Ecosystem Update August 24

Dear investors,

We're thrilled to share our August 2024 Ecosystem Update. This detailed report explores the latest market trends and events, highlights notable developments within the Advanced Blockchain ecosystem, and features recent organizational developments. Furthermore, it provides an extensive overview of our progress and insights into the broader industry landscape.

Macro Industry View

August started with a freefall in Bitcoin's price, as well as the overall crypto market cap. On August 4th and 5th, the crypto market crash, the worst since 2022, saw Bitcoin and Ethereum drop over 25% in a day. The decline coincided with a broader stock market selloff due to disappointing U.S. job data and slow Federal Reserve actions, undermining the belief that crypto is a hedge against traditional assets. Despite the recent positive news of Ethereum ETFs, the total crypto market cap dropped from over $2.5 trillion to around $2 trillion, with $500 million of outflows pulled from digital asset investments. The crash was exacerbated by macroeconomic factors and additional selloffs by major firms like Jump Trading, adding to the volatility and uncertainty in the market. 

The total market cap slowly climbed up from $2T to over $2.3T in the remaining days of August, mitigating the impact of this free fall to some extent. 

Key events:

1. The SEC has dropped its legal battle to classify popular cryptocurrencies like Solana, Cardano, and Polygon as securities in its lawsuit against Binance. This decision, revealed in late July 2024, alleviates concerns for these tokens, marking a positive development for the crypto market. Amid this regulatory shift, U.S. Several political figures have expressed support for the crypto industry. Democratic leaders are also reassessing their stance on digital assets. This move could benefit crypto-related stocks like Coinbase and crypto mining companies as regulatory uncertainties ease.

2. The newly launched nine spot Ether ETFs in the U.S. recorded their first positive net inflows since their debut, totaling $104.8 million in the week starting August 5th. Despite a significant drop in Ether's price, which fell by 23% on exactly August 5th, six of the nine funds saw positive inflows, led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust with $188.4 million. However, Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust faced outflows of $180 million, limiting the overall gains for the funds. The total net assets for these ETFs reached $7.28 billion as of August 9th, highlighting strong interest despite market turbulence.

3. Tether has decided against launching its own blockchain, citing market saturation and an abundance of existing, reliable options.. CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that Tether prefers to use current blockchains as "transport layers" for their stablecoin, USDT. Instead, Tether is focusing on expanding to other blockchains like Aptos, where they recently launched USDT to reduce transaction costs, and they have partnered with the UAE to launch a dirham-backed stablecoin. This strategy reflects Tether's emphasis on maintaining security and scalability while avoiding unnecessary competition in the crowded blockchain space.

4. MetaMask has introduced the MetaMask Card, a new payment card that allows users to directly spend their crypto from their MetaMask wallet anywhere Mastercard is accepted. Launched as a pilot in the EU and UK, the card eliminates the need to transfer funds to a bank or exchange, making crypto spending more seamless. Integrated with Mastercard's global network, the MetaMask Card functions like a debit card, offering a secure and efficient spending experience. The card is available to a limited group of users with plans for future global expansion.

Ecosystem Key Updates

• peaq announces its launch between September 23rd and 30th. NetSepio and Synapx joined the peaqosystem! 
• Mantis, Solana's first restaking L2 by Composable, opens its waitlist and partners with Orca, Synternet, Primev, and Termina.
• TLX hits $400M total trading volume and $500K in total fees within 3 months. 
• Laconic Testnet, LORO, went live on August 12, offering web3 hosting and rewarding users with points convertible to Laconic tokens.
• Polymer has announced partnership with Mode network, a modular L2 alongside Optimism.
• Contango announced partnership with leading restaking solution, ether.fi and reached $2B total trading volume. 
• Light Protocol gave a presentation at zkCon 2024, introducing their new product ZKCompression to the Zero-Knowledge community.
• Talisman integrates Cere Network, Aleph Zero EVM, and Avail Ledger, boosting wallet capabilities and expanding its reach with Ethereum asset bridging.
• MYSO now integrates with Across protocol, the leading interoperability solution in EVM ecosystem.
• Permanent Fund’s dominant asset, Arweave, strengthens its lead as the top Web3 storage solution, surpassing Filecoin. AO testnet reaches 200K users and 500M messages by August 26th.

peaq

peaq is close to its long awaited launch which is planned to take place between September 23rd and 30th. 

As the Layer 1 blockchain for DePIN and RWA, peaq continues to onboard new projects in August, including NetSepio and Synapx. NetSepio is a decentralized VPN and Wi-Fi DePIN, enabling you to surf the Web securely and earn by enabling others to do the same. Synapx is a DePIN for sharing and monetizing health data from wearable devices. With Synapx, you can share health data from your wearable devices with doctors and healthcare platforms, and get rewards for it. 

Composable

Composable’s new project Mantis has officially started a waitlist for registration. Mantis is Solana's first restaking L2, featuring a unique cross-chain intent fulfillment function. Users simply need to file an intent in human language, which will be executed by Mantis, eliminating the need for users to handle technical nuances. Mantis has attracted a lot of traction since its waitlist launch, announcing an array of partnerships with protocols in the Solana ecosystem, including Orca, the most popular liquidity layer on Solana, Synternet, Primev and termina.

TLX

TLX reached two remarkable milestones in just 3 months. TLX achieved $400M total trading volume and $500K total fees generated in August, demonstrating their high profitability. Powered by Optimism Superchain, TLX is a leveraged DeFi protocol running on Synthetix’s perps smart contract, making leveraged trading fully composable. 

Laconic

Laconic Testnet went live on August 12, marking a significant milestone of their development in these two years. Laconic is a blockchain platform that delivers context-rich, trustworthy data to decentralized applications (dApps). The testnet, named LORO, allows different users to use their web3 hosting service. By completing tasks ranging from validating to publishing web apps, users will receive points that are later convertible to Laconic tokens. 

Polymer

Polymer has announced partnership with Mode network, a modular L2 alongside Optimism. Mode's integration with Polymer Hub allows the wider ETH ecosystem access to Mode’s AI-aided DeFi yield seamlessly.

Contango

Contango announced partnership with ether.fi, one of the leading restaking solution in the EVM ecosystem with over $5B TVL. In addition, Contango crossed an impressive benchmark of $2B total trading volume.

Light Protocol‍

Light Protocol gave a presentation of its development at zkCon 2024. Light Protocol’s new product ZKCompression was introduced to the Zero-Knowledge community by Founder Swen Schäferjohann. 

Talisman 

Talisman has integrated the Cere Network and Aleph Zero EVM, as well as the Avail Ledger app. These integrations enhance Talisman’s wallet capabilities, providing new liquidity sources. Additionally, with the support for Ethereum asset bridging and management, Talisman opens itself to a broader customer base across ecosystems.

MYSO

MYSO has integrated Across Protocol, the leading interoperability solution in the EVM space. 

‍Permanent Fund

Arweave continues to solidify its position as the leading Web3-native storage solution, outpacing its competitor Filecoin, which has struggled to develop applications beyond mining and largely serves as a bridge between Web2 entities. AO testnet has already accumulated 200K users and 500M messages as of August 26th.

ABAG Update

August 24, 2024 marked a significant change in the company management board with the appointment of Hatem Elsayed as COO and Maik Laske as the future CFO.  As outlined in the most recent investor update call, communication, transparency, and strategic investments are the key focus areas for the short and mid-term.

Adhering to our promise to improve transparency of our portfolio and investments, our team has worked diligently on optimizing our portfolio page. It now reflects active and exited positions, the different stages of investments, and the investment thesis behind each holding. The investment thesis is crucial in informing our investors about the relevance of these investments and highlights our future projections for each holding. 

While effective portfolio management is a key focus, investing in promising early-stage projects is also crucial for the growth of our Assets Under Management (AUM). Therefore, our team is currently reviewing several promising opportunities, which will be announced once our due diligence process is complete.

Furthermore, we have been working closely with AVS valuation to wrap up the valuation of the top-15 assets which is planned to be announced during the course of September 2024.

As for the ongoing group audit and fact-finding phase, the management team has decided to run the audit again of Incredulous Labs Ltd. audit for the 2023 financial year by an independent auditor, as outlined in the most recent announcement. 

Lastly, we're excited to welcome Vishal Patil as our new Data Analyst, a key hire in our push towards data-driven decision making.Vishal has been supporting us as a freelancer for almost a year, and starting in September 2024, he will join our subsidiary Incredulous Labs as a full-time employee.

More about Vishal: 

Vishal Patil is a Data Analyst known for his ability to turn data into actionable insights. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal. Previously, he worked at Sahicoin, where he developed high-performing trading strategies and managed a crypto portfolio with a solid performance record. Vishal's expertise in data analysis aligns perfectly with our focus on optimizing portfolio performance.

We deeply value your continuous support and look forward to welcoming you to our upcoming investor update call. 

Best regards,

Advanced Blockchain Team

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