Currently Relevant: Edition 6

Welcome to Currently Relevant, THE RELEVANCE HOUSE’s regular roundup curating the best of news, views, and stories from the blockchain, crypto, and Web3 space.

This week: The SEC’s ire for altcoins; Ethereum devs mull a dramatic raise to the minimum ETH stake; Blackrock’s ETF application provides some much-needed relief.

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What’s currently relevant in THE RELEVANCE HOUSE

While consumer-centric businesses tend to focus on driving engagement, marketing activities in B2B companies are all about building relationships. On THE RELEVANCE HOUSE blog this week, we’ve been examining the various touchpoints in establishing and developing B2B customer relationships and how you can maximize your ROI from each step. Discover how to optimize your marketing efforts for customer courtship.

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The Big Picture

Fallout keeps coming from the US Securities & Exchange Commission’s decision to launch legal action against Binance and Coinbase. Platform tokens, in particular, have taken a beating – Solana’s SOL, Cardano’s ADA, and Polygon’s MATIC all posted significant losses after the US regulator labeled them securities (and have been dropped from a number of exchanges).

Most in the industry strenuously dispute the label of “securities”. In fact, many blockchain developers have previously shunned the very idea that token prices or markets are important, pointing instead to the value of their tech.

Which can be neatly summed up as follows:

Scalable.
Decentralized.
Robust governance.
Super fast.
Very secure and reliable.
Developer-friendly.
Interoperable.
Energy-efficient.
World-changing.

Did we miss anything?

If you want people to stop focusing on one thing – token price, in this case – then you need to give them another narrative.

THE RELEVANCE HOUSE co-founder, German Ramirez, recently authored a piece on Cointelegraph, in which he argues that branding is the Layer 1 to a successful marketing strategy in the same way that a Layer 1 blockchain serves as the foundation for ecosystems of applications and users.

The problem for many of the Layer 1s affected by the SEC's shock decision is that they’re missing the Layer 1 of their own marketing and communication strategy – meaning that it’s too easy to focus the narrative on tokens and markets.

Read “Branding: The layer-1 of a successful Web3 marketing strategy”

In funding news, Spanish exchange Bit2Me was the winner of the week, drawing $15 million in funding for an expansion into Latin American markets, from a total of $46 million invested in the sector.

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Elsewhere, despite the ongoing focus on the US regulatory situation, there’s been plenty of other news to digest.

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What’s new in Web3?

A new frontier of finance? Banking giant HSBC has filed several metaverse and NFT-related trademark applications with the US Trademarks & Patents Office. Precise details are thin, but preliminary reports indicate a move into virtual credit cards and metaverse banking applications could be on the cards.
Legendary rock band Queen has also announced it is filing trademarks of its own, for NFT-authenticated content, software for VR and metaverse experiences, and for creating virtual merchandise.
Competition is heating up in the branded virtual wearables space. Footwear giant Puma launched Black Station, a 3D metaverse experience for its community of NFT holders, while rival Nike has been stirring up excitement about a virtual sneaker NFT drop in collaboration with Fortnite.
Despite overall lower liquidity in the NFT segment, interest appears to be sustaining at the upper end of the art markets. On June 16, Sotheby’s raised $11m from the sale of blue-chip NFTs that previously belonged to fallen hedge fund 3AC. Elsewhere, Damian Hirst was flying the flag for NFTs at Art Basel, with an exhibit titled NFTs: WTF?
Polygon has announced a new partnership with Flipkart, a leading figure in Indian e-commerce, to launch a specialist loyalty program on the blockchain.
In “news that’s difficult to explain to non-crypto people,” we have the launch of “Ethscriptions,” an NFT minting protocol on Ethereum that mimics Bitcoin’s Ordinals protocol. (Except it was already possible to mint NFTs on Ethereum, so nobody is really sure why it exists, but quite predictably, there’s already a flurry of activity.)

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Focus on fintech and digital assets

Blackrock surprised everyone last week with the news that it has filed an application with the SEC for a spot Bitcoin ETF – an endeavor that’s proven fruitless to all who came before. However, there are several reasons to be hopeful this time around, which has given a much-needed boost to the markets, and led others to file similar applications.
Perhaps another surprise move given the current US regulatory situation, but backers including Fidelity, Schwab, and Citadel have collaborated on the launch of EDX, an institutional-grade crypto exchange offering API only, non-custodial trading.
The last two stories point to a trend confirmed by a survey published by Nomura last week: institutional investors are interested in crypto, but they want the security of TradFi involvement.
In a move that’s been rumored since 2020, Deutsche Bank finally cemented its intention to move into digital assets, with an application to German regulator BaFin for a custody license.

Mastercard reignited its on-again-off-again love affair with crypto, filing trademarks for software that would enable digital asset transactions.

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Inside the infrastructure

Following the recent Shapella upgrade, the queue to stake ETH and become a validator on the Ethereum mainnet has never been longer. Core developers are now mulling a proposal that would see the minimum validator stake raised from 32 ETH up to 2,048 ETH.

Could a 6,300% raise compromise Ethereum’s community-driven, decentralized brand? Read the latest newsletter from our founder and CEO German, “Brands in Web3: Web3 in Brands”, for more about this story and more of German’s marketing insights from the Web3 space.

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Meme of the week

The slew of adoption news this week, particularly from financial institutions with heavy ties to the US, indicates that perhaps the doom-and-gloom mindset caused by the SEC’s ongoing vendetta about crypto is misplaced. As is typical in the rollercoaster that is the crypto and Web3 space, it can only take a matter of days to go from this:

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