GM you H0Rs! The downside of writing full-time about the Internet: we need semi-regular brain worm detoxes in order to keep y’all’s appetite for constant hot take consumption satiated the rest of the year. The upside: I get to go on paid leave from time to time to touch grass and return with a brand new outlook on life.
(Until, of course, I turn off Airplane Mode.)
Chad & El Prof
Markets
BITCOIN ETHEREUM BNB SOLANA TERRA(Price changes reflect past 7 days as of 4.19.22 @ 4:20 PM EST.)
- U.S. government sentiment toward crypto seems less hostile of late — even the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently relaxed her rhetoric on the technology, calling it ‘transformative‘ and encouraging innovation.
- The cultural sentiment, meanwhile, increases in hostility and volume at an inverse rate. Fortunately for hodlers, government speeches hold more sway over the markets than viral videos… for the time being, anyway.
Editor’s Note: We’re trying out variable formats for our letter to keep the content as valuable and digestible as possible. Our longform content (read: incoherent rambling) will still be available, packaged on Thursday into Effort Posts. Today, however, here’s Culture H0R Lite.
Not pictured: art
It seems like a lot happens on web3 when you have to think of something clever to say about it biweekly. But, as it turns out, when you miss two weeks, you realize nothing much happens at all. Some laws got passed. Some scams got launched. Some hundreds of millions got stolen. And some Twitter philosophy bro really thought he was spitting when he used ‘permissionless’ and ‘secure’ in the same sentence.
- Coinbase is producing the Bored Ape Yacht Club Extended Cinematic Universe. The first film will debut at NFT.NYC in June, followed by two more in a planned trilogy. Considering it’s currently casting — which apparently just means DMing Twitter accounts with octagonal profile pictures — it’s given itself a strong two months in turnaround time to compete with the other BAYC-adjacent series (linked above) for the title of ‘one of the NFT video properties of all time’.
- OpenSea dropped a beta version allowing NFTs minted on Solana to trade on the platform. As both Solana maxis and multi-chain future evangelists, it’s a good get for us — we buy the case for Solana as the least inefficient NFT blockchain. As believers of an unbundled future and/or anti-trust enthusiasts, it’s somewhat less encouraging — RIP SolSea, soon to be gone and forgotten.
This just in, again
- The launch of ETH2.0 was pushed back again, for the third time in the seven or so months we’ve been writing this newsletter. Adding insult, its post-merge staking rewards are also now being reported to be far lower than anticipated. There’s an old saying on web3. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me – but at least you didn’t phish me for my life’s savings, so go ahead and fool me again.
- The EU voted to pass a draft of policy criminalizing anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, and requiring any user of the technology to disclose their identity to the government. It’s basically the classic anarcho capitalist straw man made into a real boy, so crypto firms are naturally flush with alarm and vindication. Meanwhile, Andre Croje — the guy who rugpulled 20+ tokens and walked away with a cool $1B in hand — is bullish on it, which is how you know it’s legit.
Bubble goes pop
- Luckily, stateside, crypto insider trading is still legal. An anonymous ETH wallet purchased $400K worth of tokens on Coinbase’s asset shortlist a full 24 hours before it went public. When Coinbase announces the new tokens to be listed on its platform, they tend to spike significantly in short term. And, indeed, the value of the wallet’s portfolio has already increased by 42%. Assuming the owner is a Coinbase employee — and didn’t just stumble ass backwards into a statistical impossibility — it’s further evidence that shady trading is not only allowed on web3, but encouraged.
- In perhaps the largest theft in DeFi history, hackers stole $625M from Axie Infinity. When ‘North Korea’s knock-off Pokémon heist‘ is a hard news headline, not the synopsis of an Archer episode, you know the simulation’s shot to shit.
- In a whopping 10,000% decrease in value, the NFT of the first-ever tweet — purchased by crypto exec Sina Estavi from Jack Dorsey last year for $2.9M — got a high bid of 0.09eth, or about $280, at the time of writing. This is how web3 ends: not with a bang, but a pop.
STRAY LINKS
- If the brain worm reference above r/whooshed over your head, here’s a primer on the pandemic we, the extremely online, really need to worry about
- Jordan Belfort’s into crypto now, which seems as good a time as any for the rest of us to get out.
