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Gm awesome people! It’s Monday. Last Monday, and the Last Newsletter from me, for this year.

I hope you had an awesome Christmas party!! Or were you checking the prices??

This Week in Web3

Let’s begin the 2022 grand finale..

1. FTX

SBF is back from jail 😥. His $250M bail bond was approved by the judge.

• Caroline Ellison (Alameda CEO) & Gary Wang (FTX Co-founder) have pleaded guilty to fraud & are cooperating with prosecutors. Both have been given a $250k bail & must surrender all travel documents.
• FTX has found $1B worth of assets including $720M in cash stored in hundreds of bank accounts, the company revealed in a court hearing.
• Federal official asks political campaigns to return FTX money.
• US Judge assigned to the SBF case steps down due to her husband’s law firm previously advising FTX.
• Caroline Ellison (Alameda CEO), admits to using FTX customer deposits to repay loans on risky investments.
• A secret back channel between FTX and the Biden White House shut down the day after FTX filed for bankruptcy.
• The rise and demise of FTX: Infographic
• FTX execs hid $8 billion in liabilities in a customer account that Bankman-Fried referred to as ‘our Korean friend’s account,’ CFTC prosecutors allege.

Not a good year for crypto investors. Definitely not a good year for FTX customers. Also, a reminder: Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev is still in jail.

2. VISA 👍 Blockchain

Credit giant Visa is exploring options to automatically send regular payments without manually signing transactions. They are building on Starknet (L2 solution). Well, that’s the recent news, but that’s not the only blockchain stuff they are doing. The legend has it that this autopayment solution is gonna be game-changing for e-commerce.

In October, they filed trademark applications for Crypto Wallets, NFTs & Metaverse. This week, Huobi teams up with Visa to launch Huobi Visa Card.

3. Vitalik vs Ripple

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin said that Ripple is a centralized entity against claims that they are more decentralized, in a recent interview with Bankless. Also made a statement: “XRP has not apologized for claiming that Bitcoin and Ethereum are Chinese-controlled.”

And the Chief Technology Officer of Ripple, David Schwartz, took to Twitter saying:

What are your thoughts on this? Some claim (Michael Saylor will say for sure 😂) that both are centralized, and there is no point in arguing. Anyways….

4. Crypto Survey

Blockchain.com surveyed on ‘Investor Sentiment’ focusing on crypto usage and sentiment leading into the holiday season and the new year.

Note: More than 40,000 people from all over the world who visited the Blockchain.com responded to survey questions between November 28 – December 9, 2022.

Here are some key findings:

• 41% purchased crypto this year and nearly 40% plan to purchase crypto next year.
• Countries with the highest responses, in order, were Nigeria, United States, United Kingdom, Ghana, and Germany.
• 44% of US respondents bought crypto this year and 40% plan to buy next year.
• Ghana respondents are pro-crypto, Brazilians were split almost 50/50 on purchasing crypto, and Italians were overwhelmingly skeptical of crypto

5. Coffeezilla vs Logan Paul

This week Coffeezilla (Youtuber known for exposing scams and ponzi schemes) exposed Logan Paul in a 3 part video series.

So the news is that Logan Paul made $40M off of his P2E (Play To Earn) Game project CryptoZoo, which was never fully built in the first place. The game resulted in many people losing tens of thousands of dollars.

I think it’s fair to call him a ‘mini SBF’. Anyways, this is the only response we got from Logan Paul till now.

Note: He has Blocked multiple YouTubers (on Twitter) criticizing him for the crypto Zoo controversy.

6. DEGODS to Ethereum??

DeGods (the top NFT project on Solana blockchain) and y00ts (secondary collection of DeGods) have announced their departure from Solana and revealed that they would be migrating to Ethereum and Polygon respectively.

Oops for Solana??

The otherside of the story: A Reddit post claims that the two projects asked the Solana Foundation for millions to remain on the network. While Polygon reportedly coughed up $5 million to bridge y00ts, the amount Ethereum paid is unknown.

Fun Fact: DeGods is officially the #1 most traded Solana NFT of all time.

7. Hacks, Exploits, Fee, Fines….

• Hackers drain $8M in assets from Bitkeep wallets in latest DeFi exploit.
• Bitcoin mining pool BTCcom reports $3M cyberattack.
• Rubic, the cross-chain DEX aggregator, was hacked for $1.4M.
• French investors sued Binance for over 2.4 million euros in losses.
• SEC Charges Thor Technologies for $2.6 million unregistered coin offering.
• Bankrupt Crypto Lender Celsius’ advisers, lawyers seek $52M in fees – Bloomberg

And a fun fact: According to Forbes, crypto billionaires have lost $116 billion of personal wealth since March.

Quick Bites

• Core Scientific, one of the largest Bitcoin miners by computing power in the world, has reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• Snowcrash has announced the launch of its National Geographic Genesis NFT
  collection. You can grab them in Jan.
• Twitter launches a new feature allowing users to view Crypto, Stock and ETF Prices.

• Mercedes filed NFT trademark applications.
• Scottie Pippen’s (NBA Player) NFTs (1000 pieces) sold out in 77 secs grossing 200 eth. Just another celebrity cash grab?? Just asking.
• Karl Sebastian Greenwood, the co-founder of the multi-billion dollar fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme OneCoin has pleaded guilty to multiple charges and faces a maximum of 60 years in prison.
• “Revenue is nice, but integrity trumps all”. The CEO of Paxful have made a decision to remove ETH from the exchange.
• Users can soon purchase cryptocurrencies with debit cards, credit cards, and bank transfers on Uniswap.
• CEO of Polygon Sandeep Nailwal launched a Web3 Accelerator to help early stage projects via mentorship and financing.
• My number in 172k% to finish +ve 👇

• Yuga Labs appoints Activision Blizzard President and COO Daniel Alegre as new CEO.
• Crypto exchange QuadrigaCX wallets move funds for first time in three years. The dead founder alive???
• CZ and Binance to bailout Voyager digital for $1.02B. Previously SBF and FTX tried to do that.
• Nigeria to pass bill legalizing crypto.
• The National Bank of Kazakhstan wants to roll out a CBDC as early as 2023. Somehow, every country wants to roll out a CBDC.
• Whales sell pressure breaks record for highest amount of Bitcoin sold within a 30-day period: CryptoSlate
• Donald Trump says his trading cards were about ‘art’ and not money. WTF 😂

Numbers Of The Week

200M

Polygon’s total unique addresses cross 200 million.

$2

A user sent $200,000,000 for a $2 fee.

350

That’s the number of scam tokens created every day this year, according to Solidus Labs.

$93M

South Korea freezes US$93M in assets of seven ex-Terra associates.

Interesting Tweets

Remember those national team tokens everyone was talking about before the world cup? Here’s how they performed since the world cup started on Nov. 20th:

Argentina -64%
Spain -85%
Brazil -90%
Portugal -75% 
Italy -50%
Peru -73%

[Milk Road Daily]

The failure of FTX is not a failure of crypto, it is a failure of centralization. DeFi is the point. [Tom Emmer]

The SEC admits that FTX customer assets were used to bail out BlockFi. Were those customer assets funneled to the SEC to make payments on the $100 million SEC/BlockFi settlement? Did the SEC bother to conduct any due diligence on the source of those funds? [Stuart Alderoty]

My #Christmas gift to #HODLers is this #Bitcoin chart. As you can see Bitcoin is much closer to its ceiling than its floor. The yellow line that was once support is now resistance. Since the upside potential is so low and downside risk so high, the smart move is to sell today. [Peter Schiff]

Just the start. @0xPolygon. [Narb]

Interesting Reads

• A thread on Telegram token $TON
• 5 Digital Economy Predictions for 2023
• The Most Overvalued & Undervalued Blockchain Platforms Right Now
• A mini thread on crypto options

Do You Know?

Over 570k Bitcoin (worth $9.6B) have been taken off exchanges this year.

Meme Of The Week 😂

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice. Please be careful and always do your own research.