Upcoming Events and Narratives - January

January narratives

• Liquid Staking Derivatives season: LDO, RPL, FXS, SWISE, FIS, ANKR are the main LSDs, and I anticipate this narrative to keep its current momentum as we get closer to the Shangai Upgrade. 

  • FXS is in an interesting spot as it offers the highest APY of all LSDs, due to Frax’s large CVX holding and incentivizing of frxETH curve pools, so I expect it to grow its market share by a lot as it's the most attractive choice. It has also recently had its halving and expanded into the top 5 DeFi verticals ranked by TVL with its primitives.

  • LDO is the clear winner from a fundamental and technological perspective, but the others will likely catch up the leader sometime as there will come to a point where profits rotation will happen, so FXS and FIS are better positioned to capture this as both are listed on Binance, whereas the rest is mostly on-chain. 

  • BTRFLY is launching $DINERO, a stablecoin overcollaterized by LSDs. 

• DYDX massive unlock on February 2nd as 105% of the circulating supply will be distributed to investors and team members. To mitigate the selling pressure and frustrate early short sellers, the likelihood of the dYdX team releasing an announcement prior to the cliff unlock is considerable.

• DCG Holdings: API3, HBAR, ZEC, FLOW, MANA, these tokens could be heavily impacted as DCG is forced to liquidate its venture assets to raise cash due to Genesis owing creditors $3b, including $900m to Gemini Earn.

• CRV crvUSD stablecoin's launch was confirmed by the team to happen in January.

• AAVE GHO stablecoin public testnet happening in January, it is confirmed that there will be a revenue sharing mechanism with AAVE stakers. V3 will also be deployed on Ethereum. 

• ATOM interchain security, it is a major upgrade that will enable smaller chains to inherit cosmos hub’s security in exchange for ATOM.

• LTC halving rally may have started, it happens in august but historically the narrative has been frontrun by several months earlier. 

• APE BAYC mint happening on January 18th.

• AI Tokens: FET ,VITD, NMR, OCEAN, CTXC, PHB. After the rumors of Microsoft investing $10bn in openAI, as well as the huge chatGPT popularity, this narrative resembles the late 21’ metaverse bull run

• SNX v3 launch, it has plans to become the DeFi liquidity hub. This could prove to be a massive source of real yield revenue as Synthetix would essentially be the backbone of the decentralized derivatives landscape.

• OP Bedrock upgrade testnet on January  12th, it will lower gas fees and allow the usage of zk proofs. These improvements may make Optimism stand out among other Layer 2 solutions in 2023.

• UNI ongoing discussions to deploy uniswap v3 on starknet, as well as a fee switch pilot. however, the proposal doesn’t mention expectation of fee accrual to UNI holders, mainly due to regulatory concerns.

• FTM gas monetization program that brings a new revenue source for builders. It is also the L1 with the largest TVL/Market Cap ratio, it has 30 years of runway and Andre Conje returned after several months of hiatus.

• WAVES, after the USDN depeg to $0.40, it will become instead WIXT, an index backed by WAVES ecosystem tokens as collateral. Currently less than 20% of the USDN supply is fully backed.

• FLUX halving on February 4th.

• SKL is integrating ZK.

• METIS, AAVE v3 to be deployed on Metis Andromeda.