Ecosystem Update September 24

Dear investors,

We're thrilled to share our September 2024 Ecosystem Update. This detailed report explores the latest market trends and events, highlights notable developments within the Advanced Blockchain ecosystem, and features recent organizational developments. Furthermore, it provides an extensive overview of our progress and insights into the broader industry landscape.

Macro Industry View

Total Market Cap in September:

Source - https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts

The cryptocurrency market showed further signs of recovery in September 2024, ending the month with a total market cap of approximately $2.3 trillion, up from the previous month’s volume. This improvement was supported by several macroeconomic events, including the FED’s decision to lower interest rates and China's stimulus efforts, which helped to boost Bitcoin by 7.7% over the month, while Ethereum saw more modest gains of 3.2%

However, the market still faced challenges, particularly with Ethereum ETFs, which experienced significant outflows, particularly from Grayscale’s ETHE fund, however Fidelity's FETH ETF performed positively.

Key events included:

Fed Rate Cut Boosts Bitcoin: The U.S. Federal Reserve's rate cut in early September, alongside China’s stimulus measures, was a major driver of Bitcoin’s price surge of 7.7%. This was Bitcoin’s strongest performance since March 2024 and outpaced other traditional assets like gold. We expect future interest rate measures to attract further momentum for our core markets.
Institutional Moves in Stablecoins: September saw the announcement of new stablecoin projects from Sony Bank and Revolut, reflecting increasing interest from institutions. This could mark a significant moment for the stablecoin sector as companies seek to expand their use cases, including integrations with existing crypto exchanges and blockchain platforms.
EigenLayer Token Launch: One of the standout developments in the DeFi space in September was the launch of the EigenLayer token, EIGEN. Despite some volatility, the initial token release saw substantial interest from stakers, positioning EigenLayer as a notable player in the staking sector.
Ethereum ETF Struggles: Ethereum faced headwinds as the ETHE ETF from Grayscale saw heavy outflows, with investors pulling out a total of $346.6 million during the month, particularly around mid-September. While this posed challenges for Ethereum, Fidelity’s FETH ETF showed resilience with substantial inflows of $85.6 million.

Outlook for Q4 2024: While the market remains volatile, optimism is growing as regulatory clarity improves and institutional adoption continues to expand. The crypto market is expected to benefit from further monetary easing and developments in Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, as well as growing stablecoin applications. However, macroeconomic uncertainties such as inflation and interest rate changes will continue to influence market movements into Q4.

Ecosystem Key Updates

Silencio has achieved fruitful statistics in terms of number of users and data collected.
Light Protocol’s flagship product ZK Compression has gone live on Solana mainnet, gaining a tremendous traction on social media.
peaq confirms its mainnet to launch in October 2024 and continues to expand its ecosystem, with well known projects in the space such as Safe wallet, Ledger wallet and LayerZero.
Composable’s Mantis launched their pre-fund phase, allowing users to lock in assets for rewards.
Contango has extended partnership with ether.fi, a leading staking protocol in the space.
MYSO has announced a strategic partnerhsip with Enzyme finance, one of the earliest asset management protocols in Web3 space.
Celestia just upgraded their mainnet for the first time; In addition, Celestia has secured $100M fundraising, demonstrating high investor confidence.
AO supports $DAI as an asset to farm $AO token.
NEAR's partnership with Nillion integrates private data management and AI with NEAR’s transaction efficiency, enabling developers to build privacy-focused applications, expanding decentralized AI possibilities, and attracting privacy-conscious users.

Silencio - Silencio reaches remarkable milestones in September, demonstrating the success of their strategy to onboard more users:

26,600 new users joined
57,764 new venues added
81.9M in-app coins earned
171,677 unique venues measured
352,821 hours of open street measurements
690,708 venue check-ins

Light Protocol - Light Protocol’s flagship product ZK Compression is live on Solana Mainnet. ZK Compression lays out the foundation for future Zero Knowledge services on Solana. ZK Compression can greatly reduce the cost of Solana development, attracting more developers to leverage Solana’s advantages. This debut is covered by Solana’s X post and receives over 400K views.

peaq - peaq announced their mainnet launch date! Their mainnet launch was initially scheduled between September 23rd - 30th. However, due to their success in Token2049 in Singapore, they decided to extend their launch to October to facilitate more listings on different exchanges that reached out to them in Token2049. In addition to their exciting mainnet launch, peaq recently announced collaboration with big names in the industry, such as Safe Wallet, Ledger Wallet and interoperability solution LayerZero, among others.

Composable - Composable’s Mantis has started its pre-fund stage in September, following a successful Waitlist Phase. During this phase, users can deposit assets to earn yield and Mantis Credits, with early participants receiving bonuses. A referral program offers additional rewards. Pre-funding will later expand to a broader range of assets from Solana, Ethereum, and Cosmos.

Contango - Contango has extended their partnership with ether.fi, a leading staking and restaking DeFi protocol. This partnership offers users a special promotion. Traders can enjoy a 3x boost on ether.fi points for any ether.fi instrument throughout Season 4, applicable across all markets and chains. This partnership enhances rewards for trading ether.fi instruments like weETH and weBTC on Contango.

MYSO - Enzyme Finance, a leading asset management protocol, has acquired a major stake of MYSO Finance. This strategic partnership will accelerate the adoption of bespoke on-chain covered calls and the development of MYSO v3 product.

Celestia - Celestia has upgraded their mainnet for the first time. Lemongrass, the new mainnet, versionhe Lemongrass upgrade introduces several enhancements, including improved transaction throughput, reduced latency, and increased security for decentralized applications. By optimizing consensus algorithms and network performance, this upgrade enables faster and more reliable processing of transactions, making the network more scalable and efficient.

Despite their technical advancement, Celestia also experienced a fruitful September financially. Celestia Foundation just raised $100M, bringing the accumulative raised to $155M.

AO - Starting from September 4th, AO supports $DAI, a stablecoin by MakerDAO, as a staking asset to farm $AO. Up to the time of writing, there are over $90M worth of $DAI and over $400M of other assets locked in the smart contract of AO, signaling massive traction for $AO tokens.

NEAR - NEAR has partnered with Nillion, a protocol ensuring data privacy. The integration of Nillion’s Blind Computation with NEAR’s efficient transaction processing enables modular data privacy, private data management, and private AI. This combination allows developers to create flexible, privacy-preserving applications, broadens the design space for decentralized AI, and attracts privacy-conscious users, unlocking new possibilities within the NEAR ecosystem.

ABAG Update

September 24 started with a positive announcement about Advanced Blockchain’s initial investment in Silencio, a rapidly growing platform within the DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks). Built on peaq, Silencio Network leverages blockchain technology to incentivize global noise pollution data collection, making it a pioneer in the fight against one of the most overlooked environmental threats. Comprehensive details on this announcement have been shared in our recent corporate update.

Our team has been not only reviewing further investment opportunities within the previously communicated verticals from our recent investor update call, but is also working on enhancing communication with existing portfolio companies to define synergies and identify projects where potential exits may be appropriate if insufficient progress is observed.

Moreover, the management team is actively working on finalizing the audit of Incredulous Labs Ltd. to complete the group's consolidated report for the financial year 2023.. Following this, the invitation for the Annual General Meeting for the year 2023 will be sent out, with the meeting scheduled to be held in early December.

Apart from the financial reporting aspect of our business, the management team is currently working on shaping the strategy for 2025 and 2026, which will be announced at the upcoming Eigenkapitalforum conference taking place from November 25-27, 2024.

Lastly, our COO, Hatem Elsayed, recently attended the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona, where he connected with startup founders, potential partners, and fellow investors in the space.

Looking ahead to the rest of Q4 2024, our team will be attending the following conferences:

Blockchain Life (Dubai) – October 22-23, 2024
Eigenkapitalforum (Frankfurt) – November 25-27, 2024

We deeply value your continuous support and look forward to welcoming you to our upcoming investor update call.

Best regards,

Advanced Blockchain Team