Blur Goes for Competitor's Jugular - Introduces Loyalty Program
Solana Physical Storefronts Fail to Gain Traction & Murdered “Cryptoqueen” or Perfect Cover?
Theo Delarosa
February 22, 2023
🗓 Daily Bullets - Wednesday, February 22nd
Today’s newsletter is 1,368 words. A cool 7 minute read.
Crypto is struggling - The zone that Bitcoin is having difficulty moving past is $25k and ETH $1700. The rest of the market will generally follow what these two do, and today the market is red. Meanwhile, Blur’s token price has also fallen below $1 and most of the recent popular narratives such as LSDs and AI continue slipping. Hold fast, everyone.
Today we’re looking at:
- 💢 Blur Goes for Competitor's Jugular - Introduces Loyalty Program
- 🛍 Solana Physical Storefronts Fail to Gain Traction
- ☠️ Murdered “Cryptoqueen” or Perfect Cover?
💢 Blur Goes for Competitor’s Jugular - Introduces Loyalty Program
Quick Take: NFT marketplace Blur is running with its momentum and offering 300M+ BLUR to the community in Season 2. How do you maximize your rewards this time? Via listings and “loyalty” - essentially scorch earthing your listings on other platforms (namely OpenSea). Blur wants the top spot.
Key Details for Maximizing Eligibility:
- List your NFTs through Blur
- To receive a 100% loyalty score, you can’t have listings anywhere else
- New feature - loyalty button to remove your third party listings in a single transaction
- Listing rewards will be as large as bidding rewards. Max listing points = listings x loyalty
- Warns against gaming the system: unrealistic listings, sybilling, etc
Analysis of Strategy: Incentivizing users is one of the most important aspects for a protocol. Without users, you’re dead in the water. Many platforms have taken to incentivizing users via airdrops and rewards. Blur is taking things a step further by openly requiring people to not use competitors such as OpenSea if they want to maximize their reward. Bold and aggressive!
The idea is to reward those who contribute to the protocol’s success, and loyalty is one of the best ways to do that, however this is also a clear attack on a rival. A tactic we have seen many times before with vampire attacks (Such as Sushiswap against Uniswap). All’s fair in love, war and crypto.
Food for thought, is Blur primarily just appealing to 500 wallets? Is it long term healthy to burn bridges with creators to appease whales?
53% of Blur's volume comes from just 500 wallets
(research by Archmage @jphackworth42 🧙✨)
The marketplaces are killing their profits, long-term relationships with creators and future growth prospects to compete for ~500 pro traders
— Kofi (@0xKofi)
Feb 21, 2023
Original Announcement: here
🛍 Solana Physical Storefronts Fail to Gain Traction
Quick Take: Solana Spaces, a set of retail venues that aimed to educate people about the Solana blockchain and web3, will close its New York City and Miami locations by the end of February.
Key Details:
- The closure follows a pivot towards NFTs and a rebranding to DRiP, a boutique NFT distribution platform created by CEO Vibhu Norby
- Norby's "retail-as-a-service" model sustained Solana Spaces, which functioned as an interactive billboard for crypto brands like FTX, Phantom, and Orca
- The six-month experiment attracted 60,000 visitors and performed 6,000 onboarding tutorials
- Closure due to behind-the-scenes administrative operations being too burdensome and the potential for growth too small
Significance: For crypto to go mainstream (a unique way to pronounce for all of us to make a lot of money), there needs to be a lot of users entering the space and we have repeatedly seen IRL crypto products, services and stores fail to gain traction. There have been restaurants, stores and even experiences which have not been able to gain more than a niche following.
What's next? - All is not over for Solana, they are soon to introduce their Solana smartphone - Saga. We’ve seen brick and mortar stores failing for years now, so it should be no surprise a physical store wasn’t able to gain traction. The question is whether a crypto mobile-centric focus will be enough to entice users.
Go Deeper: 1st,
☠️ Murdered “Cryptoqueen” or Perfect Cover?
The gist: Bulgarian news outlet Bird reported that Ruja Ignatova, the "Cryptoqueen" and head of the OneCoin scam, was killed in 2018, citing police documents allegedly found in the possession of a murdered Bulgarian police official. OneCoin was a Ponzi scheme that ran from 2014 to 2016, and Ignatova disappeared after allegedly scamming investors out of as much as $5B in 2017.
Key Details:
- Ignatova was reportedly killed on the orders of a drug lord aboard his yacht, and her body was dismembered and dumped in the Ionian Sea
- Ignatova's former boyfriend, Gilbert Armenta, was recently sentenced to 5 years for his role in the OneCoin scam
- Ignatova's complete disappearance led investigators to believe she may have changed her appearance, but this report of Ignatova’s death could explain why the $100,000 reward by the FBI remains unclaimed
- If Ignatova is still alive, she faces several charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison
Significance: This highlights the dark underbelly of not just crypto but crime and finance. When lots of money is at stake, people are willing to do serious things - namely steal and kill. Also, what if this is just a ruse to cover even more tracks? What better cover to disappear than to fake your death?
For the time being, uncertainty lingers and investors are no closer to seeing reimbursement.
Go Deeper: here
✅ Daily Bullets
- The Shanghai upgrade will activate on the ETH testnet Sepolia network on Feb. 28
- Tencent Cloud full entry into WEB3 with cooperation from Ankr, Avalanche, Scroll, and Sui
- Google Cloud will serve as a validator on the proof-of-stake blockchain Tezos
- Mastercard to allow USDC crypto payments via payment protocol Immersve
- Immutable cut 11% of its staff — the second round of layoffs since the end of July
- Yearn Finance - Introducing yETH, an LSD of LSDs
- Outlier Ventures launching an in-person accelerator program sponsored by the Aptos Foundation
- A16z backed Bitski launches digital currency wallet
- Ubisoft launches Rabbids NFT avatars for metaverse game The Sandbox via Polygon
- Uniswap NFT traders can now use any token on the Ethereum blockchain to purchase NFTs
- TON governance votes to freeze 20% of TON supply
- Stock exchange IEX in talks with Coinbase to create a federally approved digital asset marketplace
- Binance partnered with Ingenico, a global payment solutions provider, to enable users to pay in crypto through Binance Pay
- A euro-backed stablecoin, EUROC set to trade on Coinbase
- Cosmos Interchain Foundation allocates $40M to develop its core infrastructure and applications in 2023
📊 Market Dashboard
- 📈 Gainers:
- RIF: Payments, Storage and Domains
- STX: Layer 1 for Bitcoin
- ACH: Payment Solutions Provider
- 📉 Losers:
- BNX: GameFi
- MAGIC: Gaming Ecosystem
- CFX: Chinese L1 Blockchain
Chart of the Day - Arbitrum vs Ethereum.
- Layer 2 Arbitrum surpasses Ethereum in daily transactions, jumping from 159,919 in daily transactions on Jan. 1 to over 1,103,398, representing a roughly 590% increase in less than two months. Talk about Arbitrum season
📚 Research/Reads
- Sophisticated token distribution design that offered phased rewards to sequence network growth | What Crypto Founders Can Learn from Blur’s Token Airdrop - source
- QCP Capital Newsletter | The Crypto Circular #10: Wile E Coyote - source
- A new era for decentralized perpetual protocols | dYdX - source
- Interpretation | Hong Kong government's 20 key points on cryptocurrency compliance documents - source
🎁 Bonus - Upcoming Notable Airdrops
Tired of being a missooor? Stay ahead of the curve and optimize your shot at upcoming airdrops with this guide. Protocols covered include: Magically.gg, Collab.Land, Suiswap, GonnaMakeIt, SupraOracles, AlienSwap,
Stop Scrolling❗️
You missed $BLUR
You missed $APTOS
You missed $OP
You missed $CANTOIf you aren't aware of the upcoming notable airdrops and ways to maximize the rewards, I gotchu 🥹♥️
Here's a comprehensive guide to the upcoming airdrops that you don't want to miss 👇🏼
— Elena🌸 (@ElenaaETH)
Feb 20, 2023
🎁 🎁Bonus Bonus
Blur's anonymous founder self doxxes. Pretty wild how successful projects can become with anonymous founders.
Web2 me vs Web3 me
A thread 🧵
— Pacman | Blur.io (@PacmanBlur)
Feb 22, 2023