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It has now become quite apparent — especially after the latest FOMC meeting that took place just yesterday — that 2022 will be dominated by a slew of periodic rate hikes starting from March of this year. This hawkish pivot towards a tightened monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve has inevitably spooked both the stock market as well as the crypto market, leading to sell-offs in both. On the crypto front, BTC actually rose 4% in a span of 20 minutes on Wednesday evening (Asian time) to touch the $39.2k ceiling before diving all the way back down to the $36k region where it is currently trading at (as of the time of writing). In a similar vein, ETH is currently down 4% with all its recovery gains from the past 2 days completely wiped out. Most major mid- to large-cap altcoins are also now submerged in a sea of red, with a few of the L1 protocol tokens that were quick to recover from the weekend bloodbath leading the downside correction. Not all is doom and gloom though. On the on-chain front, there are some positive signs for the crypto market. For one, the stablecoin supply has expanded by $5.3 billion over the past month — a definitive sign that more capital is flowing into the crypto market as dollars are being minted into stablecoins. This growth in supply can largely be attributed to the aggressive mining and burning activities of USDC (which, incidentally, recently overtook USDT in terms of total supply on the Ethereum network), and will hopefully usher in better times for the crypto market than the extant situation.
Ethereum-based NFT game The Sandbox has embarked on an initiative, dubbed the Sandbox Metaverse Accelerator Program, to encourage the development of metaverse projects both within as well as outside of, the gaming world. For this, The Sandbox has committed a sizeable $50 million to invest in up to 100 startups that have the potential to build an open and interoperable metaverse. How this will play out remains to be seen, but these are definitely exciting times for the metaverse space indeed.