Amber Group, Silvergate Feeling the Heat & ConsenSys Backtracks
Daily Bullets: Tuesday, December 6th
Amber Group and Silvergate are trying to assuage jittery investors, ConsenSys is scrambling to backtrack for collecting our data, Goldman Sachs will be turning into a crypto bull, Blur NFT airdrop 2 is here. The creator of the iPod is making a hardware wallet, GameStop is the latest to feel the bear market stress and cut jobs, APE staking is live but not without some issues, SushiSwap is trying to redirect redirect fees to their own treasury and ETH has shifted back to being inflationary.
Even in the depths of a bear market, there's never a dull moment in crypto
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Daily Bullets:
Amber Group says it is “business as usual” after laying off hundreds of employees
Silvergate open letter seeks to reassure investors and customers
ConsenSys only plans to store and retain user IP addresses and wallet data for up to seven days
Goldman Sachs plans to spend "tens of millions of dollars" to buy or invest in crypto firms
Blur Airdrop 2 is officially live - have 14 days to claim by placing a bid on Blur
APE staking live. Rewards start accruing the 12th. North Americans have been geoblocked
GameStop laid off additional employees, including engineers from its crypto wallet team
Ledger partnered with iPod creator and co-creator of the iPhone, to create its Ledger Stax hardware wallet
Polygon and Warner Music Group partner on a music virtual vinyl platform
Gate established a $100M industry liquidity support fund
Nexus Mutual expects a $3M loss from exposure to Orthogonal Trading’s $36M default on Maple Finance
SushiSwap new proposal to direct all of the fees paid to xSushi holders into its treasury wallet for a year
Alchemy rolling out a dApp store to streamline access to decentralized applications for users and developers
Now for a more expanded and detailed look at the day for those who like detail and sources:
Crypto News:
Digital asset platform Amber Group is reassuring clients and stakeholders that it is “business as usual” at the firm following reports that the company laid off "hundreds" of employees
Silvergate sought to reassure investors and customers that the bank’s assets are safe and that they comply with due diligence and anti-money laundering laws after a class-action lawsuit filed last week alleging Silvergate was complicit in the movement of customer assets between two of its clients, FTX and Alameda Research
In response to backlash, ConsenSys clarified that it plans to only store and retain user IP addresses and wallet data for up to seven days in an attempt to reassure users that their personal information is being handled securely
Financial giant Goldman Sachs plans to spend "tens of millions of dollars" to buy or invest in crypto firms whose valuations have been hit by the demise of crypto exchange FTX
GameStop laid off additional employees, including engineers from its crypto wallet team
Crypto wallet maker Ledger partnered with Tony Fadell, the creator of Apple’s iPod and co-creator of the iPhone, to create its Ledger Stax hardware wallet
Web3 developer platform Alchemy is rolling out a dApp store. The marketplace aims to streamline access to decentralized applications for users and developers
Strike partners with Bitnob to facilitate cross-border payments into Africa
Economic/Government/Regulatory:
Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius received court approval to extend its exclusivity period - the time when it maintains the exclusive right to submit a Chapter 11 reorganization plan - to Feb. 15
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating several unnamed crypto firms over deceptive or misleading crypto advertising
The UK government is expected to announce new rules governing the sale and marketing of crypto assets. Regulators will have more power to police the sector, including a clampdown on crypto-related advertisements by companies based outside the UK
Central bank plans to make CBDC 'only legal digital tender' in Indonesia
Exchange News:
Gate established a $100M industry liquidity support fund for all market makers, high-frequency trading institutions, high-quality listing projects, and other institutional clients or HNW individuals
Binance Margin will delist ACA and more margin pairs on cross margin & isolated margin
Tether adds Chinese Yuan (CNH₮) to the Tron blockchain. At launch, Bitfinex will be the first exchange to support
DeFi News:
Nexus Mutual expects a $3M loss from exposure to Orthogonal Trading’s $36M default on Maple Finance
APE staking is now live - On December 12th, rewards start accruing. North American ApeCoin holders have been geoblocked from staking. Anyone who stakes in any of the three NFT pools and then sells their NFT would lose their staked tokens
SushiSwap new proposal to direct all of the fees paid to xSushi holders into its treasury wallet for a year to provide financing for its operation. Aims to make the project profitable again and increase its runway - which has been reduced to just 1.5 years
Sherlock's staking pool has experienced ~ $4M loss due to a non-paying borrower in a Maple Finance pool
NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:
Blur Airdrop 2 is officially live - have 14 days to claim by placing a bid on Blur. When you bid, you’ll also start earning points towards Airdrop 3, the final and biggest airdrop
Polygon and Warner Music Group have teamed up with e-commerce platform LGND.io to roll out a multi-year web3 music program that will allow users to play digital vinyl on-the-go
Animoca Brands secured a majority stake in the Los Angeles-based music metaverse gaming platform Pixelynx
RTFKT, a subsidiary of Nike, launching the first Web3 physical sneaker "Cryptokicks iRL", which will later enable Move to Earn mode, limited to 19,000 pairs, and the price ranges from $450-1333
Binance NFT Marketplace will launch an Ape NFT Staking Program
Fundraises:
Few investments have been closed through a $200M co-investment program unveiled by Animoca Brands and BNB Chain one year ago as Animoca prepares to launch a new $2B fund for later-stage metaverse bets
Panoptic, a Uniswap-based DeFi protocol for trading perpetual options, raised $4.5M in a seed funding round. Gumi Cryptos Capital led the round, with Uniswap Labs Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Jane Street, Avalanche Foundation's Blizzard fund and others participating
Camelot, a DEX on Arbitrum, raised $3.8M
Gridless, a bitcoin mining company that helps generate new sources of energy in East African rural communities, secured a $2M seed investment round led by Stillmark and Jack Dorsey co-founded payments firm Block
Oasys, a gaming-optimized blockchain, has successfully closed a strategic funding round, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, South Korean gaming giant Nexon
Early Stage Projects:
Rage Trade goes live on Arbitrum One on Dec 12th
Support for bridging USDC and USDT to & from Canto is now live on Synapse Protocol
BNB Chain Builder Grant November winners: dynamic NFT creation tool Owl Protocol and Web3 real-time data index BlockVision
F2pool launched mining services on Aleo testnet 3, as the incentivized testnet stage has been activated. Aleo is a new L1 for creating scalable and private applications applying zero-knowledge cryptography
Recap of Sui Testnet Wave 1, successfully achieved goal of practicing decentralized coordination and incident response on a geo-distributed Sui network
Introducing the NFT Loss Harvestooor - A dApp that buys illiquid NFTs to help claim losses and reduce your taxes
Nostra Money Market Alpha is live- first lending and borrowing protocol live on StarkNet mainnet
What’s your take on today’s news? Anything interesting that you have to say about these stories? Did we miss anything that should’ve been included?
Data:
TL;DR: ETH has turned inflationary as network usage slows. The current positive inflation rate indicates that the volume of ETH being minted now outpaces the amount that is being burned. Also, with Blur’s second airdrop here, we’re looking at their performance since launch. Volume has died down since its initial mania however sales count has been staying up and unique users is near all time high.
Blur:
Sales & Users:
Research/Reads:
Revealed: the Alameda venture capital portfolio - source
CoinShares Bi-Weekly Digest Data-driven analysis - source
Innovating the Main Chain: a Polygon PoS Study in Parallelization - source
Apple Wants to Tax Ethereum - source
Panoptic: Solving DeFi’s perennial option problem. How to avoid fragmented liquidity, toxic flow, oracle problems, and more - source
How can PoPW networks win? - source
Vitalik- a quick GPT chatbot coding experiment - source
Have you seen our institutional-quality research?
Crypto Twitterverse:
Did we miss anything or is there anything you want to discuss? We’d Love to hear your feedback and engage with the community! Feel free to leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on the Crypto market!
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