David Canellis

This is Cheatsheet, a primer on what’s happening in crypto today.



Bitcoin just set another all-time high above $73,000, but It’s looking a lot like altcoin season.



That’s not to be confused with memecoin season: Multiple cryptocurrencies for various layer-1 networks have finally outperformed the dog tokens across multiple days.



Toncoin (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/ton">TON</a>) has extended its rally for a third day, again the star performer of the top 100 after gaining nearly 21% — now up by nearly two-thirds over the past week.&nbsp;



TON is now the 13th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, ahead of polygon (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/matic">MATIC</a>), chainlink (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/link">LINK</a>) and tron (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/trx">TRX</a>). TON-powered trading bot BananaGun continues to burn more ETH than layer-2 Arbitrum and MetaMask, which signals higher on-chain activity.



THORChain (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/rune">RUNE</a>) has the rest beaten for weekly gains, however, after a 16.4% rally in the past day and has now more than doubled in seven days.&nbsp;



The network is built as a liquidity network for powering cross-chain token swaps. THORChain daily volume hit an all-time high yesterday of $639.6 million.



Bitcoin (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/btc">BTC</a>) is meanwhile up 1.5% and ether (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/eth">ETH</a>) is about flat and still 17% below its own price record, changing hands for $4,050 as of 7:45 am ET.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">On-chain mail</h2>



Rising prices have DeFi’s total value locked (TVL) metric posturing to reclaim levels not seen since the Great Terra Implosion of 2022, now more than $104 billion. But dollar bias beware.



<ul>
<li>Ethereum’s apps have felt slight net ETH <a href="https://defillama.com/chain/Ethereum">outflows</a> over the past month, losing about 80,000 ETH ($324.3 million).</li>



<li>Layer-2s Arbitrum and Optimism have lost almost 15% of their ETH over the same period (nearly 205,000 ETH worth $830.5 million).</li>



<li>Maker, the collateralized debt protocol behind DAI, has 25% less ether after losing about 770,000 ETH ($3.11 billion). Its dollar-denominated TVL is still up 15%.</li>
</ul>



The Maker situation, perhaps the result of rising popularity for liquid staking and restaking, has led to rate hikes and an “accelerated proposal” to <a href="https://twitter.com/MakerDAO/status/1766177247868621229">prepare</a> the protocol to meet anticipated demand for DAI with fewer deposits. Tron, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon and Avalanche apps have also seen net outflows denominated in native tokens, per DeFiLlama.



But not all networks are seeing the same trend. Solana apps now have more than 27% more SOL than this time last month — the equivalent of 4.81 million SOL ($731.6 million) — even as the price of SOL swelled 45%.



Solana derivatives DEX Jupiter and Parcl, a platform to gain leveraged exposure to real estate assets, have pulled in much of that SOL. Tron and Sui apps have also attracted more native tokens over the past 30 days.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/jito-labs-suspends-mempool-functionality">Jito Labs ends mempool functionality citing impact on Solana users</a>



<ul>
<li>Ethereum’s degen-optimized layer-2 Blast is jostling to flip Optimism for TVL, both about $1.06 billion.</li>



<li>That would make <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/blast-developers-layer-2-liquidity">Blast the second-biggest Ethereum layer-2 after Arbitrum</a>, which has more than three times the TVL.</li>



<li>Blast lending app Orbit is the fastest growing DeFi app with more than $100 million TVL over the past week, popping from $88 million to $430.9 million.</li>
</ul>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1600" height="603" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png" alt="" class="wp-image-82379" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=1600 1600w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=1024 1024w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=1536 1536w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=428 428w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=470 470w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=389 389w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/image-4.png?w=80 80w" sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">MakerDAO’s ETH deposits have trended downward all year (<a href="https://defillama.com/protocol/maker?denomination=ETH">source</a>)</figcaption></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Crypto business</h2>



A rarity in recent weeks: MicroStrategy wasn’t the best performing crypto-related stock over the past day, even with its 12.65% rally spread before and after the bell as of 7 am ET.



<ul>
<li>Las Vegas-based bitcoin mining stock Gryphon Digital led with almost 16% gains (13.4% in the day session and 2.25% pre-market).</li>



<li>Markets barely reacted to Coinbase’s $1 billion convertible note offering, with COIN set to open 0.5% higher.</li>



<li>Ohio-based miner Griid lost almost 7%, followed by Core Scientific, which altogether shed 5.7% between the day and pre-market sessions, dragged by lackluster earnings.</li>
</ul>



<a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/coinbase">Coinbase</a>’s move to raise cash with convertible notes (a hybrid of debt and equity) may also raise eyebrows. The firm, by far the largest crypto stock on the market, already had more than $200 billion in <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COIN/coinbase-global/total-liabilities">liabilities</a> as of the end of last year — up from $15 billion in 2021. 



(For scale, Apple, valued at more than 40 times Coinbase, has $279.4 billion liabilities, while Intel has $81 billion.)



COIN’s long-term debt has meanwhile declined 12% year on year, now around $3 billion with $5.7 billion cash on hand.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/coinbase-convertible-notes-offering">Coinbase announces offering of $1B in convertible notes</a>



<ul>
<li>If CleanSpark loses more ground, Coinbase and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/microstrategy">MicroStrategy</a> will be the only crypto stocks to beat the S&amp;P 500 over the past month.</li>



<li>MicroStrategy has now outperformed the buzzy Nvidia over the year to date — 133% to 91%.</li>



<li>Tesla and Block are now up more than 100% on their bitcoin <a href="https://bitcointreasuries.net/">buys</a> to date, joining MicroStrategy.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">On the ground</h2>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">So many bad Maker takes the last few days in reaction to the massive rate hike The right one would be along the lines of &quot;Maker emergency yanks all lending as they run out of customer deposits&quot; In practice it&#39;s even worse than that since active borrowers are also affected…&mdash; Hasu⚡️🤖 (@hasufl) <a href="https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1767821908655874062?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 13, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Summer is coming</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">2/7: OEV exploits the inherent delay in blockchain oracles updating asset prices. This creates opportunities for those quick on the draw to profit from these moments before the wider market catches up&mdash; IOSG Intern (@IOSG_Intern) <a href="https://twitter.com/IOSG_Intern/status/1767761203387117900?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 13, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Move over MEV, it&#8217;s oracles’ turn to be wrung out for yield</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">May you Blob cheaply, securely for eons, <a href="https://twitter.com/ethereum?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ethereum</a> <a href="https://t.co/RKzggcwDYV">pic.twitter.com/RKzggcwDYV</a>&mdash; Eli Ben-Sasson (@EliBenSasson) <a href="https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1767869045733306675?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 13, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Happy Dencun day for the blobs who celebrate</figcaption></figure>



Macauley Peterson contributed reporting.



Updated Mar. 13, 2024 at 8:45 am ET: Corrected year referenced for Coinbase liabilities.



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Cheatsheet: MicroStrategy has now outperformed Nvidia this year

<div id="highlights-block_6275825ab1861" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>It’s one of the biggest penalties to date imposed by the SEC on a gaming company</li>
 <li>The gaming giant did not admit or deny guilt as a condition of the settlement</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Gaming giant Nvidia will pay the SEC $5.5 million for allegedly failing to properly disclose cryptocurrency mining’s impact on its revenue.



The SEC found Nvidia hadn’t communicated that cryptocurrency mining was a “significant element of its material revenue growth” throughout 2018.



The Santa Clara company’s processors were designed and marketed for gaming, but customers found they were also efficient at generating new cryptocurrency, particularly ethereum.



In particular, the SEC highlighted two Nvidia disclosures from 2018 which reported “material” revenue growth in its gaming business, even though Nvidia knew that growth was significantly driven by crypto mining.



“Despite this, NVIDIA did not disclose in its Forms 10-Q, as it was required to do, these significant earnings and cash flow fluctuations related to a volatile business for investors to ascertain the likelihood that past performance was indicative of future performance,” the SEC <a href="https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-79" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> in a press release.



Regulators considered the alleged omission misleading, as Nvidia had already disclosed the extent at which other parts of its business were boosted by crypto demand. The US securities watchdog said it created the impression that Nvidia’s gaming sector was not significantly affected by cryptocurrency mining.



Nvidia stock almost doubled between September 2017 and September 2018, a heady period for crypto markets powered by bitcoin’s first-ever surge to $20,000.



The company’s chipsets remain popular among miners, much to the dismay of gamers. Nvidia has even <a href="https://www.pcworld.com/article/395041/nvidia-lhr-explained-what-is-a-lite-hash-rate-gpu.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">introduced</a> so-called hash rate limiters on its newer models in a bid to curb high prices and low supply worldwide.



“NVIDIA’s disclosure failures deprived investors of critical information to evaluate the company’s business in a key market,” said Kristina Littman, who runs the SEC Enforcement Division’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit.



Nvidia settled without admitting or denying the allegations. The firm’s share price fell around 4% during intraday trading on Friday after news of the settlement broke.



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Nvidia To Pay SEC $5.5M for Allegedly Failing to Disclose Crypto Revenue Boost

Ben Strack

<div id="highlights-block_61c4e71ea46b2" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>The returns of Amplify Investments’ Transformational Data Sharing ETF (BLOK) total about 35% in the trailing year, while bitcoin’s price is up 115% over that time</li>
 <li>The stock prices of companies NVIDIA and Silvergate have both surged by about 130% in the past 12 months, according to Google Finance data</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



With no ETFs available in the US that invest directly in cryptocurrencies, some investors have sought exposure to digital assets through funds holding stocks considered to be correlated to the crypto and blockchain spaces. 



But how did the returns of such ETFs &#8211; and the companies they hold &#8211; compare to bitcoin itself?



Bitcoin’s price has increased by about 115% in the past 12 months, as of 3:30 pm ET on Dec. 23, according to CoinGecko. It stood at about $51,150 at that time.



Amplify Investments’ Transformational Data Sharing ETF <a href="https://amplifyetfs.com/blok.html">(BLOK)</a>, which has more than $1.3 billion assets, primarily invests in companies developing and using blockchain technologies. 



BLOK’s top 10 holdings are NVIDIA Corporation, Coinbase, Silvergate, CME Group, SBI Holdings, MicroStrategy, Galaxy Digital, PayPal Holdings, Hut 8 Mining Corp and Hive Blockchain Technologies.&nbsp;



The fund has returned nearly 35% in the trailing 12 months, as of Dec. 22, according to FactSet data.&nbsp;



Amplify’s offering launched in January 2018, just days before two competing funds: the Siren Nasdaq NexGen Economy ETF (BLCN) and the First Trust Indxx Innovative Transaction and Process ETF (LEGR). 



BLOK’s year-to-date returns compare favorably to BLCN and LEGR, which have roughly $260 million and $145 million assets under management, respectively. BLCN has returned 8.1% over the last year, while LEGR’s returns over that span total about 19.6%.



Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, told Blockworks that <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/gap-wide-between-best-and-worst-performing-blockchain-etfs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the performance of various blockchain ETFs</a> has been “a mixed bag,” but called the returns of such products disappointing overall.



“The universe of blockchain ETFs has mostly underperformed the spot price of bitcoin, in some cases rather significantly,” Geraci said. “Unfortunately, the SEC has allowed these products to proliferate instead of approving a spot bitcoin ETF – a disservice to investors seeking bitcoin price exposure in their existing brokerage and retirement accounts.”



More recently launched ETFs that hold crypto-related stocks include Bitwise Asset Management’s Crypto Industry Innovators ETF (BITQ), which launched in May, and Invesco’s Alerian Galaxy Crypto Economy ETF (SATO), which began trading in October.



BITQ, which has roughly $125 million in assets, has returned -24% in the last month, while SATO, which has about $10 million assets, has returned -22%. Bitcoin’s price is down about 10% from 30 days ago, Coingecko data shows.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Individual stocks </h3>



California-based NVIDIA is a technology company that sells crypto mining products. The company’s stock price, which has a roughly 5% weighting in BLOK’s portfolio, was up 128% from 12 months ago, as of Thursday afternoon, according to Google Finance data.&nbsp;



Like NVIDIA, Silvergate has also seen its stock price rise more than bitcoin over the past year, surging by 134%. Bitcoin mining companies Marathon Digital and Hut 8 Mining have seen their stock prices increase by 250% and 244%, respectively, from 12 months ago.



The stock prices of CME Group, SBI Holdings and MicroStrategy have increased by about 37%, 2%, and 74%, respectively, over the span.



MicroStrategy held about 121,000 bitcoin, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/microstrategy-announces-new-414-4m-bitcoin-buy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">as of the end of November.</a>



Coinbase <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/coinbase-direct-listing-shares-are-limited-demand-is-high/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">went public in April</a>, becoming the first cryptocurrency exchange platform to do so. Its stock price is up roughly 16% in the last six months, according to Google Finance, while bitcoin’s price is up about 60% over that period. 



Bill Miller, the founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Miller Value Partners, said during a conversation with author William Green in October that Coinbase <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/bill-miller-is-willing-to-go-over-the-waterfall-with-bitcoin/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">could be “the default position for growth investors”</a> that want exposure to the crypto market without investing directly in crypto assets. 



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How Crypto-Related ETFs, Stocks Have Performed Compared to BTC

Sam Reynolds

<div id="highlights-block_611edda0c5f5b" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Nvidia posted earnings of $6.5 billion Wednesday, on strong demand for its chips in the gaming and data center industries</li>
 <li>Sales of mining chips continue to grow for the company, but have come well under expectations set out in the first quarter</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Graphics chip maker Nvidia’s prediction from last quarter that the company would clear $400 million in revenue fell flat as it registered only $266 million in sales of cryptocurrency mining processors (CMPs). While Nvidia was once included in indices for exposure to blockchain and crypto, analysts are now saying that the company is no longer the Ethereum proxy it once was.&nbsp;



Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) differ from Central Processing Units (CPUs) because of the way they process data.



GPUs specialize in parallel processing; to create graphics, a GPU is made up of many small, specialized cores that are able to break up a task and divide it across these specialized cores much like how a factory spreads the work across thousands of workers. While Nvidia created the GPU in the late-1990s to produce better graphics for gaming, by the early 2010s they realized that the parallel processors in the GPU could be used to assist CPUs in general computing tasks.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Stumbling into crypto</h3>



As a result, Nvidia sort of “stumbled into crypto” explained IDC Research Manager Jitesh Urbani. Just as Nvidia’s GPUs could assist servers in data centers to crunch away at a machine learning algorithm as part of an Artificial Intelligence workload, they could also crack away at the algorithms used in the mining process. 



Initially GPUs were used to mine bitcoin but as difficulty increased, bitcoin miners had to migrate over to custom-built silicon called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). At the same time, the rise of the Ethereum blockchain meant that miners could but their GPUs to use on this chain. As time went on, Ethereum’s positioning from more than a token to trade to the “digital oil” that enables the world of DeFI meant that demand for GPUs for mining only increased.&nbsp;



But this meant that Nvidia’s core market, retail gamers, couldn’t get their hands on GPUs. The ICO-fueled crypto boom of 2017 meant that more Ethereum was needed, thus mining farms went after every GPU they could find — at the expense of gamers.&nbsp;



“Nvidia figured out there were a bunch of miners that wanted their GPU and would pay a premium for it. They certainly benefited from that gold rush, but they’ve also tried to dig deeper into that market by offering these dedicated GPUs for mining called CMPs,” Urbani said. In order to push back against miners hoovering up all the GPU supply in the channel, exacerbated by a chip shortage, Nvidia tweaked the firmware of its latest GPUs to make them uncompetitive for mining.&nbsp;



“We reduced the performance of our GPU on purpose so that if you would like to buy a GPU for gaming, you can. If you&#8217;d like to buy a GPU for crypto mining, either you can buy the CMP version, or if you really would like to use the GeForce to do it, unfortunately the performance will be reduced,” Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has publicly stated.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">The potential of DeFi</h3>



For his part, Huang doesn’t dismiss the disruptive potential of DeFi. 



“Ethereum has established itself. It&#8217;s legitimate. It&#8217;s established. There&#8217;s a lot of credibility. It works well. A lot of people depend on it for DeFi and other things,” he has been quoted as saying. “You need that blockchain to have some fundamental value, and that fundamental value could be mined. Cryptocurrency is going to be here to stay.”



Urbani points out that mining is a comparatively small part of the company’s business. Earnings releases show that graphics cards for retail comprise around 65% of its revenue, while crypto mining processors are just 7% of the company’s bottom line — and that’s bundled in with other OEM (custom chip) ventures.&nbsp;



“Nvidia has won some and lost some by catering to miners, but during this chip shortage, that capacity could be used to satisfy gamers as well,” Urbani said. “I’m not sure that their story about creating dedicated GPUs for mining, and dedicated GPUs for gaming helped garner any lost love from the consumer side of the market.”



The dark clouds hanging over the horizon is, of course, Ethereum’s move away from mining heavy Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. With the <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/eip-1559-is-live-thanks-to-ethereums-london-hard-fork/">implementation of EIP-1559</a>, Ethereum’s move away from relying on miners has begun.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Flooding the market</h3>



All of this has begun to flood the market with used GPUs. 



“There’s now a flood of used GPUs, which are still very good for gaming — one of Nvidia’s primary businesses,” Urbani said, arguing that Nvidia now has to compete against itself. It’d be tough to market a new card to gamers, when there’s the risk of more and more cards flooding the market in the near future as miners sell off inventory in an era of compressed profitability.&nbsp;



“Why would someone buy the newest card when there&#8217;s a perfectly good card from last year available?” Urbani said.&nbsp;



Anshel Sag, an analyst with Moor Insights &amp; Strategy, plays down the risk of used cards flooding the market. Supply, Sag observes, is still tight — for now.&nbsp;



After all, Sag points out that revenue from Nvidia’s CMP division is still up but just not as much as Nvidia expected. CMP cards are not available off-the-shelf and need to be ordered in advance and orders keep coming though less than before.&nbsp;



“Demand for CMP cards appears to be flattening out,” Sag said. “But Ethereum isn’t the only crypto out there. People will mine other ERC-20 tokens. First it was Bitcoin, then it was Ethereum. Next it will be something else.”



Want more investor-focused content on digital assets? <a target="_blank" href="https://cms.blockworks.co/events/digital-asset-summit-2021-2/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Join us</a> September 13th and 14th for the Digital Asset Summit (DAS) in NYC. Use code ARTICLE for $75 off your ticket. <a target="_blank" href="https://cms.blockworks.co/events/digital-asset-summit-2021-2/" rel="noreferrer noopener">Buy it now</a>.