This article will analyze some crypto assets with potential investment value from three aspects: Cancun upgrade, RWA, and games.

Let’s talk about the tokens that we are paying attention to and planning recently.

Cancun Upgrade

The Cancun upgrade is the most important narrative in the near future. Large narratives often bring a lot of emotions and traffic (not because of technical changes that bring about price changes). But Cancun has not announced a specific time, so it has not brought any synergy. Judging from the current progress, devnet9 is likely to be the last testnet, and then it will be the public testnet. But there is also a possibility that devnet9 is a short-term testnet, and devnet10 may be the final testnet.

During the public testnet phase, the probability of announcing a specific date (block time) for the Cancun upgrade will increase. However, this announcement will probably be in mid-October or November.

The targets of the Cancun upgrade are nothing more than Layer2, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Metis, which recently announced potential benefits (Metis plans to become Ethereum's first decentralized L2 this year, enabling its community to take over the key centralized components of the network), as well as some other Layer2. In addition, Mantle is also promoting the growth of its own network, but $MNT is currently performing generally. The Cancun upgrade is also a positive for Coinbase's stock price.

In addition, the spread of sentiment will be transmitted to the protocols on Layer2. The first choice on Arbitrum is $GMX. However, $VELO on Optimism may not be able to take on the task, mainly because of the high inflation of $VELO and the weakness of the Optimism ecosystem. $SNX may be better. But if I am required to choose only one target among these ecosystems, I will choose $GMX.

Why?

There are two main reasons:

First, we are optimistic about the future development of the Arbitrum ecosystem and the further development of GMX as a leading protocol (there are also GMX tasks in the Odyssey event);

The second is the optimism about future volatility (liquidity contraction slows down).

Let me explain the first point in detail.

Arbitrum recently passed a proposal to provide 50M $ARB as a support fund for the ecological protocol, and GMX will definitely get a corresponding share. It mainly depends on whether GMX will promote the development of v2 through $ARB incentives. With the additional incentives for GMX to deploy + the reduction of airdrop expectations/incentives from other protocols, there is still a chance for GMX to revive.

In addition, I personally think that 50M $ARB does not need to worry, on the contrary, this behavior will make the car lighter, which is a good thing for $ARB. (It depends on how much you think)

GMX v2 has obvious advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that it is not very friendly to large funds, liquidity is dispersed, and the support for long-tail assets is not thorough enough. But correspondingly, the advantages of v2 are that it is cost-friendly, more composable, and has higher capital utilization, etc. Overall, I think that although the market expectations for GMX v2 are insufficient, the corresponding changes are all to solve some previous problems, which is always a good thing.

All in all, choosing $GMX is a bet on an expected reversal.

Let me say a few more words about Arbitrum. I am also quite optimistic about what Arbitrum is doing recently, such as cooperating with Espresso Systems to explore solutions for shared sorters; launching XAI (Layer3) to promote the development of the gaming track (the gaming track may have a small outbreak in the near future, which will be mentioned later), including Offchain Co-founder also said that gaming is one of Arbitrum's growth areas; Arbitrum launched Stylus, which supports developers to use traditional EVM tools and WASM-compatible languages ​​(such as Rust, C, and C++) to build applications on the Arbitrum Nitro chain. Also, Arbitrum has reopened the Odyssey event. There is actually nothing much to say about this event. There are no airdrops and rewards, only badges, which may need to be consumed together with the 50M $ARB reward.

But in the final analysis, these things are all technical changes, and whether they can trigger price changes still depends on market feedback.

RWA

FXS

$FXS is a coin with strong expectations, but also a very difficult coin to trade. Although it has attracted widespread attention from the market through its own Lend module mechanism, it has now returned to the price when Curve had the incident.

My personal judgment is that $FXS will not maintain a continuous rise, and this round of its price changes can only rely on the short-term expectations provided by new products. Its subsequent expectations include but are not limited to: frxETH v2 (node ​​operator lending model), Frax v3, FPI (Coinbase CEO believes that Flatcoins "stable coins that can track inflation rates" will be the next generation of stablecoins), sFRAX (as well as FXB, RWA), Fraxchain, frxBTC (? Doubtful, it will be more difficult to achieve, but it appears in the team roadmap) and so on.

From a fundamental change perspective, perhaps only sFRAX (if FraxDAO has a more organized governance model than MakerDAO) can reverse the decline of $FXS and drive the growth of its stablecoin and positive revenue. I will keep a close eye on this.

In general, Frax has too many products and its pipeline is too complicated, making it difficult to achieve sustainable growth - especially at a time when FRAX supply is shrinking, FraxBP TVL is declining, and frxETH growth is sluggish.

I am also keeping an eye on $MKR and $CFG in the RWA track. I think $MKR has a chance to test $1,600 (it may even be higher than Ethereum before the split). If I think from the perspective of DeFi blue chips, I will also consider $AAVE. Currently, $AAVE has been working on solving the problem of $GHO decoupling (decoupling has no direct impact on the price of $AAVE).

game

Web3 games will be my main focus in Q4. I will mainly talk about several game-related coins.

Gas Hero

The main reason for paying attention to Gas Hero is related to its producer Stepn. They spent some effort on marketing and creating early popularity, so I personally think it’s worth paying attention to this game.

From the white paper, Gas Hero has no obvious advantages over other Web3 games, and the gameplay is not very innovative, it is a placement game + Ponzi. Since Gas Hero has not yet announced the content about the gold farming income, I cannot assert whether the game can maintain the popularity through the Ponzi model. At the same time, since $GMT is also complicated in the secondary market, it is obviously untenable to formulate a trading strategy based solely on the consumption of $GMT by Gas Hero.

Prime

Parallel is a blockchain game that I like very much. Although there are some flaws in the balance of the game design, the overall game production (as you can tell by how much money was spent and how many production staff there are) is still good. It is a card battle game with a mode similar to Hearthstone, and the card collection is similar to Magic: The Gathering.

Most importantly, Parallel has deeply integrated $PRIME into the game economy. For example, in the game, each NFT card can accumulate the reputation of the card through the game. The accumulation of reputation allows players to consume a certain amount of PRIME to mint Echo (phantom card). The amount of PRIME consumed for minting phantom cards will be dynamically adjusted according to the demand for minting Echo (for example, the PRIME consumed by NFT cards with high market popularity will increase dynamically). At the same time, players do not need to buy expensive cards, but can directly purchase duplicate Echo through PRIME/ETH. As the number of players onboard the game continues to grow, the demand for $PRIME will be amplified, forming a flywheel.

However, the investment cycle of $PRIME should be very long, so the "buying point" is very important.

MC

Merit Circle’s main move is to rename $MC to $BEAM and then split it 1:100. Beam is built on the Avalanche subnet. Merit Circle claims that Beam has “a strong network of more than 60 partner games, dozens of contributors, developers, tools, and investors.”

GHST

Aavegotchi chain is coming soon. Although the official said that the testnet will be launched in September, there is still no news as September is almost over. However, from the interaction between the official and Polygon, they are working hard to promote this matter (including launching Game Center). The main problem is that the project is advancing too slowly.

other

LINK

Regarding the view on $LINK, I mainly draw on the current price trend of LINK and the view of @jyosamson. Xiusang believes that Chainlink holds the Smartcon conference every October 2nd, and there may be major announcements. Secondly, the price of $LINK is also closely related to the income of CCIP. At present, CCIP's income has no obvious highlights (also related to the downturn on the chain).

SOL

The reason for paying attention to $SOL is that Solana has been very active in hackathons recently, and some European and American KOLs/media have been calling for it. From the perspective of giving money at hackathons, the Solana Foundation is still relatively rich. However, this has no direct relationship with the price of $SOL. The biggest impact on the price of $SOL is the selling of FTX. It has been confirmed that the $SOL held by FTX is not fully circulated, but basically investment shares, so its influence on the market is not that great.

Finally, in this article, the logic of corresponding tokens is divided into strong and weak ones, so it is best to read it carefully.