About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Sudoswap, Helium, Foundation, Element, and the Solana NFT ecosystem.

• Sudoswap is a decentralized, on-chain NFT exchange that uses an AMM model. Multiple liquidity pools for a collection can be set up, each with pricing determined by a bonding curve. This enables instant liquidity, tight spreads, and cheap pricing. Sudoswap should improve the market microstructure for the space, reducing information asymmetries and increasing capital efficiency. In its first 6 weeks, Sudoswap has seen $20m of organic volume, prior to integration by aggregators like Gem and Genie.

• Over 10k NFTs trade daily on Sudoswap across 14k liquidity pools. This has generated >50 ETH of fees for the protocol and >300 ETH for trade pool owners, representing a potentially more sustainable business model for creators to replace royalty streams, with improved trading market efficiencies.

• Sudoswap has achieved >10% market share vs OpenSea over the last three days. This traction is unincentivized and impressive for a project which launched 6 weeks ago. Projects are also using Sudoswap to manage their own liquidity (e.g. Based Ghouls) and as a launchpad (e.g. Sudonauts).

• The Helium Blockchain incentivizes the creation of public, decentralized wireless networks. Since their 2019 launch, Helium has become the largest IoT network in the U.S. (and the fastest growing IoT network worldwide). To date, nearly 930k hotspots are live with coverage in 182 countries. Notably, the rate of new hotspots joining the network peaked in November 2021, and has fallen consistently since April 2022.

• To date, two critical Helium Improvement Proposals (HIP) have been enacted: the first, HIP19 (approved in Jan 2021), allows 3rd-party manufacturers to produce and sell network hardware. Since HIP19 was enacted, the number of hotspots deployed has grown ~63x (CAGR of ~1,200%).

• Despite the growth of Helium's IoT network, it has lacked critical wireless infrastructure, such as 5G, Cellular, and Wi-Fi. A second crucial proposal, HIP51, was approved in June 2022, enabling any network infrastructure to join the protocol. 5G support is now live in the U.S. with ~2,600 hotspots.

• Foundation is a creator-first NFT platform featuring an entirely on-chain NFT marketplace. Our NFT sales volume remains stable despite the market downturn, with over 6k NFTs sold in July alone. Additionally we have achieved nearly 70k ETH in volume after launching in February 2021, and have exciting plans in the near future to grow our community of nearly 85k+ users who have either minted or bid on an NFT.

• Foundation continues to be a strong home for creators despite the market downturn, with nearly 3k unique creators selling NFTs on the platform every month. Top-earning creators like Shizuka Aizawa (anime), Mcbess (animation), and OSF (glitch) have all had >25 ETH in sales over the last 30 days.

• Foundation’s protocol continues to facilitate the most on-chain transactions of any marketplace, representing over 90% of on-chain activity. This speaks to the platform's commitment to giving creators the greatest amount of ownership of their work by creating an entirely on-chain ecosystem.