What's Driving Token Prices? January 18, 2023

PSTAKE (+8.4%) - Persistence or pStake is a liquid staking derivative platform based on Cosmos. Last week, pStake launched its ATOM staking feature allowing users to deposit ATOM and receive a derivative version of the staked ATOM in return. With a compelling ~15% APY, TVL on Persistence is up 65% in the last week.
RON (+23%) - Ronin, the layer-2 scaling solution for blockchain game Axie Infinity, announced this week that it would replace wrapped ETH pairs on its decentralized exchange Katana with wrapped RON. Since the DEX serves anyone interacting in the Axie Infinity ecosystem, this move should greatly increase the liquidity of the RON token. At its height in February 2022, Ronin was doing over $700m a week in volume; today about $30m.
FTT (+33%) - FTX’s exchange token FTT surged over the last week on news that $5.5b in assets had been recovered as part of the FTX Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. With estimates of FTX’s shortfall of around $10b, this implies that bankruptcy claims may be closer to 50%. FTT rallied on this news, however, with the release of the FTX Debtors presentation yesterday, it appears that of assets recovered, $635m of it is in SOL and $529m of it is in FTT tokens.
AAVE (+35%) - Rumors are flying that decentralized lend/borrow protocol Aave is slated to launch its v3 protocol upgrade on Ethereum potentially as early as this week. Although a formal activation vote will still need to go through governance, the v3 upgrade includes a number of new features including greater capital efficiency across all the chains Aave is deployed on, risk management tools to better manage liquidations and borrowing, updates to governance, and the Aave app interface. The new protocol version has already been deployed on other chains but the launch on Ethereum should be significant as it accounts for 88% of Aave’s $4.53b in TVL.

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