TLDR: BTC and ETH continues to climb up. Bitcoin dominance stays stagnant. The hot coin we look at this week is ARCH.

BTC & ETH Market Update 📈

Prices are up on the weekly, with BTC up 4.5% and ETH 5.0%.

Bitcoin dominance started to decline this week, peaking at 50.6% but ending the week at 48.7%. It’s starting to look more and more bullish both for mid and low cap coins, where capital usually flows to when Bitcoin dominance has peaked and starts to decrease.

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.

A natural result of BTC dominance dropping at the end of the week is the BTC/ETH ratio also increasing further sitting at 19.1 ETH per BTC, underlining that BTC continues to be king in crypto, but alts are gaining momentum.

Hot Coin: ARCH 🪙 

In this week’s newsletter we dive into Archway’s token with the ticker: $ARCH.

The price action and volume is starting to look juicy:

What is the project about?

Archway's mission is to create a developer-first ecosystem where architects can design and manifest their dApps according to their terms, as Griffin Anderson stated in a Cosmos Club X space.

One of the most prominent standout features is the ability for developers to define the fees associated with interactions within their dApps. This level of freedom and flexibility empowers developers to adapt their fee structures to various use cases and operational requirements.

You can read more about what Archway is building in the article below:

Why is the project exciting now?

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

• TVL vs Price

• Airdrops

• Strong Alliances

TVL vs Price

Despite being early, Archway is gaining real traction officially hitting 1,000,000 on-chain transactions:

This traction has also translated into growing Total Value Locked (TVL), which is something to pay attention to when/if the price correlates to TVL.

Thankfully for ARCH, the relationship between TVL and Price has been strongly correlated over the past few months:

We like this because it makes price more predictable. Given that White Whale is gaining more attention and recognition from the broader ecosystem, we can see how White Whale could gather more TVL and hence the price will move up respectively.

Airdrops

With a mission centered around helping developers build dapps, it will come as no surprise as $ARCH stakers are in for potentially a lot of airdrops.

The first one is the Astrovault - the premier DEX on Archway - and their AVX token. They recently proposed to bootstrap liquidity with ARCH tokens in exchange for airdropping AVX tokens:

Astrovault’s AVX is most likely the first of many tokens that could get airdropped to ARCH stakers.

Strong Alliances

Archway has managed to strike strong partnerships with projects that are looking really solid alongside ARCH. Some of these include but is not limited to:

• Jackal Protocol $JKL: Decentralised cloud storage, aka Dropbox but decentralised!

• Decentr $DEC: Web3 Browser allowing you to use your data as a payable value with Built in VPN, adBlock and AI Chat!

You see this across dapps built on Archway, such as Astrovault and their highlighted pools:

If you just look at the price discovery of JKL and DEC you can see a very similar pattern as for the ARCH token the past week:

Now, strong partnerships in web3 is naturally fundamental to any decentralised network like Archway, but you also need an easy way for normies to both know about Archway and ARCH as well as onboard into the ecosystem.

Typically, the way to do exactly this onboarding newcomers is through centralised exchanges, such as crypto.com. This is exactly what Archway just did: