TLDR: BTC is down but ETH is up. Bitcoin dominance is down. The hot coin we look at this week is JKL.

BTC & ETH Market Update 📈

Contrary to last week, BTC is having a bad week compared to the rest of the market, being down 2.2%, while ETH price is up 14.1%!

As a natural result of the BTC price decrease, Bitcoin dominance has been decreasing this week, peaking at 51.86% but then dropping to 47.91%. It seems that capital initially this week flew to Bitcoin as the spot ETF was getting approved, and then either flowing back or continued over to altcoins like ETH, where capital usually flows to up until when Bitcoin dominance has peaked and starts to decrease, moving capital into more risky mid- or low-cap coins.

The Bitcoin halving is coming up end of March or beginning of April 2024. If history is any guidance we will continue to see BTC dominance climb up until after Bitcoin halving, whereafter people start to look for higher return moving further on the risk curve entering altcoins. This typically starts with ETH, and then on to mid- and low cap coins. Other coins being moved into are typically “ETH killers” like SOL, AVAX and other other L1s. Yet ETH is still the king amongst altcoins, as price action this week also shows.

With BTC dominance decreasing and the ETH price decreasing while BTC price is increasing, the BTC/ETH ratio is trending downwards to 16.8 ETH per BTC, underlining that BTC continues to be king in crypto, but alts like ETH are gaining momentum.

Hot Coin: JKL 🔥

In this week’s newsletter we dive into Jackal Protocol’s token with the ticker: $JKL.

The price action and volume is has been growing consistently, and doesn’t seem to stop any time soon:

What is the project about?

There are many decentralized file storage protocols on Ethereum, but Jackal is the only one available on the Cosmos ecosystem, with all the benefits coming from using the Cosmos tech stack.

DeStorage is a critical piece of puzzle to Decentralized AI (DeAI), and as new AI application are released, we believe this narrative will be growing faster than many other segment of the market. Important criteria would be fast access and transfer speed of large amount of data, which often get categorized as Hot storage. Filecoin, and AWS Glacier would qualify more as Cold storage to store data long term but with slower transfer speed.

Jackal cost of storage is currently $8/month for 1T, so unfortunately that's pretty high compared to Filecoin, but that's for Hot storage instead of Cold storage. Compared to other hot storage solution on AWS that cost about $35 per month per 1T.

As well, when it comes to AI, model reproducibility and versioning is ideal in order to be able to compare. Jackal's bucket storage makes this possible.

Currently it has a $32M marketcap in circulation with a fully diluted market cap of $62M. This is the first bull cycle for Jackal, and Filecoin was able to reach $462B FDV at the peak of it's first bull run in 2021 and $115B in circulation, so Jackal as plenty of room to grow and is better aligned with the AI narrative.

Why is the project exciting now?

There are three main reasons why we feature this project in this week’s newsletter:

• Addressable market

• Better resource utilisation

• Better tech

Addressable Market

Cloud technology is ubiquitous, allowing us to access the majority of internet-connected services nowadays. The importance of Cloud technology cannot be underestimated. It digitalizes the user experience and the way services are provided by eliminating the “need for users to have product-specific hardware so that providers can deliver the same product through the internet”.

To give a perspective of the Cloud Cartel, as of Q4 2022 Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud collectively hold about 65% of the market.

AND, the cloud market is only getting bigger, expecting a CAGR of 13% from 2023 to 2030, especially for Software as a Service.

Thus, it’s challenging for centralized providers to compete with these giants.

Better resource utilisation

According to the network itself, as the world’s first decentralized cloud computing marketplace, Jackal leverages 85% of underutilized cloud capacity in 8.4 million data centers. Jackal enables anyone to buy and sell cloud computing.

Furthermore, the State of Cloud report published by Flexera estimates the current annual public cloud waste at 28%: roughly one-third of cloud capacity is underutilized (read: wasted).

This better utilisation rate converts into lower prices to customers using Jackal to store their data.

Better tech

No user of Dropbox, Box.net or Google Drive wants to be susceptible to the uptime issues of a centralized entity. Remember in 2021 when an AWS outage halted Dropbox activity? On Jackal, users can sleep well knowing that data is backed up in a decentralised data center.