BWB2022 Day 3 First Mover Stage 앤디 리안Anndy Lian

BWB2022 Day 3 First Mover Stage 앤디 리안Anndy Lian

BWB 2022, hosted by Busan Metropolitan City was held at BEXCO for 3 days from Oct. 27th (Thu.) to the 29th (Sat).

With the theme of “Blockchain, City and Life”, as an extension of last year’s NFT Busan 2021, BWB 2022 featured conferences for the advancement of the blockchain industry and provide a space to obtain insight as well as to share information.

Anndy Lian, Book Author of NFT: From Zero to Hero presented his views on Trends Shaping the Future of NFT.

In his speech, he reminded all to go back to basics.

1. The 5 P’s of Marketing – Product, Price, Promotion, Place and People – are key marketing elements used to position a business strategically. Most of us, whilst still understanding what makes an NFT valuable, have forgotten that these are also the key elements for an NFT project to succeed. The industry is filled with people who are focusing on short-term hypes and price pumps. This is more obvious when the market is bullish; all kinds of projects get a price push upward no matter what you launch and draw.

He went on by saying that the regulation of NFT is a must, and we need to understand its importance.

2. As we can see, the market for NFTs is still growing, and it will take some time until an appropriate regulatory framework for NFTs is put in place. Having said that, governments worldwide have already begun developing NFT norms and standards, proving that they are seriously interested in these digital assets.

Additionally, you should be aware that the phenomenal success of NFTs will undoubtedly result in fraudulent activities. For this reason, it is becoming more and more crucial to conduct your research before purchasing or investing in NFT collections or projects.

3. Lastly, he also hoped that the general public and enthusiasts of NFT should understand what the market is like. Do not just be fooled by fake statistics. He cited NFT wash trading as an example.

Wash trading makes it difficult for non-fungible token enthusiasts to gauge genuine market interest in NFT collections. It also inflates and skews the amount of trading in marketplaces, misleading analysts about what’s going on on trading platforms.

Anndy Lian is an all-rounded business strategist in Asia. He has provided advisory across a variety of industries for local, international, public listed companies and governments. He is an early blockchain adopter and experienced serial entrepreneur, book author, investor, board member and keynote speaker.

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Roughly 48% of Ethereum NFT trades in October were fake

Roughly 48% of Ethereum NFT trades in October were fake

Traders seeking to artificially inflate the price of collections or earn marketplace trading rewards generated $389 million in wash trades during October.

Global NFT sales in October clocked in at more than $850 million over roughly 3 million total transactions. I looked into NFT wash trades last month and that research got me to look at the numbers more closely.

Footprint Analytics – NFT Monthly Sales

The trigger points for me to say that transactions are becoming more fake are as follows:

  1. Despite bad market conditions, we continue to see a high number of unique buyers and sellers. In October, we had over 1 million unique buyers and sellers. Both buyers and sellers have increased compared to September.
  2. The number of unique buyers and sellers seems to be inconsistent with the growth of sales value and transactions. Around 1 million users contributed more than 4 million sales value in May versus less than 250,000 in October. To me, it seems unlikely to have a growing market demand with less sales value traded.
Footprint Analytics – Sales value vs. Unique users

To look into this further, I spoke with two centralized exchanges that operate NFT marketplaces. The exchanges said that around 80% of new buyers are keeping NFTs in their wallets, rather than selling them. With the market so unfavorable, holding these assets seems to be the sensible move.

So where are all these unique buyers and sellers coming from? I had a word with Footprint Analytics and brought up my points. I realized that the statistics I am looking at are way too big. It involved multiple chains and it is hard to track everything. We agreed to work on only Ethereum-based marketplaces as an example to dive deep into since it is the most popular.

Here are the findings:

According to Footprint Analytics’ filters, wash trading makes up nearly half of all NFT trading volume.

Footprint Analytics – ETH NFT Market Overview (With Wash Trading Filtered)

Traders seeking to artificially inflate the price of collections or earn marketplace trading rewards generated $389 million in wash trades out of October’s total of $758 million in NFT trading volume — bringing the amount of wash trading in the NFT market close to half that of organic trading.  The number of wash trading users accounts for nearly 46% of total users.

Footprint Analytics – Marketplace Market Share Wash Trading Filtered & Without Filtered
Footprint Analytics – NFT Sellers & Buyers Without Wash Trade
Footprint Analytics – NFT Sellers & Buyers

Wash trading is a form of market manipulation where an investor simultaneously sells and buys the same financial instruments to create misleading, artificial activity in the marketplace. It creates enormous dissonance in the NFT industry between what most people imagine NFT trading is i.e., someone buying an NFT for speculation, and the behavior which actually underlies the market — hundreds of insiders transferring NFTs between their own wallets.

There are several indicators to identify suspicious trading activity.

Signals and indicators include:

  1. Overpriced NFT trades with 0% creators fees
  2. Specific NFT IDs that are bought more than a normal amount of times in a day
  3. NFTs bought by the same buyer address in a short period of time

The incentives for wash trading are to earn platform rewards and to create an appearance of value or liquidity for assets. Because there is no way to prevent or discourage wash trading in the NFT market today, people have a hugely misguided picture of the amount of organic, genuine trading activity in the industry.

For example, 81% percent of all trades on X2Y2, one of the top 3 NFT marketplaces, were wash trades according to the filters applied. The main reason for X2Y2 wash trading is volume-based daily trading rewards. The larger the percentage of volume a user contributes to X2Y2, the larger the share of daily trading rewards the user will earn. A similar breakdown can be observed when looking at individual collections. For example, of Dreadfulz’ $1.1 billion in total volume, $1.131 billion was flagged as wash trading.

Footprint Analytics – Marketplace Wash Trading Stats
Footprint Analytics – All Time Top 10 Most Wash Traded Collections

An analyst or writer who does not understand this wash trading dynamic risks grossly misunderstanding the current market. For example, here’s what Business2Community wrote on Oct. 12 about Terraforms by Mathcastles:

“Non-fungible token collections continue showing strong resilience amid the current general crypto market downturn so far this year. Here are some of the top-selling NFT collections this week: 1. Terraforms Reclaim The Top Spot. Terraforms, a non-fungible token (NFT) collection from Mathcastles, has reclaimed the top spot after flipping below our ten top-selling lists last week. Terraforms has a 24-hour sales volume of 1,814 ETH.”

The next collections the article listed were BAYC and CryptoPunks, which have nearly no wash trading. This would give a reader the impression that Terraforms more of a popular collection than those blue chip collections when in reality there were almost no organic trades.

Footprint Analytics – Bored Ape Yacht Club Trading Stats
Footprint Analytics – Cryptopunks Wash Trading Stats
Footprint Analytics – Terraforms-by-mathcastels Wash Trading Stats

By filtering trades for wash trading, traders, analysts and investors can more accurately evaluate NFT assets and the industry. Having accurate datasets and using them are two separate things. My role here is not to whistleblow or break the NFT myths, I am here to share my knowledge and tell my side of the story to everyone.

Using this article, I would like to make a request to analyze CEX NFT marketplaces’ data. Binance or Bybit NFT Marketplace would be ideal.

 

Source: https://cryptoslate.com/roughly-48-of-ethereum-nft-trades-in-october-were-fake/

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How many cronos tokens are there? CRO token circulation analysis

How many cronos tokens are there? CRO token circulation analysis

Crypto.com is one of the biggest crypto exchanges out there, however, recent negative sentiment and the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange have sent its native token, cronos (CRO), into a downwards spiral, forcing it to lose over 90% of its value from $0.8992 in November 2021 to $0.0698 a year later.

What are the latest token analytics suggesting, and how many cronos tokens are there?

What is CRO?

CRO is the native cryptocurrency of the Crypto.com chain and the Cronos EVM Chain. It was formerly known as the Crypto.org Coin before being renamed to CRO.

Crypto.com is a public, open-source and permissionless blockchain that aims to help drive the mass adoption of blockchain technology through decentralised finance (DeFi), payments and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The platform has named itself as the “next generation public blockchain”.

The platform was co-founded in 2016 by Kris Marszalek, Rafael Melo, Bobby Bao and Gary Or and is now operated as a desktop and mobile application.

Crypto.com's key features

The Cronos EVM Chain is the first ever Ethereum-compatible blockchain that was built on Cosmos SDK technology. It is an open source, permissionless Layer 1 chain that aims to scale the DeFi, GameFi and overall Web3 communities by letting builders instantly port apps and crypto assets from other chains while benefiting from low transaction fees, high throughput and fast finality.

The CRO token powers the ecosystem and is used for staking, which grants users a number of rewards and helps maintain the platform’s security and decentralisation. The cronos cryptocurrency is also used to settle transaction fees on the Crypto.org Chain.

Latest CRO market news

2022 has not been the best year for CRO. The token has fallen by more than 87% from its all-time high of $0.8992 on 24 November 2021 to $0.1093 on 17 June 2022. The dip in the CRO price was heightened as Crypto.com announced on 1 May 2022 that it would be slashing staking rewards for all tiers of its VISA cards “to ensure long-term sustainability”, effective as of 1 June 2022.

CRO price chart

Between mid-July 2022 and end of September 2022, Crypto.com has received a number of licence updates worldwide, including Italy, Cyprus, South Korea, Australia, Canada, the UK and France. In addition, on 12 October 2022 the firm said that Paris was established as its European Regional Headquarters and invested €150m (around $155m, as of 18 November) in France to support market operations.

Between 25 October 2022 and 28 October 2022, Crypto.com had signed three MOUs: one with the game software developing studio ACT Games; one with the city of Busan in South Korea to advance the blockchain industry; and one more with global content studio A Story to develop NFT collaborations.

However, amid all the positive news, Crypto.com has also been caught in an array of negative news. An article published on 6 October 2022 by Ad Age tech claimed that the platform had cut off deals with a number of big sports organisations, including the Los Angeles’ Angels City Football Club, the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and the online sports tournament host Twitch Rivals. The article cited unanimous former and current Crypto.com employees.

In addition, according to a series of Tweets by the article’s journalist Asa Hiken, between “June and August, 30-40% of Crypto[dot]com’s entire workforce left the company, per former and current employees. That’s 2,000+ departures — the vast majority of which were layoffs.”

The company did not address the reports.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how many cronos tokens there are now.

How many cronos tokens are there?

So, let’s have a look at how many cronos tokens are available in circulation as of 18 November 2022.

According to data provided by CoinMarketCap, the maximum supply of the cronos tokens is 30.2 billion, meaning that once the total number of cronos tokens in circulation reaches that value, new tokens can no longer be mined. The current circulating supply of the CRO coin surpassed 25 billion.

However, this was not always the case for the cryptocurrency.

When the cryptocurrency was launched in 2018, its maximum supply was fixed at 100 billion coins. But, in order for the Crypto.com network to become fully decentralised at Mainnet Launch, Crypto.com decided to burn 70 billion CRO tokens in what it called “the largest token burn in history”. This was announced by the platform on 22 February 2021.

The platform released a schedule which shows that an initial batch of 59.6 billion CRO tokens was burned on 22 February 2021. Meanwhile, 10.4 billion coins were locked in a smart contract and would be burned every month as they get unlocked. This was aiming to increase the cryptocurrency circulating supply from 24% at the time to over 80%.

The remaining 5.9 billion CRO tokens were distributed in the following way:

  • 5 billion CRO were allocated to mainnet block rewards for Chain validators and delegators
  • 0.9 billion CRO were allocated to the development of the Chain ecosystem

Of that 70 billion burned:

  • 20 billion tokens came from the platform’s capital reserve
  • 5.5 billion coins came from the platform’s community development
  • 10.4 billion tokens came from secondary distribution and launch incentives
  • 20 billion tokens came from ecosystem grants
  • 20 billion tokens came from network long-term incentives

Who are the biggest CRO token holders?

Now that we have established how many cronos tokens are in circulation, let’s take a look at the biggest CRO token holders.

Data provided by etherscan.io showed that, as of 18 November, there were 281,902 CRO holders in total. The 10 biggest CRO holders collectively owned 92.54% of the total token supply in circulation, meanwhile the top 100 owned 95.93%.

The website noted that the top account holding the most CRO tokens in total was a Null Address owning over 77 billion coins, amounting to 77.89% of the total circulating supply. Crypto.com was also among the top CRO holders in the world, owning around 7 billion tokens or approximately 6.9% of the total supply.

Analyst thoughts

Anndy Lian, chief digital advisor at the Mongolian Productivity Organisation and author of ‘NFT: From Zero to Hero’ told Capital.com that while burning 70% of the then maximum CRO token supply was a good decision, doing so in 2021 was a “downside”.

“Personally, I would prefer them to burn and then buyback in stages of burning such a huge amount. The burn back then did make the market perceive that the remaining tokens have more value but that was short lived.”

Lian added that taking into consideration everything that has happened with the FTX crypto exchange in recent weeks, CRO holders are also getting anxious about the wellbeing of the Crypto.com platform, however, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek’s live AMA session on YouTube on 14 November 2022 helped calm those worries down.

“Crypto.com is still facing potential bank run in my humble opinion. This to me is one of the biggest risks that CRO has a direct impact on.”

The bottom line

While knowing key info about the cronos tokenomics and circulating supply is important for accessing the project’s health, it shouldn’t substitute your own research. You should always conduct your own due diligence before trading, looking at the latest news, technical and fundamental analysis, and a wide range of analysts’ opinions before making any trading decision.

Keep in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. And never trade or invest money that you cannot afford to lose.

 

Source: https://capital.com/how-many-cro-tokens-are-there-crypto-com-circulation-analysis

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