🗓💊 So, Twitter’s Gonna be the Future of Finance?
Daily Bullets - Wednesday, March 8th
Theo Delarosa
March 08, 2023
Today’s newsletter is 1500 words, a cool 5 1/2-minute read.
The macro is dragging crypto down! After Fed chair Powell's hawkish speech yesterday, the market slid even further with BTC testing $22k and ETH $1500.
The probability of the Fed raising interest rates by 50 bps on March 22 has now increased from 32% before the speech to 72% Fun!
Also, we’re seeing the U.S government sending over $1B to Coinbase? Could they be dumping? (most appears to be internal transfers)
Is a Fed pivot off the table now? |
Today we’re looking at:
- 🐥🏦 So, Twitter’s Gonna be the Future of Finance?
- 💰🏷 Immutable Selling Tokens, Again
- 🏦💯 Binance.US Closes Ex-FTX Voyager Deal
- ✅ Daily Bullets
- 📊 Market Dashboard
- 📚 Research/Reads
- 📝 Good Tweets
🐥🏦 So, Twitter’s Gonna be the Future of Finance?
Quick Take: Elon Musk spoke at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference saying he wants to make Twitter a leading payment service and the world's biggest financial institution. Bold and ambitious, Elon.
Key Details:
- Musk wants Twitter to become an "everything app"
- Wants to offer a better finance experience than PayPal and provide convenient payment options
- Twitter has been curating software to enter the payments realm
- Did not mention whether Twitter's payments feature would involve crypto
- Has previously hinted at various crypto features, but he later abandoned those plans and ruled that blockchain-based Twitter isn't possible
- Twitter introduced minor features like NFT support and ETH tipping, but has not yet integrated crypto with the platform
Significance: Besides narratives, personalities are huge, not just when it comes to crypto, but everything. Big personalities and individuals command attention and in the case of Elon, have the power to move markets.
The crypto market is routinely moved by the shenanigans of Elon Musk and many speculate on whether his future ambitious plans with Twitter will eventually include crypto.
Beyond that, even if Twitter does introduce crypto features, the question is whether users will accept it.
That’s why we pay close attention to when large players such as Amazon, Reddit, Starbucks etc start incorporating crypto services. We want to see signs of adoption.
Go Deeper:
💰🏷 Immutable Selling Tokens, Again
Quick Take: ImmutableX creator, Australian startup Immutable, is reportedly trying to sell IMX tokens to private investors via a Cayman Islands-based entity. Less than two weeks after Immutable laid off 11% of staff.
Key Details:
- Total raised to date: $280M from investors
- War chest: $1B+
- Balance sheet: Immutable holds IMX tokens worth over $478M
- The private token sale being led by a major venture capitalist and was more than two times oversubscribed in the first 72 hours
- A spokesman for Immutable declined to comment on the private token sale, saying it was "confidential to the foundation."
- IMX is up about 170% since the start of 2023
Significance: There is a concern since these types of undisclosed token sales and use of offshore structures are being reviewed by the federal government in our tightening regulatory environment.
Besides that, IMX has amassed a slew of prominent partnerships and holds potential as an L2 - therefore we want to keep an eye on potential upcoming sell pressure.
You should always be aware of who holds tokens and if they could dump those tokens on you.
Go Deeper:
🏦💯 Binance.US Closes Ex-FTX Voyager Deal
Quick Take: Binance.US has been granted permission to purchase Voyager Digital's assets for over $1B after a bankruptcy judge approved the deal.
Key Details:
- Most Voyager creditors approved the deal, which could recover them almost three-quarters of their holdings
- Binance.US still needs to fulfill some regulatory requirements before finalizing the purchase
- Objections by regulators and parties were dismissed or found to have weak arguments during the hearing
- One issue was customer data sharing, but Binance.US confirmed their employees wouldn't have access to that information
- The inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the US could still derail the plan, as it can reject foreign purchases of U.S. companies.
Significance: 2022 was a terrible year for a lot of people and companies. Luna, 3AC, Celsius and FTX rekt a lot of people. So this is good news for creditors! They could potentially make a 73% recovery on their lost funds.
This deal was previously meant to be taken by FTX before they crashed and burned. The concerning thing is that Binance.US has been facing its own regulatory uncertainty.
Go Deeper:
✅ Daily Bullets
🔥 Highlights
- Elon Musk has ambitions of making Twitter the world’s biggest financial institution
- Binance.US to pay $1.3 billion in an agreement to acquire Voyager’s assets
- FDIC officials consulting with Silvergate on how to keep the company in business
- Mt. Gox creditors have until March 10 to register and choose repayment method
- Courts in the Seychelles approved Coinflex’s restructuring plans
- Grayscale appears to win opening salvo in Bitcoin ETF case vs SEC
- Immutable reportedly trying to sell a certain amount of its IMX tokens to private investors
- MakerDAO proposes additional $750M U.S. Treasury purchase
- Shibarium blockchain to release its beta version for the layer 2 network this week
- Cosmos approved proposal to launch v9-Lambda to establish first version of interchain security
- Jack Dorsey's Block soliciting developer feedback for a bitcoin mining development kit
- Esports org TSM building its own crypto subnet on Avalanche
- Binance NFT Marketplace now supports Polygon Network
- There is no Dune Token, there are no plans for a Dune token and there is no Airdrop
📰 Crypto News
- Binance's PoR system shows over $63B in reserves backing 24 assets
- Sui blockchain developer, Mysten Labs, signs deal with Alibaba Cloud
- China’s WeChat starts accepting CBDC payments
- Coinbase sued by customer refused reimbursement for $96K lost in hack
- Nansen launched Query, a product that provides programmable access to blockchain datasets
- Crypto.com announced that Apple Pay is now available to all Brazil Crypto.com Visa Card users
- Decrypt launched a real-time feed of human and AI-generated breaking news summaries
- Getty Images and Candy Digital will sell rare photographs as NFTs
- Game development studio LifeForce Games joining the user-generated content trend
- Liquid staking protocol Liquid Collective launched on Coinbase Prime and Bitcoin Suisse
- Despegar started accepting crypto payments in Argentina in partnership with Binance Pay
- India imposed money laundering provisions on the crypto sector
- AI artist to show NFT collection at Louvre
- Sotheby’s and UnicornDAO host International Womens’ Day art auction
💲Coin/Project Updates
- Compound III has been deployed to Polygon
- Curve yield farmers deploy $60M on newly launched Conic Finance
- Tender.fi hacker returns stolen funds, gets bounty reward
- Core mobile has arrived for iOS
- Introducing NEAR Mobile Wallet
- Axie Infinity Origins Season 3 - Welcome to the Rare Era
- ConsenSys 2nd commemorative NFT collection when the upgrade goes live late-March/mid-Apri
- Overlay Protocol will open $OVL claim on March 7th
- The NFT Gaming Company acquired AI assets of Voxpow to enhance digital gaming platform
- Elusiv, now available on Solana
- Improve ROOK Token Model proposal
- Introducing Gitcoin Staked ETH Index (gtcETH)
- EAS is live on Mainnet
📊 Market Dashboard
Chart of the Day - StableCoins on Exchanges
- March 4th saw the biggest inflow of stablecoins onto exchanges since November 18th. About $1.4B. Market has however slid since then on renewed Fed and inflation uncertainty. Less people seem certain there will be a Fed pivot.
📚 Research/Reads
- Potential risks associated with nuclear energy may take a backseat to the capabilities of nuclear energy | Can nuclear energy bitcoin mining be a sustainable path? - source
- A Story About How Banks Get Rekt | Silvergate Capital: What the Hell Happened? - source
- Ava Labs CEO | AI Still Has a Lot to Learn—and Unlearn - source
- Applications like Ordinals are the next on-ramp for Bitcoin adoption | Why Yuga Lab's Embrace of Bitcoin NFTs Is a Big Deal - source
- New Order DAO | 2023 Crypto Thesis - source
- Tradeoff between latency and reversion risk at the major stages in Ethereum’s current proof-of-stake consensus protocol | Bridging and Finality: Ethereum - source
📝 Good Tweets
PeckShieldAlert - um is the government dumping 49k BTC ($1B) on us?
#PeckShieldAlert 49k $BTC (worth $1 Billion) from wallets related to US Government law enforcement seizures have been transferred to #Coinbase (~9.8k $BTC, worth $217M), bc1qf2…fsv (30k $BTC) & bc1qe7…rdg (9k $BTC) #SilkRoad
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert)
Mar 8, 2023
Ignas on how OPNX (3AC founders) will acquire all assets of CoinFLEX
1/12 Kyle Davies reached out to me after this tweet.
The fundraising deal is done.
But they won't disclose who are the investors - as most exchanges don't.
He also explained how the exchange, collateral system & tokenomics works: 🧵 twitter.com/DefiIgnas/stat…
— Ignas | DeFi Research (@DefiIgnas)
Mar 7, 2023
Chase clearing up some misinfo on Kava Risa. Reminder to always do due diligence
Too much misinfo being shilled about Kava Rise today.
Rise is a 200M KAVA developer incentive program that's been around for close to a year now.
The $750M figure was quoted when KAVA was $3.75. Today, it's ~$0.80 implying a "total program val" of $180M.
Bear market tings...
— Chase (@chasedevens)
Mar 8, 2023
David phelps on targeting 1% of 99% of transaction volume or 99% of 1% of transaction volume?
every crypto project has a choice right now:
go after the 1% of users who represent 99% of transaction volume.
or go after the 99% of users who represent the 1% of transaction volume.
some thoughts:
— david phelps 🐮🏰🃏 (@divine_economy)
Mar 7, 2023
We’re trying to improve this newsletter. Should we keep the good tweets section? |