What's Driving Token Prices? February 21, 2024

STRK (-50%) - Yesterday, claims opened for the Starknet airdrop, which distributed 9% of the token supply to an estimated 1.3M wallets. Starknet is a Layer-2 protocol that utilizes zero knowledge (zk) proofs and has been live for quite a while and previously served as the home to dYdX, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange. The airdrop was only given to those who had used apps on the L2 prior to 2022, Github contributors, members of the Ethereum Protocol Guild, early ETH stakers, and non-blockchain developers who contributed to open-source projects in the past. This caused the airdrop to receive a lot of backlash since many users were ineligible for the airdrop and the subsequent unlock schedule for the token occurs 2 months post-launch date for the team and investor portion of the tokens. While the token opened at $3.55, it has since traded down to $1.81 representing a $1.3B circulating market cap and a $18B FDV.
KLAY/FNSA (-8.9%/-10.4%) - Last week, a proposal was passed to merge the Klaytn blockchain with the Fincshia blockchain (fka Line blockchain) in order to create “Asia’s largest Web3 ecosystem”. The newly formed blockchain will combine the projects’ ecosystems, which include a combined 420 dApps and 45 governance members. There is also a plan to reveal all-new tokenomics in the near future, including a plan to “eliminate” uncirculated tokens. While we have seen a handful of mergers in the past between crypto projects, this is becoming more of a trend with increased competition and new entrants into the blockchain ecosystem.
APE (+6.6%) - The APE community announced last week that Arbitrum will be the home for Apechain, the previously announced chain that will host the Otherside metaverse and associated marketplace for Yuga Labs’ NFT projects. Apechain stated it chose Arbitrum for its gaming capabilities and will be a "Layer-3" project on Arbitrum. Interestingly, at the same time, Yuga Labs announced that BAYC and other IPs in the Yuga portfolio would be available to trade on the Magic Eden NFT marketplace, and transactions could be done using Apecoin. Yuga Labs also purchased Proof.xyz, a company that owns the Moonbirds NFT project, to add to its collection. Yuga Labs received a lot of criticism for purchasing yet another IP for its portfolio as it has struggled to adequately support its existing IPs such as BAYC. Just this morning, the Yuga Labs CEO, Daniel Alegre, announced he is stepping down and Greg Solano, the co-founder of Yuga is stepping back into the CEO role.

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