Daily Bullets 💊: First Terraform Labs Arrest - Price Manipulation?!?!?

💊Daily Bullets 💊Thursday, October 6th

Oct 06, 2022

Bulls are fighting for their lives as Bitcoin continues its make it or break it battle at 20k. One interesting little detail that came out of the arrest news for a Terra employee - they allegedly used bots to inflate and manipulate the price? That’s pretty serious considering how massive Luna was. We also see the EU getting stricter with Russia sanctions. So much for decentralization, eh?

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Meme of the day:

⛓ Crypto News:

South Korea has ordered Terra founder Do Kwon to return his local passport in 14 days or risk losing the passport, and re-applications may be rejected. The first arrest in the ongoing investigation has also reportedly taken place - Yu, head of general business operations at Terraform Labs - allegedly used bot programming to inflate and manipulate the market price

EU existing prohibitions on crypto assets have been tightened by banning all crypto-asset wallets, accounts, or custody services to Russia, irrespective of the amount of the wallet (previously up to €10,000 was allowed)

Asset management firm GoldenTree, with about $47B in assets under management, has taken a $5M stake in SushiSwap’s governance token SUSHI

MakerDAO has allocated $500M for investing in U.S. short treasuries and corporate bonds - initiated by DeFi asset advisor Monetalis and lead by digital asset bank Sygnum

Crypto asset management firm Grayscale is is launching Grayscale Digital Infrastructure Opportunities - a new investment product focused on bitcoin mining hardware

Decentralized data storage platform ArDrive's mobile app went live on Google Play Store, offering users an alternative to Google Drive for data storage

Binance to remove Cross & Isolated Margin Pairs for Helium (HNT) and OOKI. Helium has announced a move to Solana recently and OOKI was sued by the US CFTC

Circle has burned $9B worth of USDC from its total supply in the last three months

Flamengo, one of Brazil’s biggest sports franchises, plans to launch a number of web3 products via a multi-year partnership with MoonPay

UK investment firm Abrdn is taking another major leap into the digital asset space by partnering with enterprise blockchain Hedera

Crypto miner Greenidge Generation seeks to raise up to $22.8M in a stock offer

Binance receives license to operate in Kazakhstan

PowerTrade, a crypto exchange focused on derivatives, is rolling out a request-for-quote (RFQ) model for the options market - hopes to attract both institutional players and smaller traders with no minimum order sizes

Celsius claims process FAQ

Privacy-focused proof-of-work blockchain Zcash, has been undergoing a spam attack - a large volume of transactions that aim to disrupt the network

zkSync 2.0 Testnet will undergo a regenesis on October 10th. The regenesis will reset transaction history, token balances, and require developers to redeploy contracts

DefiLlama borrowing optimizer

Axelar is partnering with Umee

Introducing deSwap Liquidity Network (DLN): a secure new paradigm for depthless cross-chain value transfers

Public testnet is now live on Prime Protocol

Introducing dappland - the best place to find and explore leading dapps across the StarkNet ecosystem

Introducing Genie - a no-code rewards distribution platform that allows projects to efficiently target & incentivise ideal stakeholders through factoring any wallet’s historical behavior

UXD Protocol - Asset Liability Management Module: The Endgame of Stablecoins

Soft launching Shipyard Finance - bare bones yield optimization

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: On the daily, some money is flowing into USDC and out of APE (looks like Wintermute dropped $6M worth) and WBTC. Light weekly inflow into Aave WETH and WBTC and moderate outflow from stables USDC and USDT. NFT volumes continue to be low but it’s been a bit since BAYC and CryptoPunks led by volume.

Nansen Smart Money Holdings Token Inflow and Outflows: Tracking what the whales are up to...

- Inflow (1D): USDC ($11M), WETH ($1.6M), ibCHF ($452k), DOLA ($445k), aSTETH ($414k)

- Outflow (1D): APE ($6.4M), WBTC ($3.9M), SAND ($510k), LINK ($401k), USDT ($221k)

Weekly:

- Inflow (7D): aWETH ($22.4M), aWBTC ($14.7M), MATIC ($12.3M), WETH ($9.2M), stETH ($2.1M)

- Outflow (7D): USDC ($51.7M), USDT ($34.8M), RPL ($7M), WBTC ($6.2M), BUSD ($3M)

Nansen NFT Hot Contracts:

BAYC: 761 ETH
CryptoPunks: 625 ETH
Fontana| Art Blocks Curated: 525 ETH
Probably A Label: 498 ETH
Kong Warriors Fight Club: 410 ETH

What is the Data telling you? See anything that sticks out to you?

🎓 Research:

Beyond Monolithic: The Modular Blockchain Paradigm - How modular design will enable blockchains to scale by orders of magnitude - source

Ethereum's New ‘Staking’ Model Does Not Make ETH A Security - source

Fun Games (alone) won’t Solve Web3 Gaming - source

Crypto Market Fit: Redefining Product Market fit in web3 - source

The Curve Wars and 4Pool Drama (Part 1) - source

Legal Challenges & Considerations in Web3 Gaming - source

The Construction of the Soul Part 3: Soulbound Token with zk-SNARK Implementation - source

Starknet Account Abstraction - source

The Battle for the Soul of the Web - source

Avoid bridge hacks: It's all about who/what you trust - source

Looking back at Solana outages, why are they frequent? - source

Canto Investment Thesis - source

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

🖼 NFTs/Metaverse News:

Yuga Labs unveils BAYC Community Council to help shape future initiatives - made up of 7 notable Bored Ape collectors tasked with providing feedback to Yuga Labs and uplifting community-driven projects

OpenSea to allow users to submit bulk NFT listings and purchases - up to 30 items in a single flow
Dapper Labs’ NFT platform, LaLiga Golazos, based on the LaLiga Spanish soccer league will launch in closed beta later this month

🌍 Crypto Twitterverse:

Avi @AviFelman

1/ You asked for the institutions to buy your bags, you get the institutions to buy your bags.

forum.sushi.comHello from GoldenTreeGm Sushi community We wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves to the community. We’ve been following Sushi for a while (some of us for several years now) and with the launch of GoldenChain, we are psyched to be more active in all things Sushi. We’re excited about the Sushi 2.0 roadmap, and t…

Ξnrique ⚡ @eherrerosj

1/ GitHub is an overlooked source of alpha. The greatest web3 devs build and curate in public. Are you already learning from them? Follow @stargazoor so you can get a daily thread with trending open-source projects curated by the best devs. 🧵

The Tie @TheTieIO

The Thesis for @solana: Research visualized through seven charts Solana adopts a monolithic design, wrapping transaction execution, network consensus, proof settlement, and data availability on one mainchain. Solana’s speed is scaled to ~double every two years (Moore's Law).

Atomist 🫐🛸 (💙,🧡) @0xAtomist

Following on from @tanoeth's lightning-fast thread 👏 , let's take a look at some of the implications of this new DeFi primitive from @GMX_IO - GMX Synthetics👇

Tano 🫐🍏 - 🦇🔊 @tanoeth

Today, @GMX_IO gave more information on their current design and development of their synthetic trading platform, which will launch after audits have been completed and front-end development is done. $GMX $GLP Let's dive into it and what it means 👇

Composability Kyle @KyleSamani

0/ A thread on (web3) identity

Ignas | DeFi Research @DefiIgnas

1/ The state of #DeFi in 15 charts🧵

Haym @SalomonCrypto

(1/17) @ethereum Fundamentals: The (Post-Merge) State Transition Function The World Computer is a decentralized state machine, let's walk through the state transition function Sound like nonsense? This thread will explain what happens every time a validator receives a new block

📈 Fundraises:

Web3 hospitality platform Blackbird has raised $11M in a seed round, co-led by Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital and Multicoin Capital

New trading platform, MynaSwap, has raised $6M at a $50M valuation from investors such as Blizzard, Spartan Capital and NFL superstars Odell Beckham Jr. and Kyler Murray

Citi Ventures and venture capital firm Accel co-led a $6M funding round for xalts, an institutional-grade digital asset management startup

Spexi Geospatial raises $5.5M to pursue vision of Fly-to-Earn - collecting Earth’s most important data with drones

Scale3 Labs, founded by former Coinbase engineers, has raised $5.3M in seed funding to build infrastructure for blockchain node operators to help them run their networks smoothly

Lasso Labs beta launch & $4.2M raise led by Electric Capital - Lasso makes it easy to discover and create utility for digital assets like NFTs

Medieval Empires, a blockchain play and own game, raises $2.1M

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!