Daily Bullets 💊: The Return of Andre Cronje???

💊 Daily Bullets 💊 Tuesday, October 25th

Oct 25, 2022

Markets are still ranging however with ETH price action looking much better than Bitcoin. Seems like bulls are getting excited and active. We got a busy news day filled with all types of interesting developments - particularly in DeFi. Andre Cronje came out of hiding with a new article (although his lawyer wrote the piece? Who is Megan?), Near’s stablecoin being shut down, Maker, Aave, Compound, Ribbon proposals. Everyone keeps talking about Reddit Polygon NFTs with their “3M” wallets - oh and btw, we’re rebranding NFTs as digital collectibles now /s. We should be in for some interesting times.

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⛓ Crypto News:

Smartphone manufacturer Vertu revealed its latest device, Metavertu - a Web3 phone that can run its own blockchain node and turn photos and videos into NFTs with a single click

Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest made its first purchase of Coinbase stock since June this year, along with more Block and Robinhood shares

Klaytn Foundation Buyback Announcement - continued efforts to achieve an optimal and sustainable Klaytn ecosystem

Mastercard signed a partnership with BitOasis to offer cryptocurrency-linked cards for customers in the MENA region

Layer 2 Community Grants 2022. The Ethereum Foundation offers a pool of $750,000 in grants that will help scale the network while preserving decentralization and public goods

Sui Foundation announced the launch of a developer grant program, which will grant grants to eligible on-chain developers ranging from $10,000 to $100,000

👨‍⚖️ Economic/Government/Regulatory:

South Korean prosecutors are asking the court to sentence Lee Jung-hoon, the owner of South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb, to eight years in prison on charges of fraud worth about $70M

Australian regulators are suing BPS Financial (BPS) for alleged misleading statements about its crypto asset Qoin that claimed it was regulated

💸 Exchange News:

Alexander Höptner is departing from his role as CEO of crypto exchange Bitmex. Stephan Lutz has been appointed as Interim CEO

Coinbase will list Axelar (WAXL)

Euler (EUL) Gets Listed on KuCoin

🏦 DeFi News:

PancakeSwap and the CAKE token will be deploying on Aptos shortly

MakerDAO community approves proposal to place up to $1.6B in Coinbase's custody platform, Coinbase Prime, where it will earn a 1.5% reward

Community members of MakerDAO voted to move forward with founder Rune Christensen’s plan to overhaul how the protocol works and make it more decentralized by breaking up into smaller, allegedly more decentralized units called MetaDAOs

Aave has launched a Lido Staked Ethereum, or stETH, earn strategy through Oasis.app

NEAR Protocol’s stablecoin, USN, is being shut down after it began to exhibit risky characteristics similar to those observed with TerraUSD. The Near Foundation opened up a $40M fund to protect investors and help them cash out of USN with equal amounts of wrapped Tether (USDT.e)

Aave Proposal to deploy Aave v3 on zkSync v2.0 Testnet

Compound Finance has approved “proposal-131,” which will prevent users from being able to lend relatively illiquid assets on the protocol - 4 protocols: 0x (ZRX), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Maker (MKR), and Yearn Finance (YFI)

Ribbon Finance considering a second round of lending pools for its DeFi lending product Ribbon Lend - considering onboarding a new set of institutional borrowers

Struggling Bitcoin miners are flocking to Maple Finance’s $300M DeFi lending pool. A pipeline of 10 mining firms will make up the first cohort of borrowers, with some 25 on the waitlist

Vesta Finance - following recent efforts to improve borrowing experience, removed the 30 VST liquidation reserve - borrowers will be less penalized in case of liquidation and liquidators are not over-compensated anymore

🖼 NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:

Apple updated its App Store policy to restrict apps from using NFTs to incentivize users to purchase items or features to avoid 30% App Store fees. NFTs are allowed to exist within apps on the App Store but they can’t unlock additional features or content

Reddit NFTs - Polygon-based avatars trading volume hits all-time high - last week that over 3 million Polygon wallets created by users to collect the NFTs

Gaming blockchain Oasys has taken the final steps towards debuting its mainnet, with 21 initial validators. There will be three initial phases followed by a public token listing. Square Enix, Ubisoft and Sega among its initial node validators

Meta partnership with makeup brand L’Oréal and French business school HEC Paris backing a new startup acceleration program for creativity in the metaverse

The Singapore High Court has ruled that NFTs can be considered a form of property - the first injunction issued in Asia to protect an NFT

Web3 ticketing company YellowHeart is launching a metaverse music venue – a move it hopes will drive changes in how artists, teams and event organizers release tickets and engage with fans

💰 Fundraises:

African cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card has concluded a $15M Series A financing round led by Valar Ventures, Third Price and Castle Island Ventures

BNB Chain, one of the world's most actively used blockchains by daily active users, has introduced a $10M fund to help projects with user acquisition and growth

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) $5M Enterprise Fund investment in Wave, an African mobile money app which endeavors to make Africa the first cashless continent

Crypto-centred fund UpsideDAO $5M fundraising to invest in web3 projects approved by its community members

Synota, a startup that wants to bring energy payments to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, has raised $3M in a seed round led by Ego Death Capital

Binance Labs led the pre-seed funding round for Ancilia, Inc. in its latest step toward fortifying the security of the Web3 ecosystem

Sealance Seed Funding Round - the world's first blockchain-based Trust Platform for cryptocurrencies and based on advanced mathematics, cryptography, and zero-knowledge proofs

👶 Early Stage Projects:

Canto Online Hackathon winners

Paraswap - PSP 2.0 Renaissance - Social Escrow, Fee Redistribution, and Fairdrop

Curio - Announcing: Phase 1 Completion - A game engine, whole new game design, and plans towards truly composable games

Minima and Minipay pilot blockchain-based retail payment system

BlockPI Alpha-net, Your Reliable Web3 RPC Service Provider

Scoville Testnet Phase 4 - CAYENNE is live. Introducing the Chiliz Chain 2.0 Developer Guide & GitHub repo

Introducing Hegic Herge protocol upgrade: live on Arbitrum

DeBank Hi, the messaging app for web3 natives, is now online

Fire is live - tool that shows you a preview of what will enter and exit your wallet, before you sign a transaction

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: Today we got a wee bit o’ smart money flowing into WETH (opposed to larger perp buys ~ $500M)) followed by stables TUSD, USDT. Outflows from the day primarily from USDC and WBTC. Weekly showing a move into stables USDC and USDT with flows out of WBTC and Aave WBTC. Digital Collectible volumes still pretty low - R Planet mint highest project of the day. ETH on exchanges keeps falling post Merge spike.

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

- Inflow (1D):

- Outflow (1D):

Weekly:

- Inflow (7D):

- Outflow (7D):

Nansen NFT Hot Contracts:

Following a large spike on the day of the Merge, which presumably was ETH flowing onto exchanges to be sold, we’ve seen a sharp drop off

Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital

Someone bought nearly $500m in $ETH perps this morning in under an hour 📈

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

🎓 Research/Reads:

Andre Cronje - The Crypto Winter of 2022 - source

The State of DeFi Options - DeFi? Options? We're not there yet - source

The Crypto Story - Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters - source

GMX, A Can-Be-Evil “AMM” - source

Polygon ZK Roundup: Q3 2022 - source

Messari - State of Hedera Q3 2022 - source

Messari - The Telecom Cowboys of the Decentralized Wireless Movement - source

What drives fundamentals in Crypto? - source

Decentralized Social Media Primer - Lens Protocol - source

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

🌍 Crypto Twitterverse:

Daniel Mason @dgmason

Today, Apple released new rules for crypto apps (especially web3 games) in the App Store. Apple's stance on NFTs, crypto, and payments will have a massive effect on the industry. A 🧵 featuring critical points, my takeaways, and winners/losers based on initial reading:

🙏🚫 Rooter (hiring!) @0xrooter

there's a saying that a company takes on its founder's personality. I've never dealt with SBF personally, but I have a story to share about a time solend crossed paths with alameda. 1/

Eric Choi @echoi333

How Reddit Took The Successful First Step Into Web3 (feat. Polygon) "Reddit collectible avatars as NFTs" 🧵 (1/23)

Marco Paladin @paladin_marco

A story on how I as a solidity auditor just almost lost $10k in a single click, and on how you most certainly would have lost it... Learn how to not get rekt like I almost was and why you should ALWAYS inspect transactions below 👇

Jason Choi @mrjasonchoi

The state of crypto VC - and why we started @tangent_xyz

Lamboland @LambolandNFT

DeGods is the #1 NFT project on Solana. But did you know they initially failed so bad that the founder @frankdegods was receiving death threats? Here's the greatest NFT comeback story:

Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane

Twitter is working on a “wallet prototype” that supports “crypto deposit and withdrawal”

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!