Issue 005: Weekly Web3 Newsletter by Sujith Godavarthi -

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This Week in Web3

1. Aaand it happened. Snoop Dogg and Eminem created waves in the metaverse. They both performed as Bored Apes at the VMAs. Watch the song here. [Tweet]

2. Ethereum number of addresses holding 32+ ETH just hit an 18-month high. The Merge is coming. [Tweet]

3. Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s VC firm Seven Seven Six launched a $177M crypto fund. [Investing]

4. A Satoshi-era wallet transferred the entire balance of 5,001.51 BTCs to a new wallet on August 28, with a floating profit of more than $96 million. [Tweet]

5. Remember El Salvador? the country is well known for its adoption of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Beach, a beach in El Zonte, El Salvador, is getting a set of infrastructure upgrades from the country’s government to build a set of facilities for tourists to better enjoy the location. How much? $203M! Two Hundred Freaking Million Dollars!!! [Bitcoin]

6. OptiFi, a Solana-based options trading Defi protocol accidentally closed down its program on Solana’s mainnet on Monday. So? Well, that lead to locking up $661K which can’t be recovered. The team announced that those funds will be reimbursed to the users in the next two weeks. [CryptoTimes, Tweet]

7. Vitalik is coming up with a book. He is about to release a book on proof-of-stake consensus on September 27th, compiling various writings by him over the last 10 years. [Tweet]

8. Stat: Over the last 30 days, Ethereum added about 71,307 unique addresses (newly created) daily, according to Etherscan. [finbold]

9. Wanna buy Bitcoin watches? A new watch (with a hefty price tag) ‘Astronomia’ (offering from Jacob & Co watchmakers) is being marketed to Bitcoin lovers. I tried buying the watch, but they are asking for money. So I had to drop out of that. [beincrypto]

10. Forget about your IRL date. We got an almost exact date for ‘The Merge’. At the same time, we also have a date for the Mt Gox $BTC release. The legend has it that both events will happen around the same time. Merge on September 13th and Mt Gox $BTC will release on September 15th (probably).

11. OpenSea reveals it is solely supporting NFTs on the upgraded Ethereum PoS chain. [Tweet]

12. Ethereum to 3000$? Analyst predicts an 80% surge of ETH price in September. [zycrypto]

13. Stat: 62% of all Bitcoin addresses did not sell any BTC for a year or more despite crypto winter. [Finbold]

14. As of now, how many cryptocurrencies do you think we have? It’s 10k. But out of those 10k cryptocurrencies, the top 5 make up 75% of the Total Market Value: Bitcoin is in the top with 40%, Ethereum is next with 20%, and Tether, USDC, and BNB combinedly took 16% of the pie. [AugustaFreePress]

15. Remember Napster? The first-ever peer-to-peer (P2P) music file sharing service. It was purchased by Algorand and Hivemind, a while ago. Now, Napster is going back to its roots and will launch a decentralized music ecosystem on the Algorand blockchain. [Medium]

16. Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork got a date. This important update is to increase network capacity and lower the cost of transactions. Wen? 22nd September. [Cointelegraph]

17. Stat: Ethereum miners generated $756 million in revenue in August ahead of the Merge, up 37% from July’s $545 million revenue. [TheBlock]

Interesting Reads Of The Week

NFTs

1. Solana NFT project DeGods was on fire this week. The trading volume went up huge with FP (floor price) sitting at 520 SOL. Why pump? Because the have a new collection called y00ts coming up, and people are going crazy to get a whitelist. Howie Mandal (yes, the TV show America’s Got Talent’s judge who’s got the best hair style) got a y00ts whitelist. Not just him, there are few more celebrities like Wayne Rooney, Lil Baby, and former NBA player Allen Iversion that showed interest in y00ts whitelist.

2. Meta now allows users to connect digital wallets and post NFTs across Facebook and Instagram. They are just calling it digital collectibles.

3. NFT trading volume has been down 99% over the past 4 months. From $2.7B on May 1st to $9.34M, last Sunday, it’s way too down. Crushed!!

4. Yuga Labs released a 2 min trailer showing the story of Koda and Otherside (the NFT lands). [Tweet]

5. Top NFT Sales this Week: A DeGods NFT sold for 7033.3 SOL ($221,177.31). A Bored Ape NFT sold for 769.9 ETH.

6. In August 2022, 301K new .eth names got registered. ENS generated $4.7m in protocol revenue, their 3rd highest monthly revenue. [Tweet]

7. TV show & Non-Fungible Tokens!!! This animated parody TV show ‘The R3el Metaverse’ features 5 characters: Bored Ape, World of Women, Cool Cat, Doodle, and RobotoReality. Meet the cast. [NFT Evening]

8. Tech startup Genies launched its NFT Fashion Marketplace ‘The Warehouse’. [NFT Plazas]

Do You Know?

Crypto Hackers stole $1.9B this year, according to Chainalysis. That’s a 58% jump in the ill-gotten gains.

Crypto CHAOS!!

The founder of Thodex, a sizeable Turkish cryptocurrency exchange service, who fled the country with $2 billion last year, has been arrested. He now faces 40,564 years in jail. I don’t think he is gonna make it. [Tomshardware]

KyberSwap’s frontend was exploited. The team identified and neutralized the exploit. Affected users will be compensated. [Tweet]

Crypto Asset Manager Babylon Finance is shutting down. The Rari hack is the key reason for that. [Tweet Thread]

Beer with Bill Murray NFT sold for $185k. Ok, but why is this featured on the “Chaos” list? Well, after the sale, a hacker drained all the funds from Bill Murray’s personal wallet. The hack stole 119.2 ETH ($185k) which was raised for a charity auction. But later, a runner-up in the action sent 120 ETH ($187.5k) to Chive Charities to replace what was lost. [Coindesk]

Bitcoin king in Trouble? Michael Saylor, the famous bitcoin bull has been hit with a lawsuit by the District of Columbia’s attorney-general for allegedly evading more than $25 million in income taxes. “I respectfully disagree with the position of the District of Columbia, and look forward to a fair resolution in the courts,” Saylor said in a statement provided to Bloomberg News. [Business Insider, Tweet]

Imagine stacking up 500 SOL to buy a DeGods NFT only to get the funds drained from the wallet. Unfortunately, this has happened! A Twitter user revealed losing 500 SOL to a wallet-draining scam. [Tweet]

Here is a funny story! Crypto.com sends $10.5M to a user instead of sending 100$. This happened in May 2021. Crypto.com realized its mistake in Dec 2021. By then, the woman had already spent it on a mansion in Craigieburn—a suburb in Melbourne. They asked for a refund 😅. She didn’t return. They sued her. She didn’t turn up to court and lost by default; now she has to sell the house. Crypto is full of drama, right? [Tweet, TheCryptoBasic]

Avalanche in trouble? A new report from Crypto Leaks alleges that Ava Labs paid off Roche Freedman to attack its competitors and keep regulators at bay. Ava Labs founder and CEO Emin Gün Sirer has described the piece as “conspiracy theory nonsense.” Avax was up 15% after this drama. [cryptobriefing, Tweet]

NFT Project Ragnarok (has nothing to do with Thor) raised $15.5M in April and has already spent $11.6M. Spent on what? They just paid themselves, mostly. Yes! Out of that, $6.9M went into their own pockets and $1.8M in trading losses. [Coindesk]

Favourite Web3 Takes Of The Week

In 2013 I figured that crypto would be a project that would take the rest of my life to see to completion. The world took 60+ years to migrate to millions of databases. The internet took decades to show its full potential. The same thing is true here. [Punk6529]

Bitcoin is going up for 3 years and then going down for 1 year. Is there a pattern here? If so, 2023 will be up only? Just wondering. [Miles Deutscher]

Vitalik gives a bear case for Bitcoin. “First, in the long term, Bitcoin security is going to come entirely from fees, and Bitcoin is just not succeeding at getting the level of fee revenue required to secure what could be a multi-trillion-dollar system. Second, proof of work provides much less security per dollar spent on transaction fees than proof of stake, and Bitcoin migrating away from proof of work seems to be politically infeasible.”

After the merge, PoS advocates will pump ETH to show success, ETH-PoW advocates will pump ETHW to make it thrive, BTC advocates will pump BTC to avoid flippening, L2 advocates will pump their token as an alternative. Only problem: We are in a bear. [John Brown]

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.

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Issue 005: Weekly Web3 Newsletter by Sujith Godavarthi