Where's Sam Tabasco & Frog Nation Revival?

Daily Bullets: Thursday, December 22nd

Dec 22, 2022

Alameda co-CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang have now pled guilty to criminal charges and it looks like they’re fully turning on SBF. One huge question that is still hanging in the air is the other co-CEO of Alameda, Sam Trabucco. He joined Alameda in 2019, became co-CEO in October 2021 and stepped down in August 2022 - well after the market downturn that left Alameda in a position that required using FTX customer funds. There is literally no way he wasn’t involved in what happened but so far he seems to have escaped the court of public opinion and barely mentioned in official reporting. Did he leave once he saw the ship sinking? Too little, too late? Why not sound the alarm? Why is no one focusing more on him?
Also, we saw the return of controversial blockchain dev Dani Sesta which caused Popsicle Finance's native token, ICE, to pump. Dani previously worked on a number of DeFi projects, including Abracadabra.money and Wonderland, which was a fork of OlympusDAO. He was hailed as a hero in the crypto space as leader of the Frog Nation until his association with Sifu became public and ruined his image. Fallen heroes from grace are a trend in crypto - think Do Kwon, Su Zhu, Kyle Davies, Andre Cronje, SBF. Many also actively try to successfully mount a redemption arc. Will this dev be able to pull it off?

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Daily Bullets:

Daniele Sesta returning to Popsicle Finance, a DeFi market-making and yield-earning protocol
Twitter implements financial charts for cashtags in search
Polygon’s zkEVM second testnet launched, the last step before mainnet goes live
The Republic of the Marshall Islands passed a law providing recognition of DAOs as LLCs
Kraken launched Kraken Pro, a suite of advanced trading tools and a new interface
Huobi partnership with Visa to issue the Huobi Visa Card worldwide
MetaMask Swaps now enable swaps on Layer 2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism
Frax Protocol turns 2 years old. Yearly emissions halvening increases FXS scarcity
Blur Airdrop 2 recalculated to fix the wash trading filters that affected legitimate traders
Yuga Labs's NFT collection Meebits launched a music album
The Argentine Football Association (AFA) partnering with metaverse startup Upland

Data:

TL;DR: Daniele Sesta is back and states that he’s focusing on rebuilding the OG Popsicle Finance and working on NFT Real Estate as collateral. So let’s take a look at the performance of this fallen crypto hero’s projects. We have to switch to log scale on each of these charts because otherwise it looks like they just went to zero on linear scale. All 3 are down pretty bad, roughly 99% from all time highs. However crypto is often based on narratives and stories, will Dani be able to successfully rebuild Popsicle and draw attention to his next endeavor?

Popsicle Finance: rekt

Wonderland: rekt

Abracadabra.money: rekt

Now for a more expanded and detailed look at the day for those who like details and sources:

Crypto News:

Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang plead guilty to criminal charges. In the complaint, the U.S. SEC labeled FTX's exchange token, FTT, as a security in SEC complaint, throwing a shadow over similar tokens issued by rival crypto exchanges such as Binance and OKX. Caroline’s plea agreement includes: $250,000 Bail, surrender of travel documents, forfeiture of assets

Twitter implements financial charts for cashtags in search

Crypto investment fund manager 3iQ supports Fir Tree Capital Management’s lawsuit centered on Grayscale Investments’ Bitcoin trust

Polygon’s zkEVM second testnet launched, the last step before mainnet goes live

South Korean experts say North Korean hackers have stolen $1.2B in crypto assets around the world since 2017 including about $626M in 2022

Immunefi, a crypto-focused bug bounty platform, paid over $52M to whitehat hackers in 2022, with crypto hacks topping more than $3B

A Tornado Cash developer identified as “Gozzy” initiated a proposal to receive $240,000 in remuneration to continue development activities on the sanctioned mixing protocol

2023 Crypto Events

Economic/Government/Regulatory:

The Republic of the Marshall Islands passed a law providing recognition of DAOs as limited liability companies (LLCs) - previously recognized DAOs as legal entities

The U.S. SEC filed a complaint against Thor Technologies along with its co-founder and CEO David Chin, claiming that Thor’s 2018 ICO constituted an unregistered securities sale

Retiring U.S. Senator. Pat Toomey introduces Stablecoin TRUST Act - a bill to legitimize the use of stablecoins in payment systems

Investment platform MyConstant ordered to desist and refrain from violating the California Securities Law and California Consumer Financial Protection Law for its peer-to-peer lending service and interest-bearing accounts

Exchange News:

Around 94% of the $84M FTX paid for its majority stake in Blockfolio in 2020 was in the FTT token it itself invented

Kraken launched Kraken Pro, a suite of advanced trading tools and a new interface that unifies access to spot trading, margin trading, staking and portfolio management

Huobi partnership with Visa to issue the Huobi Visa Card worldwide

Binance Margin will delist FET, FORTH, KEY, MBOX and WIN as borrowable assets from Cross Margin, as well as AION and BTS from Isolated Margin

DeFi News:

Blockchain developer Daniele Sestagalli returning to Popsicle Finance, a DeFi market-making and yield-earning protocol

MetaMask Swaps now enable swaps on Layer 2 networks, Arbitrum and Optimism in addition to the currently supported Ethereum mainnet, BSC, Polygon and Avalanche

Nomad Bridge is now relaunched

Uniswap votes passed to reform the voting process in an effort to make it easier to change the way the system is governed with nearly 100% voting in favor

Lido on Solana v2 is live - brings a series of validator economy changes

Frax Protocol turns 2 years old - per $FXS yearly halvening schedule, the total emissions have now been halved thus increasing FXS scarcity

Aave founder Stani Kulechov was given 2 million LDO tokens as an early investor in December 2020, which he held for a year and began selling at the end of 2021 over 12 months for a total of $2.4M

Raydium update on remediation of funds for recent exploit - There _should_ currently be enough cumulative protocol revenue from trading fees to make liquidity providers whole

Trust Wallet now supports Aptos dApps

NFT/Gaming/Metaverse News:

Drops on OpenSea: Creators will be able to easily drop collections on the world’s largest NFT platform with a rich canvas to express their brand, art, and roadmap

Blur Airdrop 2 recalculated to fix the wash trading filters that affected legitimate traders

Yuga Labs's NFT collection Meebits launched a music album that's also collectable as ERC-1155 NFTs in collaboration with the generative AI music platform WarpSound

The Argentine Football Association (AFA) partnering with metaverse startup Upland as one of its first entries into web3 fan engagement in a deal includes digital collectibles and a virtual gathering space for AFA's fanbase

The Pokémon Company International is suing Pokémon Pty Ltd, an Australian company, in the Federal Court of Australia over the advertisement of a new NFT-based Pokémon mobile game called PokéWorld

Axie Infinity passed Google Play store review - plan to soft launch Origins in the Malaysian Play Store first

BAYC - 2.5% royalty fee for BAKC companion collection has been turned back on

Fundraises:

Startup Cypherock, who’s new hardware wallet uses NFC-based cards to reduce risks related to seed phrases raises $1M from ConsenSys Mesh, Infinite Capital, Gnosis and its co-founder Stefan George, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Mahin Gupta, OrangeDAO - @CypherockWallet

Early Stage Projects:

Kavarii - designed to be a Social Economic Platform that promotes freedom of speech while being censorship resistant

Research/Reads:

Coinbase 2023 Crypto Market Outlook - source

Blockchain Analysis: Nansen's 2022 Annual Report Compilation - source

November 2022 GameFi Report - source

European Central Bank - Progress on the investigation phase of a digital euro - source

Uniswap Fee Switch Proposal - source

Jump Crypto - Statistical Attacks on Proof of Solvency - source

An Open Letter From Bitfinex - source

Have you seen our institutional-quality research?

M6 Research

Crypto Twitterverse:

Steven @Dogetoshi

CFTC reiterating that BTC ETH and USDT are commodities in FTX filing.

Compound248 @compound248

We just discovered Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang turned on @SBF_FTX, rattling him out to the Feds. The SEC’s civil (non-criminal) complaint is built on their participation and gives us our first “insider’s account” of the FTX disaster. I’ve given you 12 key takeaways below:👇🧵

Hsaka @HsakaTrades

No mention of Tabasco in the CFTC filing. Mentioned a few times in the SEC filing in regards to how he was Alamedas Co- CEO for a while, until Caroline took the reins. Also stress how at the end of the day the goblin was the decision maker at Alameda too.

CJ @CJCJCJCJ_

2022 is ending. This is the time where many VC’s / institutions come up with a YoY reviews or insights on what they’re looking at in the space for 2023. If you want to know what they’re looking at, I summarized some reports from key players in the industry. Part 1 🧵 below:

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!