All Been Crypto — Week 14 Jan 2022
A mixed week with prices relatively flat after the brief dip of BTC to below 40k and the consequent quick recovery. CPI print in the US was in line with expectations and we saw a weaker PPI in China suggesting aggressive tightening should be less of a concern now. We had Kazakhstan Hash-rate coming back, Coin announcing they go into Derivs, and a new decentralized NFT platform launching with a sizable Airdrop. I’m happy to see some support from Jack Dorsey for the BTC dev community and have been closely following the Pudgy Penguin Saga. Overall volumes have slowed in crypto and volatility is also coming down — usually a good time to accumulate. Enjoy your weekend and of course reading the weekly
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
NFTs an Icy Penguin Community and a new $LOOK
A great example of how an NFT community works the incentives for different players and how to value a community. Great article on coindesk about the Pudgy Penguin Saga. In short founders allegedly took the treasury and didn’t build anything they promised. On prominent member took to twitter to reveal whats going on and that he got offered to buy the ‘empty shell’ for 888 ETH. For me the interesting question here is not the buyout prices of different VCs that are out there but the idea of bringing the project fully decentralized, the ousting of founders could forge as a great story for the community and actually be a value driver in itself. So despite prices having traded lower since September which suggests the community was starting to get disappointed with the slow rollout of projects. To me it is not surprising that there was a jump in floor price from 0.6 ETH actually on the day of 9x9x9 tweet. NFTs are the story and the community and this could be one of these stress test moments that either makes or breaks the community, will be watching closely.
Also in NFTs space we had LooksRare launch this week, they were dropping their token to Open Sea users who spent more than 3 ETH over a period to attract volumes in a so called a “vampire attack”. — a term for an effort to sap volume from an incumbent protocol via superior incentives often seen in DeFi. But the 100ml volumes from day one are criticized by some for being partly due to wash trading. So its to be seen how sustainable these are, nevertheless i like seeing more decentralized NFT platforms and if anything Open Sea needs more competition.
Legal protection for BTC Devs
Jack Dorsey doing another favor to the BTC community setting up a ‘Legal Defense’ Fund.He proposed creating a nonprofit organization to protect the rights and interests of open-source Bitcoin developers, who are often subject to “litigation” and “threats.” The fund’s first activity will be to run point on coordinating the defense of Craig Wright’s Tulip Trading lawsuit against various bitcoin developers in relation to a “breach of fiduciary duty” with regards to the theft of crypto from the Mt. Gox hack. This is a great support for the developer community and hopefully helps stem some exodus we have seen over the past couple of months where core devs have left the project. (some coming back ano though as being speculated)
Coinbase buys Future(s)
The Exchange has announced it is buying a crypto futures exchange, FairX, as part of a move to offer crypto derivatives to traders in the United States.Not surprising as they are the only listed exchange and can replenish capital quickly in the market.It is also very much a good strategy as more and more volumes go into derivs and complexer products. Crypto derivatives volumes totalled $3.3 trillion in November, according to UK research CryptoCompare, accounting for almost 55% of the total crypto market.Coin going the right way.
QUOTES:
What you’re seeing today is a retail trend in bitcoin, […], Whales are using the least amount of bitcoin while growing the number of addresses
Pascal Gauthier, CEO and chairman of Ledger
It’s likely that gaming is the introduction for most people into some sort of durable digital assets
Twitch Co-founder Justin Kan
We are finalizing a mechanism for operations of the system [allow local businesses and merchants to settle payments with international partners] This should provide new opportunities for importers and exporters to use cryptos in their international deals
Alireza Peyman-Pak, the ministry’s deputy minister and head of Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization
