Daily Bullets đź’Š: Rick and Morty Creator/Paradigm Backed Art Gobblers NFT Experiment Surges
đź’Š Daily Bullets đź’Š Tuesday, November 1st
Momentum on the recent bullish push upwards has stalled with Bitcoin trying to defend $20k and ETH ~ $1500. Expect volatility for tomorrow’s FOMC at 2PM EST - we usually see whipsaw price action. Meanwhile, Art Gobblers saw a surge with 15,000 in ETH volume within the first day trading (Catalyst/Reason: Ricky and Morty creator and Paradigm backed). Several people have voiced displeasure at insiders receiving whitelist spots as well as the ponzinomics behind GOO (see research section for tokenomics). Blur Marketplace, which is also backed by Paradigm, receiving a lot of attention and a good chunk of that Gobblers volume with their trader friendly zero fee approach.
⛓ Crypto News:
- Galaxy Digital, the crypto-focused financial services firm run by Michael Novogratz, plans to cut at least 20% of its global workforce
- Layer 2 solution Boba Network integrates with BNB Chain. SushiSwap will launch on the BNB Chain version of Boba Network as a launch partner
- Nissan has filed 5 trademark applications for some of its most iconic car models like GTR, SKYLINE, and Z, claiming plans for NFTs + NFT-backed media, Online NFT marketplaces + Digital wallets, NFT minting, trading, storing software
- In Oct. 2022 - 44 exploits (53 protocols affected) stole ~$760.2M with ~$100M already returned the exploited protocols (Total loss: $657.2M)
- Payments firm MoneyGram has added a service to its mobile app allowing nearly all U.S. customers to buy, sell and hold bitcoin, ether and litecoin and expects to grow those their selections over the coming year
- Startup Stasis completed an integration with XRP Ledger in an effort to expand the settlement layers it uses to facilitate cross-border payments with its euro-backed stablecoin, EURS
- At a time when many bitcoin miners are struggling with liquidity, CleanSpark has bought an additional batch of 3,843 Antminer S19J Pro machines at a total of $5.9M
- Crypto fund manager Bitwise has introduced active trading strategies, designed to capitalize on market inefficiencies across the crypto market to cater to institutional clients
👨‍⚖️ Economic/Government/Regulatory:
- Crypto exchange Coinbase has filed documentation asking permission to help Ripple Labs in its ongoing legal battle with the SEC
- The Justice Department is returning to a probe into potential bank fraud at stablecoin operator Tether - The probe focuses on Tether’s controversial banking relationships, which have drawn scrutiny from U.S. regulators in the past
đź’¸ Exchange News:
- Huobi denies it has plans to conduct “large-scale layoffs” and has refuted reports that two of its top executives have resigned amid a takeover
- FTX will list Mask Network (MASK) spot and perpetual futures
- FTX completed its 171st FTT buy and burn - 109,737 FTT this week, worth approximately US$2,870,000 of FTT
- Crypto exchange operator Binance set up a seventh unit in Ireland as it continues to expand its roots in Europe
🏦 DeFi News:
- MakerDAO co-founder Nikolai Mushegian dies at 29 in Puerto Rico
- Gearbox V2 is live - has seen a sudden spike in TVL
- 3 of the 4 people behind now-defunct DeFi bonds tool Porter Finance have relaunched the project and rebranded as Arbor Finance, months after Porter was shut due to a lack of demand from borrowers
- Credix Finance, a decentralized credit marketplace, unveiled a $150M stablecoin credit pool to Clave, a digital lending platform, to originate loans to businesses and consumers in Latin America
- DeFi yield platform PieDAO has filed a proposal to its community for a phased buyback of its tokens, after ending the protocol’s liquidity mining program in October
đź–Ľ NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:
- Art Gobblers, an NFT project co-created by Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland and backed by Paradigm, sees over 15,000 ETH in volume on its first day. The project attempts to make a self-sufficient art creation ecosystem, or a decentralized art factory
- GameStop’s NFT marketplace officially live. Built using the Immutable X Layer 2 scaling protocol, the platform will offer digital assets from major web3 games
- Stepn developer Find Satoshi Lab is going against the creator royalty trend set by other NFT marketplaces with its own multi-chain offering called Mooar - with a zero-fee, compulsory royalty structure. Payments to artists will default to 2%, or within a 0.5% to 10% range, depending on what the creator chooses to set. No service fees but adopts a membership model, which costs $29.99 per month
- National Basketball League megastar Steph Curry to introduce his own version of the Metaverse to the NBA’s 650 million fans - filing a “Curryverse” trademark application on Oct. 26
- Atari is introducing the Atari X initiative, uniting all of its blockchain interests under one operation that will be funded and managed by the top-class economy. Atari.X launched their first NFT collection, and those who hold these assets can look forward to virtual and physical utilities
- The Open Metaverse Alliance officially launched and opened membership to Web3 builders and sponsors. The association, which includes members like Dapper Labs and Yuga Labs, is pushing for an interoperable, blockchain-powered metaverse
- Opensea launching a new copymint detection system today that can identify exact matches, flips, and fuzzy copies within seconds of a mint
- Zora has launched Nouns Builder, a no-code tool for creating a Web3 organization powered and funded through NFT auctions
đź’° Fundraises:
- Reap, a Hong Kong based digital payment company has announced the closure of the $40M investment round led by Acorn Pacific Ventures with Arcadia Funds, HashKey Capital, Payment Asia, Hustle Fund, and Fresco Capital have also participating
- Lingfeng Innovation Fund (LIF), a new venture capital fund led by former Binance Labs executive Nicole Zhang, landed $20M to invest in crypto startups. The vehicle is a sister fund to Lingfeng Capital, the Beijing-based fintech investment firm with over $400M in AUM
- RealFevr raised €10M to build the Ultimate GameFi Sports Ecosystem
- State-chartered digital asset bank Custodia, formerly known as Avanti, raised $7M. Custodia is designed to provide real-time settlement finality for U.S.-dollar payments in digital asset transactions
- Zebra Labs raises $5M to help Chinese celebrities enter the metaverse. Funds raised from the Chinese gaming firm NetDragon and the Japanese conglomerate Sumitom
- NiftyApes, a firm that lets users take out loans on any NFT collection, has raised $4.2M in seed funding led by Variant and FinTech Collective. Additional participants include Robot Ventures, Polygon, Coinbase Ventures, The LAO, FlamingoDAO, Ryan Sean Adams
- Cryptosat raised $3M in seed funding as part of a bid to bridge the worlds of crypto and space technology. The round was led by Cryptosat's founders, joined by FileCoin and IPFS developer Protocol Labs
- Scrimmage raised $600,000 pre-seed round to support cryptocurrency-based gamified rewards betting system led by Miami Marlins co-owner Roger Ehrenberg through his Eberg Capital and IA Ventures funds
- Laser Digital, the crypto subsidiary of Japanese banking giant Nomura, has joined the roster of investors in Orderly Network, a DeFi infrastructure protocol built on the Near blockchain. The capital injection is additional to the $20M seed round raised in June from several backers, including Sequoia China, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly and Jump Crypto
👶 Early Stage Projects:
- Y2K Finance - IFO is live
- Introducing Eclipse - 1) The first Solana Sealevel VM rollup, 2) An IBC-enabled rollup on Celestia, 3) A Rollup-as-a-Service with a customizable base layer
- Introducing - JitoSOL, Solana’s 1st MEV-powered liquid staking derivative. JitoSOL Yield = Staking + MEV Rewards
- Inverse Finance - new whitepaper: FiRM. The Fixed Rate Money Market Protocol- will unlock new possibilities in DeFi, from fixed-rate loans for any duration to interest rate hedging and speculation and more
- AlphaVentureDAO partnering with Sei to deliver the most competitive DeFi incubation program, Alpha Incubate Batch 2 - will help accelerate Web 3.0 startups exploring the rapidly growing DeFi design space
đź“Š Data:
TL;DR: Smart money daily inflows remain light. Top inflow today is $7M into Maker with a large movement out of stables ($80M USDC+$10M USDT). Weekly inflows are also super light with weekly outflow showing large moves out of Compound derivatives ( cUSDC $50M, cDAI $44M, cETH $41M). Art Gobblers currently with over 15,000 ETH in its first day
- Nansen Smart Money Holdings Token Inflow and Outflows: Tracking what the whales are up to...
- Inflow (1D):
- Outflow (1D):
Weekly:
- Inflow (7D):
- Outflow (7D):
- Nansen NFT Hot Contracts:
- Art Gobblers volume appears low on Nansen and probably due to Blur Marketplace not being integrated on Nansen yet. Either way, volume dwarfs the rest. Dune and Blur show Gobblers currently with over 15,000 ETH in its first day
- Art Gobblers was a free mint that traded as high as 15 ETH, dropped down to 10ish ETH and has been ranging sideways since in the 12-14 range. The yellow cluster are smart money buys and they bought into the early pump mainly in the 12-15 range
- Blur Marketplace seeing a strong surge in volume - 8453 ETH mainly due to the Art Gobblers mint
🎓 Research/Reads:
- Art Gobblers - source
- Art Gobblers - GOO (Gradual Ownership Optimization) - source
- Blur Review: An NFT Flipper’s Paradise - source
- Glassnode - Hammering Out The Bottom - source
- Jump Crypto - Accelerating Multi-Scalar Multiplication in Hardware… and Software - source
- Multicoin - Value Flows in the MEV Ecosystem - source
- Solana Network Performance Report: October 2022 - source
- Since the Merge: How Are Things Changing? - source
- Early stage project database - source
🌍 Crypto Twitterverse:
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