What's Driving Token Prices? (July 20, 2022)

AXS (+25%) - Last week, play-to-earn blockchain game Axie Infinity announced a new breeding event where users can create "rare" summer skins within a 50-day window. Since the announcement, the breeding of Axie NFTs has increased significantly (~4.8x over the previous week), and weekly revenue is also up 200%. Despite this, AXS still has a long way to recover, with annualized revenues at $4.68M versus $300M six months ago.
GNO (+41%) - Gnosis Safe, the multi-sig wallet, announced a $100M raise led by 1kx. The Gnosis Safe was originally created by prediction-market Gnosis but was recently spun out with the intention of launching its own token and DAO. Investors in the round include Tiger Global, A&T Capital, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Greenfield One, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, ParaFi, Lightspeed, Polymorphic Capital, Superscrypt, and 50 others. Finally, they announced they would be rebranding to “Safe.”
ETH (+44%) - The big market news last week was that the ETH merge will take place roughly around September 19. The merge combines Eth 1.0 (current PoW chain) and Eth 2.0 (PoS Beacon Chain) and will officially transition Ethereum to a proof-of-stake chain. While the PoW and PoS chains will be combined, Ethereum staked on the Beacon Chain will still remain locked up for several more months until the next phase in the ETH 2.0 roadmap occurs.
LDO (+83%) - With the merge date set, Lido is set to potentially see its primary liquid staking asset, stETH, unlocked in the following months. In addition, as the PoW version of Ethereum is phased out, more users may wish to stake their ETH on the new PoS chain to validate the network which will increase TVL on Lido. Following the news of the merge, Lido also announced it would release support for wrapped stETH on L2s and that it was looking to perform a sale of tokens from treasury to raise $29M.

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