Daily Bullets: FOMC, Russian Mobilization - Time to Pay Attention

Daily Bullets: Wednesday, September 21st

Sep 21, 2022

All eyes are on FOMC today at 2PM EST as traders and investors are desperate for an idea of what the next leg of the market will look like. Most market participants are betting on a 75 bp rate hike with non-negligible odds of 100. Expect volatility if you’re trading! Meanwhile the macro and geopolitical environment keeps on getting iffier - news that Russia is escalating isn’t encouraging. Regulation is breathing down our necks. We’re in for some interesting times!

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Draft legislation to create a U.S. federal framework around stablecoins would temporarily ban the types of payment coins that are not backed by outside assets for 2 years - similar to TerraUSD

President Vladimir Putin has ordered the partial mobilization of the Russian population, including calling military reservists into active service and a boost to weapons production - tightening global geopolitical tensions

Wintermute offers hacker 10% bounty on funds taken

Tether, Bitfinex ordered to show financial documents showing the backing of the USDT stablecoin

The European Union has finalized the full text of its landmark Markets in Crypto Assets legislation

Binance Futures will launch USDⓈ-M LDO and CVX perpetual contracts with up to 25x leverage

Neobank Revolut has expanded its crypto investment offering, adding 29 new tokens for its American customers

Layer-2 scaling solution Boba Network has expanded its support to the Avalanche blockchain

21Shares launches Ethereum exchange-traded product tailored to the bear market

⁠Digital bank FV Bank integrates USDC stablecoin for direct deposits

Central Bank of Iran will begin the pilot launch of crypto-rial as the bank’s digital currency

Arbitrum paid a code bounty hunter 400 ETH for finding a bridge vulnerability which could have compromised more than $250M

Liquid staking startup Alluvial has added the cryptocurrency exchange platform Kraken to its independent industry consortium

FTX and Binance are leading the auction for crypto-lender Voyager

Huobi enables cryptocurrency purchases with fiat in Latin America by partnering with AstroPay

Ankr partners with Polygon to enhance the building experience for Supernet Developers

Mina Protocol Q3's ecosystem roadmap

Optimism Quests: a guided exploration of the ecosystem that allows users to earn NFTs while exploring Optimism apps

Announcing Urbit's EVM blockchain

StarkNet is now live on Infura

Benqi Finance - Phase 1 of veQI - a tool to supercharge Avalanche validators

Succinct Labs - towards the endgame of blockchain interoperability with proof of consensus

Savvy comes out of stealth - allows you to unlock your liquidity & get an advance on future yield, with non-liquidating self-repaying lines of credit

Introducing Liquid Collective: the enterprise-grade liquid staking protocol. Designed to meet the needs of institutions. Built and run by a collective of leading web3 teams

UXD Protocol is launching its capitally efficient, algorithmic stablecoin, $UXD, on Sei

Subspace Network - Gemini II Incentivized Testnet is live

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, we see a reversal of yesterday with the most amount of money flowing into USDC today, followed by WETH and a random outflow of MIM. Weekly shows money flowing into Compound and Aave ETH products and still a net outflow from USDC. Slight boost in NFT volumes

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

- Inflow (1D): USDC ($92.8M), WETH ($12.8M), cETH ($9.5M), COMP ($5.3M), DAI ($5.2M)

- Outflow (1D): MIM ($7.7M), alUSD ($2.2M), MATIC ($426k), APE ($405k), cbETH ($386k)

Weekly:

- Inflow (7D): cETH ($73.9M), aSTETH ($22.5M), USDT ($21.2M), WBTC ($18.2M), WETH ($9.9M)

- Outflow (7D): USDC ($60.1M), RPL ($10.9M), cCOMP ($9.7M), MIM ($7.7M), cUSDC ($6.8M)

Nansen NFT Hot Contracts:

Legendary Dancing Seahorse: 2190 ETH
BAYC: 1120 ETH
ATARI50: 1037 ETH
MAYC: 949 ETH
ENS: 515 ETH

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

🎓 Research:

Messari - State of Bitcoin Q3 2022 - source

The Next Big Crypto Narrative. A Search For The Supernatural - source

eGirl Capital - Liquidity, Capital and Bank Runs - source

Realistic yield: Separating the wheat from the chaff - source

On building mobile first. Build where people spend their time - source

Gigachad Due Diligence Questionnaire - source

The Kill Bill: What the Future Holds for Stablecoins - source

Why equity plus token warrants is the new go-to formula for crypto VCs - source
How to Make On-Chain Gaming Competitive: 'Procedural Generation' [Part 2] - source

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

🖼 NFTs/Metaverse News:

MoonPay, Universal Studios and Hypermint partnered to create an NFT-based scavenger hunt at Universal Theme Parks

Funko teams up with Warner Brothers for DC Comics' NFT release

Playstation is now making NFT but with a twist. They call them Digital Collectibles

insrt finance is building a simplification and abstraction layer for NFT finance - unlocking yield & returns generated by Ethereum NFTs

Introducing Bagholder, an NFT loyalty protocol that lets you reward people for holding NFTs from a collection in their wallets

Digital fashion platform BNV will launch its own Metaverse

FastAF partners with Solana-based NFT project Degen Apes to provides a token-gated use case

Open sourcing the Art Gobblers smart contracts

🌍 Crypto Twitterverse:

Cold Blooded Shiller @ColdBloodShill

Don't trade FOMC. I know it's difficult when these events come up and everyone knows there's volatility to be had. Your trades will get wiped. Let me take you on a journey through the average traders emotions during this period of time (and how to avoid that happening) 🧵👇

Regan Bozman @reganbozman

The crypto vc market is currently thawing after a 4 month freeze, but with major dislocations 🐻'Bear market chasm' = gap between 2021 and 2022 vals 📊Bar is *much* higher for Series A's 💀Very few 2021 seed companies will survive 1/ Some jumbled thoughts

Varun Shenoy @varunshenoy_

Zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) will revolutionize how we think about privacy and scaling computation. And they're just starting to take off. Don't want to get left behind? Here's a quick primer, just for you👇

Momentum 6 @Momentum_6

CC0 (Creative Commons) is one of the least understood topics in the #NFT industry It has the potential to either make or break the NFT industry! Keep reading to learn all about #CC0 to stay ahead of the pack: 🧵👇

daniel @dgmason

10 things every crypto founder needs to know about: - entity setup - fundraising - compensation (salary + tokens) - hiring devs & execs Based on firsthand experience from @hiFramework investing in 100+ companies and seeing dozens go from inception to hyper-growth. 🧵👇

Ignas | DeFi Research @DefiIgnas

1/ TIL Uniswap Analytics TVL data is wrong. Their official analytics page shows TVL at $10.58B, but the real TVL is around $5B. How is that possible?

Patrick Collins 🌪 @PatrickAlphaC

🧑🏾‍💻 With artificial intelligence, blockchain, and many other technical advancements, we are rebuilding the way we interact with each other daily. 👷‍♂️ The question is, what is the system we are rebuilding to? And given all this new technology, what should it look like? 🧵

📈 Fundraises:

Spice VC’s $250M second venture fund is expected to close mid-fourth quarter

Hong Kong billionaire Adrian Cheng's VC firm C Ventures reportedly plans to raise a new $200M crypto fund

Crypto analytics firm Messari raises $35M in Series B led by Brevan Howard Digital

Chess game Immortal Game raised $15.5M in a funding round backed by Kima Ventures, TCG Crypto, Alven, Moonfire Ventures, Spice Capital, Kraken Ventures

Higlobe raises $14M to eliminate international fund transfer fees for the global workforce

Web3 finance platform Integral closes $8.5M round led by Electric Capital

SkyBridge Capital and FTX led an $8M round for the NFT-based gaming firm Vulcan Forged, with the option to invest $33M more

Antic raises $7M to set the stage for the age of experiences and make co-ownership seamless

Spot, a next-generation communications platform, raises $5.5M

Nilos raises $5.2M to build a crypto treasury platform for businesses

Web3 back-office platform Headquarters has closed a $5M round co-led by Crypto.com Capital, Forge Ventures and MassMutual Ventures

Banking giant Nomura launches crypto VC unit named Laser Venture Capital - will invest in startup categories including DeFi and blockchain infrastructure

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!