🚀 Sony Are Merging Web2 & Web3 Together

Sunday is here.

Welcome back to another newsletter from us at The Merge.

• 💫 Sony announces ‘Soneium’ with aims to join Web2 & Web3

• 🪄 Paypal is set to launch a new stablecoins rewards program

• 🌎 Backed Finance breaking into LATAM with tokenised RWAs

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Global Market Overview

Real World Assets on-chain (excl stablecoins) are worth $11.59b (↑3.8% MoM &↑60% YTD).

There are 61,860 Total Asset Holders (↓0.98% from last month).

• $170.2b is in Stablecoins

• $8.87b is within Private Credit

• $1.98b is in US Treasury Debt

• $953.3m is in tokenised Commodities

• $22.08m is in Global Bonds

• $5.33m is in tokenised Stocks

The top 3 networks are 🥇Ethereum ($93b in Total Value Locked) 🥈Tron ($62.6b in TVL) & 🥉Binance Smart Chain ($4.9b in TVL).

Fancy taking a look for yourself? Check it out here.

So, what’s being tokenised this week?

Stablecoins

Currently, the market cap of stablecoins is $170.25b (↑105% from last month 🔥).

As of today, it makes up 0.81% of all M2 Money Supply (↑105% from last month) with Monthly Transfer Volume totalling $1.66 trillion (↑3.7% from last month).

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Tether ($111.9b)🥈Circle ($30.6) &🥉Maker DAO ($5.03b).

Top stories this week?

🌐 PayPal has partnered up alongside Anchorage Digital (digital asset platform and infrastructure provider) on a stablecoin rewards program. One that is first of its kind and available to clients who have custody with Paypal’s USD stablecoin ($PYUSD) or with its institutional self-custody wallet, Porto.

The program aims to “help increase institutional adoption of stablecoins and bridge the gap between tradfi and the digital asset ecosystem” says Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage.

💫 Sony announces ‘Soneium’ - a public Ethereum layer 2 blockchain with aims to join Web2 & Web3, able to stand as a general purpose, versatile blockchain to serve across multiple verticals and users across the world.

Launched by none other than Sota Watanabe, Director of Sony Block Solutions Labs and CEO of Startale HQ (builders of Astar Network) - this seems to be a pivotal step forward for the industry and especially Japan as a leader in the space.

US Treasuries

Currently, the Total Value of Tokenised Treasuries is $2b 🚀 (↑1.18% from last week).

The Average Yield to Maturity is 4.94% with 0.112 years in Weighted Average Maturity. There is a total of 5,061 Holders (↓0.75% from last week).

The top 3 current entities are 🥇 Ondo ($529.96m)🥈 Securitize ($507.33m) & 🥉 Franklin Templeton Benji Investments ($425.46m)

Top stories this week?

🚀 According to Block.io, asset manager Franklin Templeton is expanding its onchain money market fund to Avalanche.

The $FOBXX fund invests in low-risk U.S. government securities, including fixed, floating and variable-rate securities in addition to repurchase agreements collateralized fully by the U.S. government.

The $BENJI token which is currently available on Stellar and Polygon is used to purchase shares in the $FOBXX and is increasing its accessibility to more investors on-chain, for the first-of-its-kind tokenised money market fund currently worth around $420 million.

Private Credit

Currently, there is $8.87b in active value loans & $14.22b total loan value across all protocols.

As of today, the top 3 current protocols with outstanding loans are🥇Figure ($8.1b) 🥈Centrifuge ($279m) & 🥉Maple Finance ($231m).

Top stories this week?

🌊 Clearpool has launched Ozean, a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 built on Optimism, designed to enable RWA on-chain yield so that it can be more accessible and compliant, offering essential infrastructure for institutional markets.

Ozean addresses some key DeFi issues such as real-world capture, lack of composability and poor user experience. Clearpool ($CPOOL) stakers will benefit from earning rewards and yield staked $USDX treasuries ($USDX will be issued by Hex Trust and is Ozeans native gas token.)

If you’re interested in understanding more you can find out some more here.

Commodities

Currently, the market cap of commodities is $953.36m (↑4.16% from last month).

As of today, the Monthly Transfer Volume totals $156.12m (↑17.18% from last month) with 56.26k addresses that are current holders.

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Paxos ($468.2m)🥈Tether ($466.93m) &🥉Aurus ($16.70m).

Bonds

Currently, the total value of bonds is $22.08m (↑0.15% from last week).

As of today, the Average Yield to Maturity is 3.95% with 0.076 years in Weighted Average Maturity. There is a total of 18 Holders (↓5.56% from last week).

The top 2 current entities are 🥇Backed Finance ($20.74m)🥈OpenTrade ($1.35m).

Stocks

Currently, the total value of stocks is $5.33m (↓9.44% from last month).

As of today, the Monthly Transfer Volume totals $1.14m (↑39.63% from last month) with 108 Active Addresses and 727 Current Holders.

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Coinbase Global ($2.58m)🥈Nvidia Corp ($1.27m) &🥉 iShares Core S&P 500 ($1.08m).

Top stories this week?

🌎 Backed Finance has teamed up with eNOR Securities, an El-Salvador-based exchange to launch a variety of RWAs serving the Latin American Region.

It will include the likes of tokenised Coinbase stock, shares in BlackRock’s S&P 500 ETF and corporate/government bonds.

The partnership marks the first time Backed’s tokenised securities are listed on a licensed investment exchange serving both retail and institutions.

Weekly Resource List

🔐 Coinbase Wallet: Easy-to-use crypto wallet

You’ve more than likely heard and probably used Coinbase, so no introduction is needed. This is by far one of the easiest and non-crypto native wallets to be picked up and used by anyone. They even have a ‘Simple Mode’ for beginners. (link) 

🌐 RWA.xyz: On-Chain Analytics

Explore tokenised real-world assets and the investors, issuers and service providers participating in public blockchains. View protocol statistics, industry aggregate metrics, and the issuers all in one place (link)

🔎 Santiment: Crypto Intelligence Tool

A behaviour analytics platform for crypto, sourcing on-chain, social and development information on thousands of coins, including market signals. For RWA’s insights check out this (link) 

🦇 Arkham Insights: Smart Money Insights

An investment tool if you want to understand where ‘Smart Money’ (aka the market makers) are placing their bets (link) 

🦎 CoinGecko: Crypto Data and Analysis Platform

Keep up to date with prices, trading volumes, and crucial crypto data (link)

That’s it!

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,

Merge 👾