ConsenSys IP Tracking, WBTC/WETH FUD & Influencers in the Bahamas

Daily Bullets: Monday, November 28th

Nov 28, 2022

Long Holiday Weekend Recap: We see troubling news that ConsenSys collects IP addresses and wallet addresses for those using Infura - highlights the fight for privacy in crypto. Crypto influencers have been busy flying to the Bahamas to look for SBF. WBTC is slightly off peg however the WETH FUD we're seeing is a meme. BlockFi is the latest casualty in the FTX fallout with liabilities ranging from $1B to $10B. Fantom claims to be cash-flow positive, earning more than $10M in annual revenue. Amazon Prime Video 8 episode series on the SBF and the FTX Saga in the works with Marvel's Russo brothers to work on it with potential Marvel actors.
In general, the markets continue fairly range bound with most attention speedrunning one FUD event after another.
We still have the cloud of "which firm will fall next" hanging over our heads. Today we see BlockFi filing for bankruptcy and we still have vulnerable players left

Before we get started… Sharing is caring and knowledge is power! Do you find this newsletter helpful? Then be a Chad or Chadette and share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues

How it started:

How it’s going:

Daily Bullets: Long Holiday Weekend Recap:

ConsenSys collects IP addresses and wallet addresses
Binance officially launched the Industry Recovery Initiative with a $1B commitment
Crypto Twitter influencers converged on the Bahamas in search of SBF
WBTC/WETH FUD - WETH is a meme gone too far
BlockFi will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and lay off a large portion of its staff
Fantom blockchain is cash-flow positive, earning more than $10M in annual revenue
Amazon Prime Video working on an 8 episode TV series on SBF and the FTX Saga
1inch new feature to prevent MetaMask users from getting hit by sandwich attack frontrunning
WBTC DAO moved to a new smart contract multisig, replacing signers that are no longer active
Aave temporarily freezes lending for 17 tokens after last week’s massive short left bad debt
Deadmau5’s Pixelynx unveils augmented reality music metaverse NFT scavenger hunt

Now for a more expanded and detailed look at the day…

Crypto News:

Ethereum-focused software company ConsenSys collects IP addresses and wallet address information of those who access Ethereum wallet MetaMask via the blockchain infrastructure service Infura. Alternative RPC providers like Ankr, and others don’t collect such data but they may collect such data if they want to. Other RPC providers, such as Alchemy, Moralis and QuickNode, also stated that they are collecting personal information such as IP addresses if you used their services

Binance officially launched the Industry Recovery Initiative with a $1B commitment and intent to commit a further $2B if the need arises. Jump Crypto, Polygon Ventures, Aptos Labs, Animoca Brands, GSR, Kronos and Brooker Group have also committed to participating with an initial aggregate commitment of around $50M

Crypto lender BlockFi will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and lay off a large portion of its staff

Wrapped ether remains perfectly fine, despite jokes on Twitter

Amazon Prime Video started work on an 8 episodes TV series on SBF and the FTX Saga with "Avengers: Endgame" directors the Russo brothers with multiple Marvel actors in talks to star

Blockchain development firm Starkware has open-sourced a new release of its programming language Cairo - the first step in a wider move to make its entire blockchain stack for StarkNet open source

Crypto Twitter influencers converged on the Bahamas in search of SBF

Independent developers from The Open Network (TON) community developed a Telegram bot for trading and transferring cryptocurrency

Crypto users have left $27M of funds unclaimed in the Polygon bridge, potentially due to the two-step withdrawal process

Fantom blockchain is cash-flow positive, earning more than $10M in annual revenue

Taipei blockchain week - December 12–17, 2022. General Admission: $125

$25M Casper Accelerate Grant Program will support learning, development, and innovations in Infrastructure, dApps, DeFi, Gaming & NFTs

Exchange News:

Binance released its Proof of Reserves (PoR) System. On-Chain Reserve: 582,485.9302 BTC

Wemix will be delisted from major South Korean exchanges in December due to concerns about its token distribution.The Wemix team called the move unreasonable and vowed to fight it

Introducing Bybit's $100M Institution Support Fund. Who is eligible: Market maker and HFT institutions on Bybit or other exchanges

Huobi denies rumors it will merge with Poloniex

Coinsquare, one of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, may have had client data breached, but claims customer assets are secure in cold storage and are not at risk

Japanese messaging giant Line has decided to shut down its cryptocurrency exchange business amid the ongoing crypto winter but will still continue to run its other blockchain ventures, including the Line blockchain ecosystem and Link (LN) token

Coinbase and Coinbase Pro will list Vulcan Forged PYR

DeFi News:

DEX aggregator 1inch introduced a feature called RabbitHole that's designed to prevent MetaMask users from getting hit by sandwich attack frontrunning

WBTC DAO, the community that administers the Wrapped Bitcoin project, is moving to a new smart contract multisig, replacing signers that are no longer active. FTX, Airswap, MakerDAO and others have been removed

Aave has temporarily frozen lending markets for 17 tokens and stablecoins on Ethereum after a massive short position on Aave’s CRV market resulted in a bad debt of $1.6M

Ape Staking Update: shortened the pre-deposit period by a week to keep original December 12 launch

The MakerDAO community rejected a proposal to use up to $500M of the stablecoin USDC to invest in bonds with crypto investment firm CoinShares

Cardano DeFi project Ardana halts development, citing funding, timeline concerns. Previously closed a $10M round led by now bankrupt crypto hedge fund firm Three Arrows Capital last year

NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:

nftperp Beta Mainnet is officially live

Moonbirds now purely “in-chain”, which means no external dependencies—the art is generated exclusively by smart contracts. Each bird is now assembled by one contract from image layers stored elsewhere, all on chain

Deadmau5’s Pixelynx unveils augmented reality music metaverse NFT scavenger hunt: ‘Rock Band Meets Pokémon Go’

Prada presents the new Timecapsule NFT Collection. Each drop is linked to both a limited edition physical product and a gifted NFT

Fundraises:

Web3 game publisher Fenix Games raised $150M in funding to acquire, invest and distribute blockchain games. Saw participation from investors, including Phoenix Group and Dubai-based venture capital firm Cypher Capital

Crypto lending firm Matrixport, led by Jihan Wu, is looking to raise $100M at a $1.5B valuation

XanPool—a cross-border payments infrastructure provider—is accelerating expansion plans across Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Latin America after raising $41M

Kiln, an Ethereum Staking-as-a Service startup, raised $17.6M in a Series A funding round from a group of investors including Consensys, GSR Ventures and Kraken's venture capital arm

Blockchain research and development firm Proximity Labs and three DEXs on the Near Protocol blockchain - Orderly Network, Spin, and Tonic - announced a $10M developer fund

Hack VC, Placeholder, and Blockchain Capital have invested $10M in Across Protocol at a $200M valuation

Midnight emerged from stealth to announce $7.5M in seed funding earmarked to build a studio and platform to create Web3 games

t3rn, a Polkadot-based blockchain interoperability protocol that aims to facilitate cross-chain transactions, raised $6.5M in a strategic funding round led by Polychain Capital with Huobi Ventures, Figment Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Lemniscap and others participating

XDao, a multichain DAO builder, raised $2.3M in a seed round at a $50M valuation from DWF Labs, Telos Foundation and Grizzly Capital

nftperp raised a total of $1.7M at the valuation of $17M from funds and angels include: Dialectic, Maven 11, Flow Ventures, DCV Capital, Gagra Ventures, AscendEX Ventures and more

Early Stage Projects:

The $ACX token is live and ready to claim. An ERC20 token that controls the Across.to cross-chain bridge

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: Fantom came out with some financial info regarding their performance and holdings so we’re taking a look at some user metrics for Fantom. We can see there was a recent spike in daily active addresses on Fantom, however daily transactions have been on a downtrend since the summer. Pricewise, Fantom is currently at the same level it reached during the summer 2021 lows.

Daily Active Addresses & Daily Transactions:

Active Addresses:

Price:

Research/Reads:

A Grand Unified Theory of the FTX Disaster - source

The Future of MEV is SUAVE - source

The Uniswap Airdrop - Lessons for the Industry - source

Why Nobody Really Uses Web3… Yet - source

Arthur Hayes - White Man - source

The Grayscale (GBTC) Effect - Part Three: 3AC, Grayscale, Genesis, and DCG - source

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

Crypto Twitterverse:

Joseph Lubin @ethereumJoseph

I’m seeing a lot of misunderstandings around our updated privacy policy that need to be clarified. 1/21

Ben Lilly @MrBenLilly

1/ Welcome to the biggest ponzi game of 2021. A game that let SBF build an empire on what can be described as FDV - Faulty Designed Valuations. He used it to borrow billions of capital in order to gain political and media influence. Let's take a look into this methods..

The Crypto Illuminati @0x_illuminati

A reaction thread to @AndreCronjeTech article - Fantom: an inside financial peak at being a 'crypto company' 🍿🧵👇

sassal.eth 🦇🔊 @sassal0x

Reading the replies I feel like I should clarify This is a shitpost/meme - there is nothing wrong with WETH and you can always redeem 1 ETH for 1 WETH Though if you don't believe me I'll buy all of your WETH right now for 0.3 ETH Sell me all you want Then go fuck off

Hudson Jameson @hudsonjameson

There are a lot of funny jokes today about WETH (wrapped ether) crashing or being insolvent. WETH is not in trouble, and I want to explain the joke for those who may have been worried seeing the tweets today.

Dankrad Feist @dankrad

A lot of people making jokes about WETH. Please be aware it may not be obvious to outsiders that it's completely different from bridged assets and there is literally almost zero risk. I think it would be better to mark these more clearly as jokes.

Zhu Su 🔺 @zhusu

So a surreal thing happened a few weeks ago, by a beach during sunset. 10 german teens 5 guys 5 girls, all drunk, waded waistdeep into the ocean, taking tiktoks of the moment Riptide started pulling them in deeper, one guy said "lets go back," the group ignored

Sjors Provoost @sjors@sprovoost.nl @provoost

The outcome was not surprising sadly, but it was nevertheless an interesting (two hour) hearing. It's the first time the public prosecutor explained their reasoning. But ultimately this wasn't about the merits of the case, only about whether to extend his detention.

CoinDesk @CoinDesk

BREAKING: Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev must stay in jail a further three months, a Dutch court has ruled. @jackschickler reports https://t.co/WU3jWeRx21

Alex Krüger @krugermacro

Major changes coming to the crypto industry in 2023

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!