What's Driving Token Prices? May 31, 2023

MULTI/FTM (-41%/-9.4%) - Last week, bridging project Multichain saw a 40% decline after rumors surfaced that the founding team had been arrested in China. The problems began last week when users started to complain about transaction delays, which the team blamed on a recent upgrade. On-chain detectives were quick to point out that several large entities withdrew their assets from Multichain, including the Fantom Foundation, which withdrew about $2.4M in liquidity. Fantom's token also saw price declines as Multichain is the only bridge to the Fantom blockchain.
OP (-9.4%) - Layer-2 protocol Optimism will unlock a large number of its tokens this week. The unlock comprises core contributors and early investors, and the newly released tokens will double the circulating supply. The unlock comes a week before Optimism’s Bedrock upgrade, which is projected to lower fees on the L2.
JOE (+19%) - Decentralized exchange Trader Joe is outperforming this week following a number of positive fundamental changes on its exchange—primarily a massive increase in its DAU/MAUs. Active monthly users have increased about 5x since April from ~50K to roughly 250K. The increased activity has been attributed to the bridge between Bitcoin and Avalanche, which is supported by the Stargate cross-chain bridge on Layer Zero. Many speculate that Stargate will soon airdrop a token to the bridge’s users, which has encouraged the increase in activity. Avalanche has also seen an uptick in activity, boasting an all-time high in monthly active users of almost 900K.

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