Lido Finance kicked off the 2023 trading year by displacing MakerDAO as the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol with the highest total value locked (TVL). Still maintaining its spot, its TVL currently sits at $8.22 billion, per data from DefiLlama.

The reason for the rally in TVL is not far-fetched. With the Shanghai upgrade scheduled to take place before the close of Q1, 2023, the liquid-staking platform has witnessed a surge in the number of staked deposits on its platform.

Further, the growth in user activity on Lido Finance has contributed to a rally in the value of its native token LDO. On a year-to-date basis, LDO's price has gone up by 163%.

Interestingly, while the LDO addresses that hold between 100 and 1,000,000 LDO tokens have spent the last month accumulating the altcoin, holders of 1,000,000 to 100,000,000 LDO tokens gradually let go of their holdings.

In 2022, the play-to-earn gaming ecosystem experienced a significant decrease in user engagement due to the overall decline in the cryptocurrency market.

However, the current year has seen a resurgence of interest in the gaming aspect of the crypto industry. According to DappRadar, the leading P2E gaming platform, Axie Infinity, has observed a 59% increase in unique active wallets since 1 January.

Additionally, sales volume on the platform has risen by 214%, and the daily transactions count has increased by more than 100% during the year so far.

Due to heightened activity on the platform, new demand for its native tokens, Smooth Love Potion [SLP] and Axie Infinity Shards [AXS], and the number of daily active wallets trading these tokens rallied significantly to reach a peak by 14 January.

Since touching this peak, the prices of SLP and AXS have declined by 11% and 12%, respectively.

An assessment of the profitability of leading metaverse tokens Apecoin [APE], Decentraland [MANA], and The SandBox [SAND] revealed that only APE holders have turned a profit so far this year.

The MVRV ratio for APE is currently positive at 15.81% and is trending upward, while the MVRV ratios for MANA and SAND are both negative at -59.77% and -33.31%, respectively, making them undervalued.

A coin is considered undervalued when the MVRV ratio is below 1, meaning that the current market capitalization is less than the total value of all coins that have been realized. In this case, if an investor sells MANA and SAND at their current market prices, he will realize losses on his investments.

Twitter: @AO15U

Dear bulls and dear bears,
We have something for each of you, to support your take on the market.

For bears,
We are seeing some patterns emerging now, for example on Lido:

It's in the process of building the top, in the final stage of divergences. Divergence in network activity and in network growth:

Price remains on top, however active addresses and network growth are down.

This is usually a bearish sign, a well known pattern.

Building a top can take time. You never know the timing of top building. No one knows.

For bulls,

The good news is MVRV is not over. It's below dangerous 'overbought' level for a number of assets. Examples below.

We could also assume that some tokens are done, some not yet. We'll see it soon.

Ethereum holders are all massively buying:

It probably means that exchange reserves are being sold. The dump is being bought by everyone.

On the other side very big holders (from 100K to 10M ETH) are being liquidated. They need to liquidate ETH in order to replenish liquidity. So they are doing it.

There is very massive a risk addressing activity. The crypto market realized risk.

If you want to see one chart, see how people withdraw from exchanges, this is the chart.

Exchange balances (supply ETH on exchanges also) also decreasing, everything goes to private wallets:

Now everyone learned, you need to be your own custodian.

Compared to strong June dump, liquidations on Aave are not there yet (yellow line).

No super special 'rekt' charts onchain.

Looking at Ethereum holders distribution it seems that everyone is buying the dip:

Could be that they are swapping risky assets to blue chips, to Ether.

Historically speaking we've seen a similar pattern in back September, they just bought the dip and we dumped.

So taking profits from altcoins and moving back to blue chips could probably mean the end of the rally for some time.

Chart: https://app.santiment.net/s/618qjzC-

BTC and ETH funding rates are staying low, even despite the latest price recovery.

After the weekend, despite the price decline, we're observing an increase in active addresses for Ethereum. Will this result in a recovery? Let's see how it plays out.

Ethereum holders are showing an interesting behaviour.

We are tracking 4 groups on the chart above. And all of them have changed behaviour on the latest bottom on July 13.

Especially the group from 1K to 10K ETH, their holdings are decreasing. Of course we can not say it's a real dumping because of a number of liquidity pools and perhaps exchanges in this group. But for sure their balance is decreasing.

10-100 ETH group is slowly but growing.

Small holders 0-10 ETH don't know what to do, doing nothing, probably scared by the latest bottom and still in concerns.

100-1000 ETH holders initially took some profits but then went up again.

And all of them were triggered by July 13 bottom.