Artemis Weekly Wrap-up (9/22/2023)

your go-to source for weekly fundamental updates

This week, Tim Draper announces plans for a crypto accelerator, Proof of Play, a blockchain game studio and technology company, raises $33mm seed round from a16z and Greenoaks and Busan is building an urban blockchain and digital assets exchange.

let’s jump right in 👇

🌞 Google Cloud expands Web3 presence with the addition of 11 new blockchain networks and start-up partnerships

💫 Artemis Data Insights:

• Spike in NEAR daily active user activity driven by e-commerce application Kai-Ching

• ERC-4337 activity continues to heat up across chains

L1 / L2 market prices saw average and median WoW price declines of ~2.3% and ~2.2%, respectively, while equity markets continued to fall further (S&P 500 and NASDAQ index down ~2.8% and ~3.4% over past 5 days, respectively). BTC continued to see less price movement than the broader L1 / L2 ecosystem (down ~0.4% WoW), while altcoins such as OP and AVAX continued to fall mid to high single digits over the week (down 9% and 6.5%, respectively).

🌞 Google Cloud expands Web3 presence with the addition of 11 new blockchain networks and start-up partnerships

Google’s cloud-computing business continues its expansion into blockchain data, adding 11 networks including Polygon, Optimism and Polkadot to its ‘BigQuery’ program for public blockchain datasets.

In a press release by Google Cloud, James Tromans (Google Head of Web3) and Alberto Martin (Google Director, Web3 Product Management) stated that they’re continuing to build upon their dataset because “blockchain foundations, Web3 analytics firms, partners, developers and customers tell us they want a more comprehensive view across the crypto landscape.” As part of the expansion, Google is planning to add 11 new chains to its BigQuery public datasets:

1. Avalanche

2. Arbitrum

3. Cronos

4. Ethereum (Görli)

5. Fantom (Opera) 

6. Near 

7. Optimism

8. Polkadot

9. Polygon Mainnet 

10. Polygon Mumbai 

11. Tron

This initiative is yet another step in Google Cloud’s foray into the Web3 space. Google Cloud previously unveiled a new Web3 start-up program that offers $200k in Google Cloud credits alongside early access to Google Cloud Web3 products and access to Google Cloud’s Web3 product and engineering teams. Google Cloud also recently partnered with Voltage, a Lightning Network infrastructure provider on Bitcoin, and Orderly Network, a developer tooling platform for decentralized finance applications. Google Cloud has noted that the partnerships were struck due to an increase in interest from clients looking to explore blockchain workloads on the Google Cloud platform.

💫 Artemis Data Insights: Spike in NEAR daily active user activity driven by e-commerce application Kai-Ching

Over the past month, NEAR has seen a huge spike in daily active addresses, surpassing 3.2mm transactions and ~900k active wallets on September 5, 2023.

What drove the massive increase? Per NearAtlas, the Kai-Ching application that launched at the end of August has driven ~1.6mm monthly active users over the course of September.

Kaiching monthly active addresses per NearAtlas

What is Kai-Ching? Kai-Ching is the native stablecoin for Cosmose AI, a venture-backed company that uses AI analytics to tracks in-store foot traffic and engage with consumers online. The company partnered with NEAR earlier in 2023 to build a payment system allowing users to shop with crypto at low transaction fees, saving money for both buyers and sellers. As a part of the partnership, The NEAR foundation invested an undisclosed sum of money into Cosmose AI which valued the company at $500mm.

At this time, the blockchain payment system is live and only available in Singapore, where consumers can discover nearby products and merchants and pay directly within the app. Miron Mironiuk, CEO and founder, claims that paying within the app allows consumers to reduce the costs of one’s annual coffee consumption to just $4, which is 50 times less than Stripe or Paypal. He also notes that over half of Kai-Ching’s users are Gen Z and “super comfortable” with crypto. Given the recent traction that the application has gotten, we will be watching to see if users are retained over time.

💫 Artemis Data Insights: ERC-4337 activity continues to heat up across chains

ERC-4337 active wallet activity has continued to pick up across multiple major blockchains.

Arbitrum in particular has seen a significant level of gas usage over the past month related to the ERC-4337 contract. The ERC-4337 contract was the third largest gas guzzler over the past month, only behind LayerZero / Stargate, and surpassing heavyweights Uniswap and Tether.

After reviewing the Arbiscan contract for the ERC-4337 entry point contract, we see that a number of Web3 infrastructure platforms including Biconomy, Stackup and Pimlico are continuing to interact with the ERC-4337 EntryPoint contract.

As developers continue to heavily experiment with account abstraction technology, we expect that consumer-facing applications will eventually follow. The Artemis team will continue to closely monitor for applications that successfully utilize this technology to reduce the frictions of new users attempting to interact with on-chain applications.

Detailed L1 dashboard for people who love more numbers in smaller font:

Note: Revenue represents fees that go to the protocol’s treasury or are returned to tokenholders via a burn mechanism (source: Token Terminal). Weekly commits and weekly dev activity as of 9/8/23.

The content is for informational purposes. None of the content is meant to be investment advice. Use your own discretion and independent decision regarding investments.