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Here's the wrap of the biggest news in the digital assets space. To get email updates delivered to your mail box check out this free newsletter. Here's a sample of what you'll be receiving. Everything is archived so you can access it any time.

3iq Files IPO for Ether Fund to Trade on Canadian Stock Exchange

I've said in the past the main catalyst for ETH's price rise will be Ethereum 2.0. Post upgrade the core team expects less ETH to be emitted into circulation and ETH will be burned in every transaction. Given the explosion of activity on DeFi platforms, I expect burning to eat away at the circulating supply at a very rapid rate. Moreover, the bottle neck for DeFi has been high gas fees. A week back I paid about $15 per transaction and I know others who've paid more. Assuming, the upgrade reduces fees, we'll see more activity once the high fee barrier has been eroded away. Savvy investors following the space made the connection early and were accumulating during the bear market. However, recently I've seen and uptick in new investor activity. Most people who've joined my private discord  are new to the space. Not only are we seeing new retail investors, but we're also witnessing large players enter the space. Canadian investment fund manager 3iq Corp, announced last week that it has filed an IPO for its Ether fund. The preliminary IPO prospectus has already been green-lighted by a regulator. 

The Ether fund intends to raise a minimum of 10.75 million and a maximum of 107.5 million by issuing issuing A units at $10.75 and Class F units at $10.53. They already have a Bitcoin Fund on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The Bitcoin Fund completed a $48 million offering in May and a $10 million offering in June. This coincides with the significant price increases we observed in those months. 

Chainlink’s (LINK) Newest Partnership w/ Gaming Company

I've long said Chainlink is not a DeFi token. It will be one of the most ubiquitous tokens in the industry. Furthermore, it'll penetrate and add value to innumerable industries. GamerHash a gaming-focused platform is the latest firm to onboard Chainlink oracle services. GamerHash's users can share their idle GPU/CPU for mining crypto or earning crypto rewards through playing games. Chainlinks oracle will enable BTC/USD Price Reference Data to be used in calculating the profitability of providing various computational resources. Additionally, Chainlink's Verifiable Random Function (VRF) will be used to distribute non-fungible token (NFT) rewards on the GamerHash Marketplace. This could perhaps be the largest attempt to seed NFT adoption in the gamer community. Daniel Kochis, Head of Chainlink Business and Development, echoed a similar sentiment, 

"The gaming industry is primed to see massive expansion through the introduction of in-game rewards represented as scarce NFT assets."

GamerHash expects VRF to permit gamers to both trade and invest in their choice of digital assets while being assured of the price quotes being reliable. Lastly, VFT lets developers easily access and interact with oracles on Chainlink, making the creation of fair layer-two applications possible. Many people have a very rigid view of the possibilities offered by Chainlink's oracle network. In my view, this is just the beginning of network effect proliferation. 

Aavenomics

Most DeFi projects have plans to decentralize and hand over protocol ownership to the community through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Many projects maybe headed in that general direction, however to my knowledge Aave is the first to formalize a pathway. 

They also have a token migration planned with LEND being converted to AAVE at rate of 100 to 1. The total supply of AAVE will be 16 million with 13 million redeemed by LEND holders. Three million will be allocated to the Aave ecosystem reserve to cover shortfall events. Aave will be secured by a Safety Module (SM), a staking mechanism. Stakers who support the SM by providing liquidity will be compensated with AAVE tokens along with a percentage of protocol fees. Staking will feature AAVE along side AAVE/ETH pair, thus AAVE stakers will be eligible for BAL rewards. All rewards will accrue and be distributed in real time. 

Aave Improvement Proposals (AIPs) are generated by governance forums and ratified with on-chain voting. AAVE tokens stored in a ledger or the SM can be used to cast votes. The first vote will determine the fee distributions and possible vesting periods. Once they determine how to allocate collected fees, they'll re-shift their focus to marketing and growth. I highly recommend looking into the project as I expect significant growth in the coming years.

 DeFi Token of the Week

For this week I selected MTA, the token for the Mstable project. The project essentially pools USD pegged stablecoins and rotates them among various DeFi protocols chasing the highest yield. From this standpoint, it's very much like Yearn. Users deposit USD pegged stablecoin and are given mUSD which represents a claim on their pooled tokens. The pool at its peak has returned over 40% APY. The MTA token holders can insure mStable and earn rewards as a result. Moreover, MTA holders also have governance rights for protocol proposals. At the time of writing the token trades less than five dollars and is below 20 million in market cap. This model for pool USD pegged stable coins could be adapted to BTC, gold, silver and other assets. Very interesting project, in my view worth the look. 

For those interested in a video format:

3IQ Files IPO [3:00]

Chainlink Gaming Partnership [5:27]

New Lend Tokenomics [8:46]

Ren VM Main net [13:00]

Token of the Week [18:40]