This week's newsletter was cowritten by @serdave
PRICE CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- BTC ($23,258): -3% / -51%
- ETH ($1,709): -2% / -54%
- XRP ($0.37): -6% / -55%
- UNI ($8.87): -2% / -49%
- Crypto Market Cap ($1.1T): 0% / -50%
- BTC Dominance: 40%
- ETH Dominance: 19%
STABLECOIN MARKET CAP CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- Tether ($66B): 0% / -15%
- USDC ($54B): 0% / +28%
NFT 3M TRADING VOLUMES
THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO
- Kevin Rose, founder of Moonbirds, announced this week that the project would be moving to a cc0 licensing format instead of its current system where NFT owners have full IP rights to their NFT. Link. Link. Tweet.
- Blackrock, the largest asset manager in the world with over $9 trillion in assets, is giving clients using its Aladdin portfolio management software the ability to trade crypto. The program will only support bitcoin to start. Link. Link. Blog Post.
- Nomad, a popular cross-chain bridge that raised a $22 million seed round earlier this year, had a smart contract vulnerability that allowed users to drain all $190 million of its assets. Link. Link. Nomad is offering a 10% bounty on any funds returned. Link. $32 million has been returned from 86 wallet addresses so far. Tweet.
- Tiffany’s sold 250 “NFTiffs", digital passes that can be redeemed by CryptoPunk owners for a custom pendant of their NFT. The passes were sold for 30ETH or roughly $50,000. Link. Link. Link.
- Gucci will now accept ApeCoin in its retail stores via a partnership with BitPay. Link.
- Swiss luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer is integrating Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs into design elements of its Calibre E4 digital watch, and will allow clients to purchase timepieces using ApeCoin. Link.
- Starbucks will be introducing Web3 components to its popular rewards program at an upcoming investor conference in September. Link. Link.
- More than 8,000 wallets on Solana were hacked this week for over $5 million. The cause appears to be related to the closed-source Slope Wallet app storing keys as plain texts on their servers. Link. Link. Link.
- Open options on ethereum passed the open options on bitcoin for the first ever. Link.
- Crypto funds saw $481 million of inflows in July, the highest in 2022. Link.
- Senators are working on a bi-partisan bill that would require crypto firms to register with the CFTC as its primary regulator. The SEC and courts would still have the power to determine what tokens are securities vs commodities. Link.
- A new Ethereum token standard, ERC4907, will allow people to rent and loan NFTs for fixed periods of time in a trustless manner. Link. Magicians Discourse.
- Instagram users in 100 countries can now share their favorite Ethereum, Polygon, and Flow NFTs on the platform via integrations with Coinbase Wallet and Dapper Labs. Link
- Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor stepped down as CEO of MicroStrategy after the enterprise software maker reported a loss of more than $1 billion in losses related to its bitcoin holdings. The company holds almost 130,000 bitcoin on its balance sheet and began investing in 2020 as an inflation hedge. Link. Link. Link.
- Crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger is in talks to raise $100 million. Ledger raised its Series C in June 2021 at a $1.5 billion valuation. Link.
- Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace, announced support for Ethereum NFTs. The platform will aggregate listings from other marketplaces, and will offer minting services and multi-chain support. Link.
- Robinhood crypto was fined $30 million for violating anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations in 2020. Link.
- Optimism’s native OP token outperformed this week on news that a major upgrade to was slated for Q4 2022. The upgrade to the rollup architecture will decrease deposit times from L1s to L2s and reduce transmissions to mainnet by 20%. Link.
- Binance is partnering with Mastercard to launch a prepaid crypto credit card in Argentina. Users will be able to pay for goods with various cryptocurrencies, an attractive offer in a country where the native currency is experiencing 64% inflation. Link.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren wants the OCC to rewrite Trump-era crypto banking guidelines that allow banks to hold reserve backed stablecoins like USDC and USDT. Warren wants the OCC to draft new guidance with the Federal Reserve and FDIC. Link.
- A prolific crypto miner who was involved in the ETC fork has said he would continue mining Ethereum on a fork called ETH POW after the chain moves to proof of stake later this year. The merge will remove the need for transactions to be verified by miners, who have spent billions of dollars buying GPUs. Link.
- Crypto lending firm Celsius is facing a class action lawsuit from 300 of its storage customers, who claim they retain the title of the $180 million in assets they custodied with the company. The group accounts for 4% of Celsius’s total assets which are now locked in bankruptcy proceedings. Link.
- The SEC charged 11 people at Forsage with operating a $300 million ponzi scheme by using new customers' deposits to pay earlier customers promised rewards. Link.
- Crypto firm Chiliz is investing $102 million into soccer club FC Barcelona to expand the club’s Web3 offerings. Link.
- UK rock band Muse is releasing its next album as an NFT on Polygon platform Serenade. Holders of the 1,000 edition collection will receive downloadable hi-def audio files digitally signed by the band. Link.
- The New York Attorney General is asking employees at crypto companies to come forward about any deceptive practices they have witnessed. Link.
- Two class action lawsuits were filed against Coinbase this week, alleging that the company “knew or recklessly disregarded” that the crypto assets it held should be registered as securities with the SEC and could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings where the exchange’s customers could be considered general unsecured creditors. The lawsuits are seeking payments for Coinbase stock holders who lost money when the stock price tanked this year due to these two announcements. Link.
- Security firm Hacxyk discovered a vulnerability in the Near protocol that led to wallet keys being stored in plain text back in June. Near immediately fixed the issue and no wallets were compromised. Link.