🟣 AI-Mazing

AI tokens experience positive price action following NVIDIA's Q4 financial results

Top of the morning, BWR fam!

AI this, AI that. This increasingly looks like one of those narratives that sidelined investors will look back at in a couple of years, scratch their heads, and wonder how they missed the obvious opportunities.

NVIDIA released its Q4 2023 earnings yesterday, and what has become somewhat of a tradition, analyst predictions were beaten by a mile. 4Q revenue came in at $22.1B vs. the estimated $20.4B, and the adjusted gross margin was 76.7% vs. the estimated 75.4%. Q4 net income came in at $12.3B, up almost 800% compared to last year’s $1.4B.

AI-related projects unsurprisingly benefitted from this development, with the largest tokens up across the board within the past 24 hours: TAO (~+9%), RNDR (~+18%), FET (~+12%), AKT (~+7%), and AGIX (~+37%).

In other news, Circle has discontinued USDC on the Tron network, stating compliance as the reason. USDC is minted through Circle Mint, which can be accessed by enterprise businesses and wholesale distributors that mint large volumes of USDC. These entities will have to transfer their USDC holdings to other networks or directly redeem their underlying on Tron. Looking at the stablecoin market cap on Tron, this isn’t a large hit for the chain, as USDC only makes up ~0.5% of the total ~$51.5B stablecoin market cap. In comparison, USDT’s share of the market is a whopping ~96%.

Finally, Gauntlet has announced that it’s leaving Aave. The company was operating as the Risk Steward for the project but stated that due to difficulties related to “inconsistent guidelines and unwritten objectives of the large stakeholders,” the firm will not be working with Aave going forward. This is a good example of some of the difficulties that can arise when collaborating with large DAOs.

That’s all your boy has for today. Have a great Thursday!

— Brick (X: @0x___Brick | Farcaster: @brrrick)

STRK token claims went live on Monday, with more than 700M tokens being up for grabs. Note that the above graph showcases an onchain subset of the aforementioned share. While the Ethereum, StarkEx, and GitHub groups have only claimed ~18% of their aggregate token allocation of ~150M, ~93% of the Starknet group’s share of ~434M tokens has been claimed. In other words, the graph suggests that most of the short-term sell pressure coming from the initial token release is done.

Unlike pretty much all of the recently launched infrastructure-related tokens, such as DYM, STRK’s price plummeted notably from where it began trading, dropping from around $3 to below $1.9. At the current price, STRK trades at an FDV of ~$18B, which aligns with OP’s FDV of ~$16B and ARB’s FDV of ~$18B.

Two possible explanations for STRK’s re-rating are the fact that it has clear comparables in the form of other rollups or that market participants are positioning themselves for the upcoming token unlock deriving from the investor and early contributor allocations. Tokens unlock in April 2023, with ~13% of the total supply, or ~1.3B tokens, becoming liquid. This will increase the circulating supply by ~2.8x, and it’ll be interesting to see how the token will react to the substantial unlock.

Osmosis thrived in H2 2023 on the back of increased DeFi activity deriving from recently launched Cosmos-related projects and better market conditions. With new value accrual mechanisms for the native token, Osmosis is well-positioned to continue its strong performance in 2024.

In this report, we dive into crypto private market data to gather insights on where the future of the industry is headed. Despite a notable downturn in private raises, capital continues to infuse promising projects that aim to transform payments, banking, consumer experiences, community and more, with 2023 being the fourth-largest year for crypto venture capital.

The Series B round is double what the firm raised a year ago.

The Wormhole team hopes to minimize trust assumptions in its protocol through zero-knowledge proofs.

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.