Q9 Weekly | World in Motion… ⚽🏆

Q9 Capital

6 min readOct 28, 2022

28 October 2022

Q9 Capital: www.q9capital.com

World in Motion… ⚽🏆

· Crypto markets rally, largest short-liquidation event in 15 months

· BUSD gaining stablecoin market share

· Fan tokens and football NFTs surge ahead of World Cup

Crypto markets rallied on Tuesday as the dollar weakened and rate hike expectations eased.

While four days does not make a trend, the short-term price breakout is positive. Markets have become more confident the Fed will only increase rates by 50bps in the December meeting, rather than persisting with 75bps. BlackRock analysts are telling financial advisers to expect “pivot language” from the Fed next week. As Q9 has argued for a while, inflation isn’t going away and will be a slow grind down — interest rate cuts are not coming soon — but the pace of hikes may now slow.

Ethereum (ETH) jumped 18% to $1.5k to lead the surge among major cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin rose +6.5% to $20,285, the first time it has traded above $20k since the first week of October. Dogecoin surged (+30%) as Elon Musk’s $44bn Twitter deal nears completion. Crypto stocks were also buoyed, as Coinbase shares climbed over 9% over the week.

Bitcoin’s market share of trade volume has hit its highest level in over two years. The share of BTC volume versus volume for altcoins aggregated across 14 centralised exchanges climbed past 50% for the first time since 2020.

Bitcoin vs Altcoins Trade Volume (USD)

The large price rally this week led to the most short liquidations in 15-months, with over $700mn liquidated. Bitcoin accounted for $328mn of the $686mn in short liquidations yesterday — roughly 47%. Traders going long on crypto also took a hit, with $99mn in long liquidations — bringing the combined total, both long and short, to around $786mn.

Short Liquidations

Source: The Block

However, many big tech companies have come under pressure as earnings season kicks off again. Meta (Facebook) lost nearly a quarter (-24%) of its value falling to a new multi-year low. Nearly $85bn was wiped off its value and it has fallen out of the Top 20 most valuable US stocks. Amazon fell -15% as it missed analyst expectations. Alphabet also missed on earnings as YouTube shrunk.

Crypto’s Levine a Legacy

Financial commentator, Matt Levine, wrote an entire cover-to-cover magazine for Bloomberg Businessweek explaining crypto — something a single author has done only one other time in the magazine’s 93-year history (“What Is Code?,” by Paul Ford). For crypto enthusiasts of all levels it is worth a (long) read.

You can read the entire magazine online here.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

BUSDy Little Bees

Binance’s successful push to promote its BUSD stablecoin is eating into the dominance of market leader Tether, with trades against BUSD climbing to a third of all volume on Binance. BUSD is the main stablecoin on the BNB Chain, a set of two blockchains associated with Binance. It’s pegged to the price of the US dollar, unlike the chain’s native token BNB, which is free floating.

While trading in Tether (USDT) is still dominant across all exchanges, its share of trading has fallen to 58% while BUSD’s climbed to 24%.

Three NFTs on the Shirt

Fan tokens of national soccer teams are rallying as the FIFA World Cup nears. The global sporting spectacle to be held in Qatar is now less than a month away.

Source: Socios

In the past seven days, fan tokens of the Peruvian national football team (FPFT), Spain’s national team (SNFT) and Brazil’s national team (BFT) have rallied 29%, 17% and 12%, respectively. Fan tokens of Turkish and Argentinian teams have risen by 10% and 9%.

While the tokens don’t represent actual ownership of national teams, they provide holders access to several fan-specific perks such as merchandising, to participate in exclusive meet-and-greet events and earn loyalty rewards.

For instance, holders of the Peruvian Token can interact with the team’s players on the Bitci FanToken Platform, receive fan rewards and digital collectibles, access locker rooms and watch the match from VIP areas.

These fan tokens are issued on blockchain-based fan rewards platforms such as Socios and Bitci.

Top Fan Tokens by Market Cap

Source: CoinGecko

However, the cryptosphere is also currently awash with many unlicenced World Cup tokens with zero affiliation with the competition or the teams. That hasn’t stopped bettors from making big gains. A token called World Cup Inu surged some 500% in the past week alone, with others like CHAMPS and world cup token gaining at least 200%. Investors should exercise caution with these type of betting assets.

The FIFA+ Collect Official NFT platform also went live on Sept 22nd with its Genesis Drop, a collection of 532,980 packs containing historical highlights from past FIFA events. The packs are priced at $4.99 apiece and each contains three randomly selected highlights, or what the platform calls ‘moments’.

Source: FIFA+Collect

Source: FIFA+Collect

The NFTs give footy fans a way to own and trade some of the most memorable “moments in time” from the history of the World Cup, featuring some of the greatest goals, saves and celebrations in previous tournaments. Moments like Diego Maradona’s “hand of God”, Zinedine Zidane’s double against Brazil in the 1998 final, and Paul Gascoigne’s tears during England’s semi-final defeat at Italia ’90 are now all immortalized as NFTs.

Pele hoisted on shoulders of his teammates after Brazil beat Italy in the 1970 World Cup final

The fan token market is likely to become more active than ever in the coming weeks.

More than half the world’s population watched the 2018 FIFA World Cup and numbers are expected to be similar this timer round — plus this is the first major sports competition post-Covid… and one which will integrate many Web3 initiatives.

Just like traditional sports memorabilia and stickers, these fan tokens and NFTs provide an accessible opportunity for fans around the world to engage with their favourite players, moments and more on new platforms.

There’s a lot of promise in the recent convergence of football and blockchain technology. No matter if they have utility or not, football NFTs are an exciting new kind of digital collectible that could emerge as the next-generation of “trading cards” or “football stickers” that have always proven immensely popular. What’s for certain is that blockchain technology and football will be meeting in Qatar to put the World in Motion.