Welcome back to the Flarnchain Newsletter! I'm getting started on this one pretty late tonight, thanks to the "Love is Blind" season finale (lol not joking). That's not going to stop me from delivering this newsletter to your inbox each and every week like an atomic clock though.
This marks week 162 in a row of writing the Flarnchain newsletter. Lots of ups and downs over the past 3+ years, but this past week marked a pretty big up for crypto markets overall. Bitcoin reached an all-time-high and is currently sitting around $73,000 - which is around $3k-$4k higher than it's previous all-time-high reached way back in October 2021.
As you can see from the long term chart, this particular surge in price in 2023 and 2024 has been nothing less than parabolic. Bitcoin has been the best performing asset in the past decade... by a longshot. I don't anticipate that changing in the next decade.
What else... Ethereum upgraded this week. The most recent upgrade called "Dencun" now allows layer 2 scaling solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, Zk Sync and a multitude of other layer 2s to bundle transactions in a more efficient manner, dramatically reducing the transaction fees on these networks.
I personally have shied away from using Ethereum and it's rollups this cycle. I really never got the hang of the user interface of Ethereum, it always seemed like you had to do way too many transactions and pay way too many fees to get anything done. That doesn't mean it's not a super high quality investment... I just don't know if the whole "world computer" vision of Ethereum is going to play out if the network is cumbersome and confusing to use. That said, Ethereum has performed remarkably well in the past 1 year:
The total market capitalization of all crypto assets is hovering very close to $2.9 trillion, which is quite exciting. I feel like $3 trillion is a psychological barrier for the entire market, as $3 trillion feels like a big amount... of course $2 trillion is big, but $3 trillion is bigger (by $1 trillion).
About $200 billion of value was added to the entire crypto market, which is a lot for a single week. My prediction is that this bull market the crypto market capitalization will peak above $10 trillion. Much of that value will come from Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the big gains will come in the much smaller market cap crypto assets, especially the ones that have these things:
Good tech
Sufficient decentralization
Strong community
Great developer tools
I think these 4 categories are strongly represented by many of the blockchains in the Cosmos Network (the internet of blockchains), and so I'm putting a lot of my crypto efforts in those blockchains. In particular, a passion project of mine in terms of investment and actual use of the chain itself, is the Stargaze blockchain. It is an application specific blockchain designed as an NFT hub. Basically it's an online, decentralized, art gallery. I'm very bullish on Stargaze ($STARS).
I don't really have much more energy to say much more, but I do know I need to draw a market animal, so let's do that:
This week's market animal is obviously a bull. This bull is in the theme of Vladimir Harkonnen... okay last thing.
52 weeks of huahua
I purchased around 80k of huahua last week (about $20). The wallet now holds 1.2 million Huahua and the unrealized gain is 40.48%.
That's it for tonight!
Perhaps next week will be a bit more organized / substantial.
Cheers!
-flarn
