Monthly on-chain, September
September was a very boring month for the cryptocurrency market; liquidity was draining out of chains and protocols, and prices were going lower and lower. But that was actually the best-case scenario that we plotted in the August report, because there was no dramatic crash with capitulation.
Ethereum rollups started losing users’ attention, while their TVL was resilient to falling, ready to skyrocket again. At the same time, TVL growth was indicated inside a few underdog chains, such as Kujira and Linea.
The month was unremarkable, but at the end, interesting things have happened: the SEC delayed all ETF filings in advance, which was surprising, and the market has not reacted negatively. At the same time, rumors about the SEC approving applications in January 2024 started spreading.
TVL growth and decline leaders
Interestingly, Kujira and Linea are leading the TVL growth list. Also, in the past month, you may have noticed Sui catching up to its twin-chain Aptos; they will likely match up in terms of TVL soon.
Despite the best possible event, the official integration of @wallet into Telegram, the price of TON and TVL increased insignificantly, showing that the ecosystem is still empty and there is no demand for this asset. Base joined the list of leaders in TVL’s decline, but given the previous rise, it’s only a minor correction, and once there is a narrative, it will shine again.
Blockchain of the Month: Kujira
Kujira is a Layer 1 blockchain on the Cosmos SDK. Back in the day, Kujira was a top-tier project on Terra. Then Terra collapsed, and many people buried all the projects related to it. Despite this, three months later, a small Kujira team launched the blockchain. In the last few months, there were no specific marketing campaigns that would have explained the growth; the team simply makes a good-quality product and creates new applications to give value to the token and their share. This kind of stuff is rare in crypto, but it does happen.
Thoughts on October
October started with two green daily candles on Bitcoin, and it was the strongest movement since June. Bitcoin has broken the downtrend that started in August, and now the price must consolidate above 29k before a new uptrend can be declared. If it fails, BTC most likely touches 20k.
Regarding on-chain activity, we expect liquidity inflows to all major networks. Celestia announced an airdrop for active L2s users and ATOM stakers, while Arbitrum resumed Odyssey, which was paused over a year ago. This is a harbinger of on-chain recovery and a signal that most of the available liquidity will again be redistributed across the major Ethereum rollups. On Twitter, a bunch of influencers even started talking about an alt season again, but there is no new liquidity in the market yet, so the more TVL rises in rollups, the more it drops across the rest of the chains.
So, the market is showing some signs of being alive, but as long as Bitcoin is below 30k, it’s more of a dead cat bounce over and over again.
