SudoSwap - A New Blur/OpenSea Challenger Approaches
NFT Creator Royalties Controversy Back in the Spotlight & Are Insiders Frontrunning Binance Listings? (Again)
Theo Delarosa
February 20, 2023
🗓 Daily Bullets - Monday, February 20th
Today’s newsletter is 1450 words. A cool 7 minute read.
Crypto is holding in there! After a shaky weekend, Bitcoin is still tackling the $25k zone whilst ETH tests out $1700. Blur airdrop holders are still waiting to see how high their drop will top out at and now we’ve also seen the launch of SUDO. NFT-Fi and Chinese coins seem to be getting their moment as well, meaning other narratives have taken the backseat.
Today we’re looking at:
- 🆕 SudoSwap! - A New Blur/OpenSea Challenger Approaches
- 👨🎨 NFT Creator Royalties Controversy Back in the Spotlight
- 🦹♂️ Are Insiders Frontrunning Binance Listings? (Again)
🆕 SudoSwap! - A New Blur/OpenSea Challenger Approaches
Backstory: Capitalizing on the recent Blur vs OpenSea momentum, NFT AMM Sudoswap went live with their own token. This new challenger offers their own approach - LP with your NFTs and volume farm with your illiquid jpegs.
Intro to Sudo:
1/ It’s time for a tiny Sunday threadooooor, pump my bags edition. $SUDO on the menu. New corn, gud tech. Nice airdrop. You likely already bought or hesitating. I don’t care, will just drop some underrated info in case you still hesitating to buy my bags.
— Zoomer Oracle 龙金福 (@ZoomerOracle)
Feb 19, 2023
Significance: Is the trend of creator royalties going to zero? Could SudoSwap pools offer a solution?
Smart NFT founders like @wabdoteth & @9gagceo understand that @blur_io and @opensea are gonna cut out royalties to zero over time.
Solution? Create your own pools, set your own fees (royalties), and let people trade on @sudoswap
$SUDO $XMON twitter.com/wabdoteth/stat…
— Taiki Maeda (@TaikiMaeda2)
Feb 19, 2023
This overall highlights the growing momentum behind NFT Finance, a subsector that allows unleashing locked liquidity within the NFT space. Why keep your assets illiquid when protocols are eager to unleash that liquidity for a variety of use cases. Pro trading tools, LP pools, etc. The innovations keep coming and this area promises much potential.
Go Deeper: 1st
👨🎨 NFT Creator Royalties Controversy Back in the Spotlight
Backstory: The ongoing battle between OpenSea and Blur is causing reverberations in the creator royalty debate once again. Blur airdropped its BLUR token to over 100,000 NFT traders and advised NFT project creators to block OpenSea trades, which has resulted in a rapidly rising user count for Blur and the opposite for OpenSea.
Key Details:
- OpenSea has temporarily eliminated its 2.5% fee on sales in response to rising competition
- OpenSea will only enforce a 0.5% mandatory creator royalty fee on NFT trades for projects that don’t have an on-chain enforcement method, but sellers can choose to pay more
- OpenSea's operator filter tool will no longer block marketplaces that take the same kind of approach that it just unveiled
Significance: Platforms are trying to figure out a path forward to find the right balance of incentives and motivations for all ecosystem participants—creators, collectors, and power buyers and sellers
The issue is that you can’t please everyone. When you make a move to appeal to traders, who want lower fees, then you start running into the issue of pissing off artists and creators who can make the decision to abandon listing on your platform. Lucrative will be the path that makes as many people happy as possible.
Perspective from Animoca Brands Chairman:
1/ As @opensea@blur_io battle for market share at the expenses of #creator#royalties the true losers in all of this are the creators and the ecosystem as a whole. I attach a reminder thread as to why fair #NFT creator #royalty is critical to maintain #opensea#NFTs#web3twitter.com/ysiu/status/15…
— Yat Siu (@ysiu)
Feb 18, 2023
🦹♂️ Are Insiders Frontrunning Binance Listings? (Again)
Quick Take: Insider trading and people profiting off announcements is nothing new in crypto. It happens constantly. Where do they get their info? Wallets associated with front-running token listings on Binance again recently profited by frontrunning the Gains Network (GNS) listing.
Key Details:
- Two traders made over $200k in profit from Gains Network's GNS token after Binance listing
- Blockchain investigator Lookonchain identified one wallet that accumulated $500k worth of GNS before Binance's announcement and sold over 11k GNS tokens for $125,975 after
- Lookonchain also identified another wallet that made over $100k in profit
Is anything being done? Binance claims to have a zero-tolerance policy for insider trading and has an internal security team monitoring possible employee trading activity - however the activity still routinely happens.
Significance: In the traditional finance world, this type of activity would be clearly labeled as insider trading and it’s illegal. Conducting trades with knowledge or information not available to the general public. Is that what’s actually happening or coincidence? We have very little visibility into what’s happening, how or why. Could the traders have another system in place? Or do we have more cases of rogue employees? For now all we can do is watch their footprints on-chain.
On-chain analysis:
CT is talking about some anon wallet 0xaa buying and selling $GNS on the #binance listing news.
🫡We analyzed the address and it's hard to say it is an insider trader because it has been trading $GNS for a month.
Besides the first buy is on 1/23 (25 days ago), here's more👇:
— 0xScope (🪬 . 🪬) (@ScopeProtocol)
Feb 17, 2023
✅ Daily Bullets
- CZ denies Binance is considering delisting tokens from US projects
- Nishad Singh, the former director of engineering at FTX, is making a deal to plead guilty to criminal charges
- Hong Kong plans to lift ban on retail crypto trading
- The Helium Foundation proposed March 27, 2023, as the migration date to the Solana blockchain
- Jump Crypto made $1.28B from helping restore UST’s $1 peg in 2021 in exchange for discounted LUNA tokens
- Energy giant Saudi Aramco signs agreement with droppGroup to build Web3 tech
- Galois Capital to shut down and return its remaining money to investors after half of its assets trapped on FTX
- Bank of Russia to pilot CBDC in April
- FTX Japan to resume crypto and fiat withdrawals on Feb. 21
- Arbitrum integrated onto Coinbase
- NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce settled charges brought by the U.S. SEC for unlawfully promoting tokens sold by EthereumMax
- Zipmex will reopen customer withdrawals
- Alchemy Pay adds Google Pay for on-ramp fiat-crypto purchases
- Platypus salvages $2.4M in hacked funds with BlockSec's help
📊 Market Dashboard
- 📈 Gainers:
- CFX: Chinese Infrastructure
- ACH: Payments
- STX: L1 for Bitcoin
- 📉 Losers:
- FIL: Decentralized Storage
- RNDR: Distributed GPU Rendering
- WOO: DeFi+CeFi
Chart of the Day - Battle of the L2s
- Checking back in on Optimism vs Arbitrum in the battle of the L2s, we can see that transaction counts on Optimism dropped sharply in January whilst Arbitrum began moving on up. Many have speculated that the Arbitrum token launch can’t be far away.
📚Research/Reads
- Charge sheet filed in court by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission |U.S. investigation into Do Kwon and his infamous stablecoin unveils several new revelations - source
- Challenges and opportunities | The economics of cryptocurrency mining: Costs, revenues and market trends - source
- a16z Crypto | Regulate Web3 Apps, Not Protocols Part IV: Practical Application - source
- A primer on composable cloud services | Compute legos: driving the next phase of crypto innovation - source
- Long-awaited AAA blockchain games have finally begun hitting the markets, led by the Beta of Illuvium | January Monthly GameFi Report - source
🎁 Bonus - Farming OpenSea Airdrop
Blur and Sudo airdrops came and went with much hype, however the OG OpenSea doesn’t actually have their own token yet. Could that change soon? Here’s a guide for maximizing your odds of getting an airdrop:
Are you ready to get your hands on some $SEA?
The ultimate guide for farming the @opensea airdrop is here – don't miss out!
🧵👇
— Rekt Fencer (@rektfencer)
Feb 19, 2023