Apollos Moonshots: Crypto Bounces Back and Serves Delicious Sushi

[ad_1]

Matthew Harcourt, analyst at Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm Apollo Capital, shares the bottom line every week on what’s happening in the fast-paced and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Sentiment in the crypto space was at its best in about two weeks when Matthew Harcourt spoke to Stockhead on Friday afternoon, with Bitcoin trading at around US $ 32,500 and Ethereum over US $ 2,000.

“We’re getting a really solid rebound – depending on how strong the race is, it could set us up for a good half hour, but you don’t want to talk too early,” Harcourt said.

Still, there have been positive signs, including recent surveys indicating that high net worth and institutional clients of Goldman Sachs and Fidelity are interested in buying crypto, Harcourt said.

Last week also saw a US $ 900 million fundraiser for the FTX crypto exchange at a valuation of US $ 18 billion. Investors included Softbank, the Japanese multinational.

“We think this is really positive for the crypto asset market,” Harcourt said. Massive valuation is revolutionary for a company that is only two years old and will serve to transform institutional attitudes towards crypto.

In addition, the London hard fork for Ethereum is expected to go into effect in just a week and a half, on August 5 (Australian time). London includes EIP-1559, a network upgrade that will lower gas costs (transaction) and make the ether deflationary.

“I’m sure we’ll get a bit of momentum (from the price of ether) in the last two weeks before this, just like we saw during the Coinbase IPO. The price action didn’t really start until just before – I think a similar thing could happen with Ethereum.

“Hopefully this rebound is a trend reversal, but there are still a lot of critical points to be crossed before exiting this bear market.”

Delicious sushi

The Apollo coin for the week is Sushi, the token that powers the decentralized cryptocurrency exchange of the same name.

The exchange was launched in late August last year as a controversial UniSwap clone, and recently underwent a smooth rebranding from SushiSwap to Sushi.

The tokens are the # 67 crypto with a market cap of US $ 1 billion. The exchange itself manages a volume of around US $ 175 million each day, with total liquidity of US $ 2.7 billion.

Since its launch, it has processed $ 93 billion in transactions, compared to $ 298 billion for Uniswap.

“Over the past year, they’ve really established themselves as a differentiated product,” says Harcourt.

Sushi token holders are rewarded with a portion of the exchange fee, Harcourt said.

“A lot of projects can’t do this because of security, legal issues, but because Sushi is a decentralized exchange, it does. ”

Sushi controversy

The Sushi community has been embroiled in a controversy in recent days over a proposal to raise US $ 60 million by selling Sushi tokens to venture capitalists at a 20-30% discount, Harcourt notes.

“There has been some negative feedback from the community and the forums,” he says.

It’s interesting to see a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) run by token holders like Sushi trying to negotiate with VCs, Harcourt says.

“We’ll see how it plays out,” he said.

But this controversy – and the ability for institutional investors to get tokens at a discount – can drive the price down.

“This is a project that we have had in our portfolio for a few months now. We really like the token and the fundamental protocol.

Apollo also owns Uniswap’s UNI tokens and actually holds a larger position in that coin, Harcourt said.

“But we really like Sushi in terms of decentralization, community ownership. Very similar, obviously, but we think they are differentiated enough to fit in our portfolio.

Uniswap has proven to be a long-term player, as its plans to launch Optimism scaling solutions on Ethereum (currently in alpha!)

The exchange is on Polygon as well as Ethereum, along with a dozen other blockchains, and last week announced its Trident upgrade which it calls a next-generation automated market maker.

“They continue to ship, and continue to be quite innovative, and have a good community,” Harcourt said.

The views, information or opinions expressed in the interview for this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for the advice on financial products contained in this article.

SUBSCRIBE

Get the latest news from Stockhead for free delivered to your inbox.

It’s free. Unsubscribe whenever you want.

You might be interested in

[ad_2]