What's Driving Token Prices? August 30, 2023

PEPE (-23%) - the meme project, Pepe, faced a rollercoaster of a week as internal conflicts led to a treasury liquidation and a crash in token price. Last week, it was reported that the Pepe treasury multi-sig wallet suddenly changed its requirements from 5 /8 signers to 2 /8 signers. Team members reportedly removed 60% of tokens from the multisig and subsequently removed their access to the multisig. These tokens, worth ~$15m at the time, were sent to several centralized exchanges to be sold, crashing the price over 20%. As the story made the rounds, many began labeling Pepe as a “rug” as the founding team had clearly given up on the project and chosen to cash out. While the project might now be free from “bad actors”, the token price is still suffering down -23% for the week.
LINK (-7.2%) - Decentralized oracle provider, Chainlink, announced the version 0.2 of its staking program will launch in Q4 following the initial launch last December. Despite the announcement, the staking component of the Chainlink network will remain very small with the total LINK available for staking increasing from 25M (2.5% of circulating) to 45M (4.5% of circulating). This is among a handful of other smaller updates. Critically, participants can still only stake to the ETH/USD data feed, so revenue distribution will remain miniscule. Staking is a large component of Chainlink’s roadmap designed to decentralize and provide incentives for data providers operating in the network. However, the slow rate of deployment of staking to existing Chainlink oracles makes this appear to be very far out.
DYDX (-0.5%) - Voting has begun on a proposal that would officially migrate dYdX, the leading decentralized exchange, to its own chain on the Cosmos network next month. Once dYdX transitions to its own chain, the new exchange will utilize the DYDX token as the Layer-1 token for security (via staking) and for paying gas fees. This upgrade has been long awaited and promises a number of improvements to speed and execution over the v3 of dYdX. The vote is set to conclude Friday and is already favored to pass.

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