What's Driving Token Prices? October 26, 2022

MKR (-23%) - The decentralized stablecoin issuer MakerDao has recently experienced upheaval following MakerDao's founder, Rune, posting a controversial "Endgame" proposal to split Maker into various subDAOs, among other changes. Yesterday, the proposal passed—in a controversial fashion—as Rune accumulated more than 60% of the vote via vote delegates. Many believe some large holders did not participate in the vote, which led to this outcome.
DOT (+4%) - Gavin Wood, Founder of Layer 1 platform Polkadot, announced last week that he would be stepping down as CEO of Parity Technologies, the company behind DOT. Wood, who is also one of the Ethereum co-founders, started building Polkadot in 2016 as an improved version of Ethereum. However, after launching in 2020, Polkadot has yet to gain meaningful traction compared to its peers like Solana, Avalanche, and Binance Smart Chain. Wood will transition to Chief Architect and focus on building several “social primitives” that should help further Polkadot as a Web3 platform.
APT (+25%) - Layer 1 protocol Aptos made headlines last week as it launched its mainnet and had its token listed on 3 major centralized exchanges. The hotly anticipated launch comes after Aptos raised $350M from venture capital firms Coinbase Ventures, FTX Ventures, Binance, a16z, Multicoin Capital, and others. Aptos promised to eclipse Solana, Ethereum, and other major Layer 1s with its high throughput speeds. However, the quick listing of APT on Binance, FTX, and Coinbase raised the ire of the crypto ecosystem because new issues are rarely listed so quickly. Additionally, the exchanges were also investors, causing many raised eyebrows at the potential conflict of interest. Finally, no details on the APT token’s supply schedule or distribution were released in advance, leading many to believe that retail was receiving the short end of the stick, left to trade without all the relevant information. Trading opened at $10, declined to about $7.50 and has since rebounded to $8.80.
HEGIC (+157%) - Decentralized options protocol Hegic, announced the launch of its “Hegic Herge” protocol upgrade. During the beta testing phase, the protocol earned over $400K in P&L, which is claimable by HEGIC token holders. Other features include a complete move to Arbitrum from Ethereum, a new feature that uses HEGIC as collateral in the protocol, and the launch of a new trading interface.

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