August Layer 1 Landscape Recap

Crypto markets have been sensitive to macroeconomic factors in recent years, expanding rapidly alongside traditional financial markets in 2020 and 2021 during a period of unprecedented quantitative easing enacted by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Subsequent quantitative tightening policies have had a noticeable impact on crypto as well, with a series of high-profile institutional collapses in 2022 paving a path to the especially aggressive crypto regulatory environment that has persisted throughout 2023 thus far. 

As we head into the final chapter of Q3 - and the end of summer - crypto markets remain closely attuned to the effects of both regulatory and monetary policy decisions. Recently, for example, a major court win by Grayscale Investments in its case against the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) led to significant price rallies across crypto assets in late August. In today’s recap of the Layer 1 (L1) network landscape in August, we will take a closer look at the continued impact of uncertain market conditions on L1 networks and their decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems.