games is host to around 6,000 unique players each day, which makes up more than 30% of Decentraland’s daily users. In the past three months, the game has generated more than $7.5 million in revenue through its various income streams, according to Decentral Games founder Miles Anthony.

“At any given time, we have over 1,000 players playing poker,” Anthony told CoinDesk in an interview. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of users, but when it comes to the open metaverse, it’s pretty substantial considering the main issue right now with metaverses is that they’re empty.”

For as much press as “Web 3” is garnering, it’s important to remember the numbers are still small. The number of wallets (the pseudonymous, but not exactly precise, measure of actual humans interacting with Ethereum-based smart contracts) touching OpenSea on a daily basis is just 50,000, according to DappRadar. The non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace was recently valued at $13.3 billion in a recent funding round.

Read more: This Casino in Decentraland Is Hiring (for Real)

Decentral Games bet big on the metaverse a year and a half ago when it started acquiring virtual land in Decentraland. The DAO says it’s accumulated more than 1,000 of the game’s parcels to date. That effort was backed in part by an investment from Decentraland itself back in September of last year.

The success of Decentral Games’ ICE Poker should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with online gambling platforms, which have been a hit among virtual communities for decades.

Anthony says the platform sees itself as the genre’s Web 3 iteration, requiring users to purchase one of its NFT wearables before being able to play with house chips, as well as issuing two separate tokens – ICE and DG – to support its ecosystem.

The wearables, sold in drops on the platform in limited supply, already fetch high prices on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea, holding onto a floor price of 2.46 ETH (around $6,500) at the time of writing.

With a high-priced point of entry, guilds have become a core aspect of the game’s ecosystem, Anthony said. He says the game has intentionally avoided relying on mega guilds like YGG for accessibility. Gaming guilds typically rent out key crypto assets for a share of future profits from retail users.

“To be 100% honest, I actually think large guilds are really detrimental to game economies,” Anthony told CoinDesk. “Obviously the valuations for [guilds] have been pretty wild. And it can be great for even the short term, but I think a lot of these deals kind of overlook long-term effects.”

Read more: Crypto VCs Are Making a Big Bet on Gaming Guilds. Why?

Anthony says the platform solves this problem with a built-in delegation system, where players can loan an NFT wearable to another user in exchange for a 60-40 share of any revenue earned with it. Users who delegate just a single NFT make up the majority of the platform’s lenders.

Wen users?

Despite the enormous hype around the future of the metaverse in recent months, few poker platforms have been able to successfully enter the space, in part due to regulation.

Virtue Gaming became the first play-to-earn poker platform with a Malta Gaming Authority license in December, though its platform differs from ICE Poker’s in that it makes money off traditional casino mechanics rather than tokenization.

Anthony said Decentral Games is also preparing to launch a mobile iteration of ICE Poker in the coming months.

Shares of GameStop (GME), the original meme stock that stoked retail investor frenzy in buying highly volatile stocks last January, surged as much as 31% in after-market trading Thursday after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company is launching a division to build a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and to establish cryptocurrency partnerships.

The video-game retailer hopes the new unit will lead its turnaround efforts to become profitable, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with its plans.GameStop’s plan calls for it to build an online hub for buying, selling and trading NFTs of virtual video-game goods such as avatar outfits and weapons. The company has hired more than 20 people for the division.The Grapevine, Texas-based company is also close to signing partnerships with two crypto companies to share technology as well as co-invest in games and in other NFT-related projects, the Wall Street Journal said.Prices for LRC, the native token of layer 2 protocol Loopring, spiked about 15% on the news. There have been rumors that Loopring is one of the crypto companies that is working with GameStop on its NFT marketplace. That speculation sent LRC’s price soaring in November.In October, GameStop said it was looking to build an Ethereum-based Web 3 arm, according to a job listing posted by the company.

Read more: GameStop Enters the Metaverse With ‘Web3 Gaming’ Job Post

Earlier this week, the American rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West implored people to stop asking him to do a “f***ing NFT.” There was something cathartic about reading his words, written by hand in black marker on a physical sheet of paper. “My focus is on building real products in the real world,” he said.

Both the note and the caption of the photo were written in all caps, as if to convey an outburst of exasperation. The post suggested that he has been inundated with requests from agents, hucksters, companies, shills and fans to create or promote non-fungible token projects. With more and more celebrities sharing hollow endorsements for NFTs that appear to be thinly veiled paid advertisements or money-grabs, it seems likely West has been dealing with a deluge of petitions to get involved in this nascent market. His statement is particularly refreshing to read because of this context: it stands in contrast to all of the public figures promoting crypto products they seem to otherwise know or care little about.

Jill Gunter, a CoinDesk columnist, is a venture partner with Slow Ventures, where she invests in early-stage crypto and Web 3 projects. She is also a co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit research organization working to guarantee the right to a free and open financial system.

Even those stars who are educated and coherent about crypto and do seem genuinely passionate about the promise of Web 3 – Paris Hilton, for example – still struggle to tie NFTs back to the “real world.” Her recent appearance on the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” alongside her Bored Ape NFT, has gone viral over the last couple of weeks for the awkwardness and disingenuousness with which she and Jimmy fawn over how “cool” their Apes are. It was her previous appearance on the show that stood out to me, however. She provided Jimmy and the audience with a very reasonable, high-level explanation of NFTs: “It’s a non-fungible token, which is a digital contract that’s on the blockchain. So you can sell anything from art to music to experiences, physical objects.”

I cannot fault her explanation. It’s not very specific, but then again she is speaking to an audience that is as mainstream as it gets. I have provided many skeptical friends with similar descriptions over my years of working in crypto. The retort they always level at me in different variations is a fair one: “What does any of that mean in the real world?” Unfortunately, Paris, there is little utility today in anyone minting digital versions of physical objects as NFTs.

Even those of us who are not skeptics, who have hitched our livelihoods to this experimental industry, regularly speak about crypto and Web 3 in contrast to the “real world” as if to express self-awareness that we are inhabiting another planet. We talk about tokens and NFTs versus “real world assets;” we talk about DeFi applications juxtaposed against “real world finance.” We all know that we have not yet delivered real products in the real world. Kanye West is right.

One common critique of crypto applications is that they are self-referential. DeFi in particular largely functions this way: Stake your magic beans to earn yield in internet money that you can trade on margin for derivatives of yet more digital tokens. In a way, this is an incredible achievement. As an industry, we have created a separate, mostly functional financial system almost wholly unlinked from the real world.

On the other hand, that crypto is in a universe unto itself lends the whole space a fragile quality – as if it is all a collective illusion and, once the first person awakes, it could all evaporate.

Crypto has built castles in the air. They are very complex, compelling, sophisticated castles but they are, as of yet, without foundations connecting them to terra firma.

Read more: Jill Gunter – The Right (and Wrong Way) to Get Web 3 Adoption

In a postscript to his NFT note, Kanye West scrawls, “Ask me later.” It is as if he is leaving the door open for us to build the foundations for those castles and to make NFTs and the rest of Web 3 matter to the real world. Maybe someday NFTs will be of interest to him and to the rest of the inhabitants of planet Earth.

How do we as an industry answer West’s implied call to action? What does it mean to make crypto matter to the real world? I believe the answer lies in building the right infrastructure to get us to mass adoption.

There are still so many flaws with the layer 1 and layer 2 technologies that support all of the early Web 3 applications that render the apps unusable for many would-be consumers and participants. Transaction fees on Ethereum frequently stretch into the hundreds of dollars. Layer 2 scaling systems face challenges around delayed withdrawals. More expandable layer 1 protocols struggle with maintaining uptime. There are limited privacy guarantees made by existing smart contract platforms. Even the most user-friendly wallets present challenges to users who are largely unfamiliar with concepts of private key custody.

There is so much work to be done just to get the platforms we are building on into a state where they can support the full range of users and use cases, including those that extend to the real world.

Part of why the use cases of crypto are limited today is because the infrastructure on which they are built continues to have limitations. Okiki Famutimi, a product builder who has contributed to companies including Circle and Aave, wrote a few years ago about the notion of “post-threshold companies”: companies that are building products for the point in time after mainstream adoption has been achieved. There are a lot of post-threshold companies in crypto, he pointed out, building products that assume eventual mainstream adoption when it is not yet even clear we will ever actually get there. These premature post-threshold companies can create a lot of hype and noise and distraction and cause skeptics to question what value these products, built on as-of-yet unfit foundations, will ever offer the real world.

For those who are less concerned about immediate mainstream utility, the nascent products of these post-threshold companies like NFTs, decentralized exchanges and decentralized autonomous organizations can offer a glimpse of the future. If the infrastructure supported better user experiences and onboarding, cheaper transactions and created reasonable privacy guarantees, we could squint and see the future of art, music, finance, governance and collective action.

Our explanations of exactly how this will all pan out may yet be a little hand-wavey, as Paris Hilton’s was on « The Tonight Show. » Her description reminded me of another celebrity speaking in grand generalizations about a nascent technology. In a BBC interview from 1999, David Bowie spoke of the internet as “ an alien life form,” while his interviewer squinted skeptically. “The context and the state of content is going to be so different from anything we can imagine at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.” Of course, at that point it was hard for most of us to see exactly how the alien life form of the internet would ever impact our world in the ways it was promising.

Indeed, in the intervening two decades since Bowie offered this vision, the internet for many of us has become the real world that we inhabit mentally and emotionally. It is worth remembering that Kanye West, in order to spread his message about focusing on real-world products, took to Instagram to post a photo of the paper on which he wrote. I would be surprised if someone has not already screen-shotted the post and minted it as an NFT. Who is to say that someday very soon we won’t consider that just as real as the Instagram post itself?

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