What's Driving Token Prices? April 19, 2023

SOL (-3.8%) - Last week Solana announced that its Saga phone would be available to the public beginning on May 8. Currently, a handful of waitlist users have received their phone and early feedback has been very positive. Solana is also in the process of onboarding decentralized wireless network Helium. Helium, which previously ran on its own blockchain network, shut down their blockchain early this week and officially migrated to Solana’s network as of today.
UNI (-0.5%) - Last week, Apple’s App store granted full access to Uniswap’s mobile app, giving the general public the ability to trade on the decentralized exchange’s mobile interface. Notably, the mobile app charges 2.55% when buying crypto using fiat, a high fee, but in line with what Coinbase charges on its retail mobile app. Despite the new product release last week, trading volumes saw a decline similar to the rest of the sector (volumes down -22% WoW). Uniswap captured 65% of DEX volumes in March, and we will be watching to see if that expands with the new release.
XCH (+8.4%) - Chia Network, the layer-1 (L1) blockchain founded by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, confidentially filed an IPO registration with the SEC late last week. The network has long had ambitions to file for an IPO after raising a $61m Series D round in 2021. The blockchain also positions itself as the most secure, compliant, and sustainable L1, therefore the move to file an IPO makes sense.
RPL (+25%) - Decentralized liquid staking provider, Rocketpool, launched its v2 upgrade on Monday enabling withdrawals and lowering the threshold for validators to stake. Specifically, if a node operator wants to spin up a new Ethereum validator, they only need to provide 8 ETH compared to the previous minimum of 16 ETH. The Ethereum network requires 32 ETH per validator which could potentially increase validators and TVL on Rocketpool (TVL is already up +15.25% in the last week since the Shanghai upgrade).

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