Welcome back and thanks for joining us this week! ?? - That’s my reaction to this tweet from Arthur Hayes’ suggesting that GTX (new “venture” from 3AC guys, Davies and Zhu) has raised the $25 million.?I hope it’s not true, I won’t be surprised at all if it is, but he called them muppets so I kinda feel better… In (much) more important news this week, there is a debate raging as to what the Bitcoin blockchain should actually be used for, more specifically what is ok to put into a block and even more specifically should NFTs run on Bitcoin.?Let’s dig into this and the rest of the news:
- ??????Ok, the first thing you need to know before we get started is that the max block size on the Bitcoin network is 4MB - it was originally 1MB, but a Bitcoin upgrade/fork in 2017 called Segregated Witness or SegWit increased the limit.?The second thing you need to know is that another upgrade in 2021 called Taproot added simple smart contract functionality to Bitcoin.?So why is this important? Because with increased space and the ability to add simple code, Bitcoin can now run the classic video game DOOM for example!?But the debate isn’t about video games (yet) it’s about NFTs - as an NFT protocol called Ordinals is now running on Bitcoin.?While I don’t pretend to be a techie, the way it works by tracking single Satoshis (the smallest unit of a Bitcoin) and repurposing these as NFTs while actually storing the image on-chain sounds very cool.?But Bitcoin “Maxis” aren’t happy as they believe Bitcoin should only be used for financial transactions…
- ??????Phew – that was a long start, so how about some inspiring light reading (about Bitcoin mining lol):?Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has become the first national park in the world to run a Bitcoin mine in an effort to protect its forests and wildlife.?Honestly, you should read the whole MIT Technology Review article because it’s just incredible how the park was struggling before they started the mining operation which runs completely on hydro electric power from within the park.
- ??????No more Bitcoin news this week, so let’s switch gears to the next best thing, Ethereum (I hope that doesn’t start any debates…):?Though it doesn’t sound as cool as “The Merge”, the Shanghai upgrade is coming as I keep pointing out.?Here is a fantastic explainer from Decrypt.?And here’s something related and also fantastic – this thread on Liquid Staking from Blockworks research.
- ??????Now that you’re in the Ethereum news zone, here’s the rest in this block:?The European Investment Bank (EIB) is again leveraging Ethereum to tokenize capital markets, this time while issuing the first-ever digital pound sterling (GBP) bond.?Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, plans to launch a DeFi platform on Ethereum (Vitalik - are you thinking what I’m thinking?? ??).?And here’s a great thread on Ethereum scaling – def worth a read if you want to learn more about layer 2 (L2) solutions.
- ??????We mentioned banks so I’ll stick this in here: 105 year old German bank DekaBank is preparing to offer crypto services to institutional clients.
- ??????Looks like we might have a battle royale brewing between Amazon and eBay as both are hiring for web3 and NFT initiatives.?EBay is hiring specialists for its NFT marketplace KnownOrigin and Amazon is looking to expand its "Web3 Go-To-Market (GTM) team that is responsible for growing adoption of Web3 workloads on AWS."?FYI – a quarter of all Ethereum nodes run on AWS.
- ??????In very related news, eBay has partnered with Interactive/virtual events platform Notable Live to leverage NFTs for fan experiences with their favorite sports players, leagues and teams, among other initiatives.?Ebay ventures led Notable’s series A.
- ??????We mentioned NFTs and web3 so I think you know what time it is… it’s this week’s NFT and metaverse news block!!!:?Samsung is preparing its own metaverse hardware in partnership with Google and Qualcomm.?Solana protocol Metaplex will enable NFT royalty enforcement for secondary sales.?Hermès “MetaBirkin” NFT lawsuit begins with a ruling that will not allow an expert to testify in support of the NFT creator. The English Premier League has linked up with digital trading card company Sorare to expand its NFT offerings. Jack Dorsey backed decentralized social network protocol Nostr officially went live via mobile app stores.?In case you don’t know, wash trading is a big problem in NFT markets - NFT wash trades account for 6.5% of daily sales volume on OpenSea.?And bad news for some NFT holders and creators on social NFT platform Rally as they are shutting down and warned users that they may no longer be able to access their assets - with very short notice.
- ??????While we’re talking bad news, let’s get you caught up on the FTX drama last week:?FTX set off alarm bells with Australia’s financial regulator, The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), several months before they “went down under” (I’m proud of that one). ?Alameda Research wants to recoup around $446 million it transferred to bankrupt lender Voyager Digital (good luck with that?!). ??U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan has granted the prosecution’s request to amend SBF’s bail condition and prohibit him from attempting to contact any former or current employees of Alameda Research or FTX. ?The Justice Department is probing Silvergate’s relationship with FTX?(State Street and BlackRock revealed after news of the probe that they have boosted their Silvergate Stake… you can jump to your own conclusions). ?And I will admit this news got me a bit excited – the FTX trial judge ruled that the names of the two unidentified people who co-signed SBF’s $250 million bail bond can be made public (I wonder how Kevin O’Leary took that news??).
- ??????And now some good news (here’s that crypto payments trend I keep highlighting):?Binance has launched a prepaid crypto card in Brazil in partnership with Mastercard.?The card will allow payments with 13 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether and Binance USD.?In unrelated Binance news, Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence is now a lobbyist in D.C. for Binance.US as they increase their lobbying efforts along with firms like Tether, Bakkt, a16z and Riot Platforms.
- ??????Let’s keep the happy train rolling (too cheesy??) and talk funding:?I know this is a small raise ($4.1 million), but I am mentioning it because it marks Pfizer's first time joining a DAO as their venture arm backed VitaDAO which funds research projects in the field of longevity science.?And this raise by Addressable isn’t huge either ($7.5 million) – but the implications are kinda crazy as this “digital fingerprinting startup” claims to be able to match anonymous crypto wallets with social media accounts, saying they have already matched 17 million crypto wallet holders with their Twitter accounts.?And here’s a small ($50,000) grant that may have a big impact as Aptos issued a grant to Lorenzo Alvisi, a Cornell University computer science professor. Giga Energy, a bitcoin mining infrastructure startup focused on utilizing wasted natural gas as a power source, is raising $10 million in Series A.?And here’s an informative thread about the top projects VC’s invested in last year.
- ??????You want a big number for a change??dYdX users traded $466 billion in crypto derivatives during 2022.?Really impressive considering dYdX is a DEX and not open to US customers.
- ??????And in good news for Coinbase, and I think for the industry as a whole (this may turn out to be VERY significant):?U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer has rejected claims in a proposed class action by customers who claim Coinbase sold them unregistered securities and also failed to register as a broker-dealer.?In other Coinbase news, Joe Lallouz and Aaron Henshaw have left the firm.?They started blockchain infrastructure company Bison Trails which Coinbase acquired and rebranded to Coinbase Cloud.
- ??????This is a bad look for Gemini – they reportedly implied to customers that their assets in its interesting-bearing Earn product (they ones they sent to Genesis…) were safe because they were backed by FDIC.
- ??????I gotta fill you in on the Celsius drama (why couldn’t this guys mom pick a different name??): First, maybe this is good news for some of you as Celsius announced that it will start letting "eligible users" withdraw their funds. ?Celsius problems “dated back to at least 2020” according to an examiner’s report. ?Turns out they used Quickbooks to keep track of their finances.?And now they are considering issuing a new token to raise money to pay creditors (isn’t there a name for doing something like this ??)
- ??????I’m closing this week with some interesting, questionable, thought provoking, and MASSIVE numbers out of Ripple related to the trading of it’s XRP token.?I’m keeping my opinions to myself on this one (probably for the best and keeps legal happy!).?Ripple Labs has bought $8.4 billion XRP tokens in the secondary markets since the SEC charged them for selling an unregistered security in December of 2020 (this case will have a massive impact on the industry).?They have also sold around $11.1 billion worth of XRP since early 2021 directly to investors (they sold $226 million in Q4, 2022).?They claim they are doing this to support “healthy markets”.?Maybe they need a dictionary.??
That’s it folks!?As always - thank you for reading! Have a great rest of your Monday and an AWESOME week!!! ??
Editor in Chief @ TradeZero Crypto Newsletter
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