THIS NEWSLETTER IS SPONSORED BY |  | This is The Block's new Data & Insights Newsletter. Each week, The Block Research team will present a series of charts backed by the most exciting and interesting data points, along with explanations for what's happening behind the metrics. The data will be gleaned from The Block's Data Dashboard, which is freely available on our website, theblockcrypto.com/data/. | 1: Wonderland TVL takes a hit following controversy | Chart via The Block's Data Dashboard | Key Insights provided by The Block Research | - This week it was uncovered that one of the co-founders, 0xSifu, of the Olympus fork on Avalanche, Wonderland, may be the QuadrigaCX co-founder Michael Patryn. While initially this was not confirmed by Wonderland's other co-founded Daniele Sestagalli, he later wrote a blog post establishing 0xSifu was indeed Patryn. Patryn has had several criminal convictions, so this news raised alarm in the Wonderland community.
- Because of this, the market cap of Wonderland's native token TIME fell 31% from $511.8 million to $352.6 million. The tokens from other "Frog Nation" projects also took a hit. Abracadabra's SPELL market cap dropped 23% and Popsicle's ICE 42%. However, ICE lost the least amount of market cap by value, but its initial market cap of $98.9 million made the percentage larger.
- Wonderland's TVL was $760.7 million on January 16th and was already declining prior to the 0xSifu news. The day the news broke marked a low for Wonderland's value locked of $78.6 million, falling 90% in 11 days.
- However, the project was quick to start a vote as to whether or not to unseat 0xSifu and had him step down as treasury manager while the vote took place, which resulted in 88% of TIME tokens voting that he should be removed from the project. Additionally, Sestagalli told The Block that 0xSifu / Patryn had "returned all funds to multisign" and "0 money is lost." The fast response and immediate transfer of power had the TVL of Wonderland back up at $385.7 million the following day.
- Another vote opened this weekend surrounding the future of Wonderland, which remained split at the end of the first day it was open. Sestagalli opened up on Twitter stating that the community has failed by not reaching a clear agreement, and implying that users who voted against maintaining the project should "find a new home" that they can support. He also announced that he's working on a new proposal and ending the thread saying "Wonderland might come to an end but the Frog Nation lives" seemingly confirming that regardless of the vote, Wonderland will shut down but Sestagalli will continue his DeFi endeavors.
| 2: Exchange volume finally bouncing back after winter drop | Chart via The Block's Data Dashboard | Key Insights provided by The Block Research | - The 7-day moving average of daily exchange volume hit the highest it's been in 2022 at $36.2 billion on January 28th.
- The average fell from more than 50% a relative high of $51.8 billion on December 7th to $21.1 billion on January 20th.
- The markets have also been particularly rough recently due to uncertainty surrounding the U.S. monetary policy. Both bitcoin and ether have had prices fall significantly, but both are up a bit from their respective lows last week.
- In comparison to July 2021, another major price drop with bearish market sentiment following China's mining crackdown, this doesn't seem too bad. In July the daily exchange volume fell to a low of $16.4 billion and stayed below $20 billion for 19 consecutive days. While these are not the same situation and crypto has gained popularity since July, the attitudes towards the dip are similar and it is nice to see that the market panic is not hitting as hard.
- While the trend has started coming back down the past few days, the volume average still remains higher than it did at the end of December.
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| 3: BNB hits new all time high for USD value burned with Burn 18 | Chart via The Block's Data Dashboard | Key Insights provided by The Block Research | - An OpenSea UI issue caused several users to accept offers for their NFTs way below floor price. The issue arose from users moving their NFTs to new wallets instead of paying gas fees to actually cancel their current offers, and then having the offer still exist once the NFT was moved back to the original wallet. This initial offer can be worth a lot less than the current value of the NFT due to their gaining popularity, so OpenSea was reimbursing users who lost NFTs because of this.
- OpenSea is attempting to fix this issue and in doing so sent reminder emails to users with outstanding offers reminding them to actually cancel the offer through a transaction on the blockchain. However, this then led to frontrunners discovering that the old offer existed, thus buying the NFT at the old offer price before it was canceled.
- This leading NFT marketplace has also been under pressure due to the immense success of their new competitor LooksRare. While OpenSea has hit a new monthly volume high of $4.21 billion, their market share has gone down from 84% in December to 61% so far this month. LooksRare has more user incentives than OpenSea does and is thus attracting many of their users.
- Nonetheless, OpenSea's volume has been growing, but much of that can be attributed to the surging popularity of NFTs themselves. Despite ominous market conditions, NFTs are performing positively. In addition, they are consistently gaining mainstream exposure, like getting featured on Jimmy Fallon this week.
| 4: Uniswap and Coinbase putting up comparable daily volumes | Chart via The Block's Data Dashboard | Key Insights provided by The Block Research | - In mid-January Uniswap and Coinbase have been putting up incredibly close 7-day moving average trade volumes.
- The two exchanges were $900 million apart on January 19th with Coinbase leading, only for Uniswap to be leading by $3 million the following day. Continuing from January 20th both have seen increases in their daily volume, maintaining their proximity for the most part.
- Uniswap across all its platforms (v1, v2, and v3 on Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon) saw more volume than Coinbase for five days this past month, including a gap of $1.5 billion on January 30th which marks the largest gap in which Uniswap dominates the volume.
- This is not the first time for Coinbase and Uniswap to be neck and neck. For most of September and October 2020 they both put up low volumes in the hundred millions. And in June 2021 Uniswap dominated slightly in the middle of the month.
- When Uniswap is leading the pack between the two, the difference tends to be on the smaller side, while there have been days where Coinbase exceeded Uniswap by over $5 billion.
- Nonetheless, Uniswap being able to outpace the most dominant fiat centralized exchange shows the growing popularity of DeFi.
| 5: Bitcoin miner revenue per TH/s down after difficulty rise | Chart via The Block's Data Dashboard | Key Insights provided by The Block Research | - Every 2,016 blocks (about 2 weeks) the Bitcoin network's mining difficulty adjusts to maintain that on average one block gets mined every 10 minutes. This past adjustment on January 20th marked the largest difficulty adjustment since last summer, increasing 9.3%.
- Total hashrate for the bitcoin network has since recovered from the sharp drop after the China mining crackdown, since which there has been relatively consistent growth of the network difficulty, which in turn has led to a general decline in miner revenue per TH/s. These increases in difficulty has now dropped bitcoin miner revenue per TH/s, because now more work is expected to be necessary to mine to a block.
- Since the day of the sharp increase, this metric has fallen from $0.22 to $0.18, an 18% drop.
| Insights by The Block Research
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