Issue 10: Weekly Web3 Newsletter by Sujith Godavarthi

Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here

This Week in Web3

Let’s begin the show…

1. Ethereum L2s > Avalanche (L1)?

What if I say that the L2s of Ethereum: Optimism and Arbitrum, are each flipping Avalanche in daily transactions?

The total transactions on Arbitrum and Optimism hit 5.7M and 5.2M each, respectively in September while Avalanche C-chain saw only 4.8M transactions. By the way, Arbitrum already have a 50% share in L2 market.

Source: Twitter, Instagram

2. Bitcoin & Mcdonald’s 🤗

NO! I am not talking about having to work at Mcdonald’s for investing in Bitcoin.

I am talking about paying with Bitcoin at Mcdonald’s. Yes, you can now. But for that, you need to travel to Lugano, Switzerland. Watch this video.

3. Bitcoin Haaaaaashing…

Bitcoin hash rate hits a new all-time high. CZ (Binance guy) says the miners know something that we probably don’t know.

4. $3M Worth Of Coinbase Shares 🤑

Tobias Lütke, well known for buying tobi.eth for 30 ETH (by the way, he is also the CEO of Shopify) bought almost $3 million worth of Coinbase shares over the past two months. He is just buying the dip.

On average he bought $369,000 of Coinbase stock every week since the start of August.

Source: Blockworks

5. CBDC in India

India’s central bank, the RBI, released its concept note on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Revolutionary? Or just another form of modern slavery? They can be regulated and controlled by the central bank. So….

6. Coinbase Documentary on Prime

A documentary on Coinbase, titled ‘COIN’ was released on Amazon Prime. The CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong revealed in a tweet that he agreed to do this to demystify crypto.

“I agreed to do this documentary because I wanted to demystify what it takes to build a tech startup and encourage more people to start companies. I also wanted to demystify crypto.”

Source: Twitter Thread

7. 3AC NFTs To Be Liquidated

Remember Three Arrows Capital? One of the ‘got margin-called because of $LUNA crash’ victims.

Turns out they have now transferred over 300 NFTs (owned by Starry Night Capital, the investment fund focused on NFTs and owned by 3AC) to a new Ethereum wallet .

They spent around $35 million to acquire these NFTs in 2021. By July 2022, they are worth $4.2M. Now, they are worth around $850k. Are these NFTs about to get liquidated? Anyway, I am sending my offer, right away. 0.0420 ETH.

Just in case you don’t know, the Terra-Luna crash cost them $200 million.

Source: Blockworks

8. Mastercard Launches ‘Crypto Secure’

MasterCard launches software called ‘Crypto Secure’ to fight against fraudulent crypto transactions. This tool is being built by CipherTrace, a blockchain startup that was acquired by Mastercard last year.

The software aims to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in order to help banks and crypto-centric debit card issuers identify fraudulent crypto transactions.

Source: Bitcoin.com

9. ETH & Bitcoin Mining

In the month of September, miners (before the merge happened) and validators (post merge) combined made $406.86 million. Down by 50%+ month-over-month.

On the other hand, Bitcoin miners brought in about $550.5 million in revenue in September, down 16.2% from the previous month.

But if we just zoom back, according to Blockchain.com data, revenue from Bitcoin mining dropped to less than $20 million a day compared to the previous year, when miners were making around $62 million daily.

10. $570M Binance Hack

An attacker stole 2 million BNB (~$566M USD) from the Binance Bridge.

The CEO of Binance tweeted: “An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC. The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly.”

The chain was paused for several hours.

Source: Tweet, Reddit, Tweet

11. Privacy is Still Illegal

Remember Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash developer that got arrested? The tool was used by bad actors but Pertsev was held responsible for writing the open-source code. He was arrested for it. Yes, for writing the code.

A dutch judge dismissed Pertsev’s appeal last week and so he will remain in jail until late November. That’s not it. His wife, Ksenia Malik, also fears all of Pertsev’s property will be seized and auctioned.

“At the moment, only a car, but I think they can come and take something else at any moment. I don’t feel safe,” she said. Prosecutors will sell “all of our legal property at auction, leaving me with nothing.”

Source: The Block

A lawyer tweeted: ‘It is shocking and disturbing that @TornadoCash developer Alexey Pertsev is still being held in custody even though the authorities haven’t told anyone why, and possibly for the mere act of writing code. This isn’t a crypto issue, it’s a human rights issue.’

12. Celsius Executives Cashed Out $17M

According to some sources, the top 3 executives of the bankrupt crypto lender Celsius cashed out $17M right before suspending withdrawals and filing for bankruptcy.

Alex Mashinsky (CEO) withdrew about $10 million in cryptocurrency in May 2022. Daniel Leon (Co-founder) withdrew about $7 million.

Simply put, they got their cash out!

Celsius owes billions of dollars to investors. It’s hard to return billions, so they took their millions. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Source: Gizmodo

13. Kim Kardashian Pays $1.26M In Fine

Kim Kardashian paid $1.26M as a fine to SEC for promoting EthereumMax scam (she charged $250k for that) on her Instagram story in the past (when I was 2 years old).

Kim didn’t let her followers know that it was a paid promotion. And now, she paid for her past mistake.

Now, the other side of the story is Gary Gensler (chairperson, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) released a video explaining ‘not to trust celebrities when it comes to investing advice’. The SEC staff aren’t happy with that. Why? They are calling it a ‘publicity stunt’. I mean, he appeared on CNBC (reportedly made a stealth arrangement for this) to brag about the settlement, so…..

Anyways, here is an authentic song that you should listen to .

Quick Bites

Dogecoin surpasses 4.4M unique wallet addresses.
It’s been 8 years since Tether launched USDT.
Celsius co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer S. Daniel Leon have stepped down, a week after the CEO resigned.
We will promote efforts to expand the use of the metaverse and NFTs – Japan’s Prime Minister.
South Korean prosecutors freeze an additional $39 million worth of Bitcoin & crypto reportedly owned by Do Kwon.
Elon taking over Twitter sent Dogecoin 5% up.
Since the merge happened, Ethereum lost 20% of its market cap.
South Korean prosecutors have arrested a Terraform Labs employee (it’s not Do Kwon).
Czech city of Královec to introduce Bitcoin as legal tender.
A recent study by BCBS revealed that the world’s top banks have exposure to around $9 billion worth of cryptocurrencies.
Namibia’s central bank says Bitcoin can be accepted as payment.
Under a partnership with Near Protocol, Google Cloud will support Near developers in building and scaling their Web3 projects and DApps.
Ethereum’s number of non-zero addresses hit an ATH (86,763,719) this week
Someone lost 7 Bored Apes (BAYC NFTs) that are worth $1M combinedly to a hack. [Tweet]
Payment of 141,000 BTC to former Mt. Gox customers set for January 2023.

Numbers Of The Week

74%: Bitcoin accumulation level reached a 7-year high with 74%. This metric is a measure of buying bitcoins and HODLing for 6 months. It was 70%, and 77% at the last bottoms in 2019, and 2015 respectively. [Tweet]

5,595,907,839: That’s the amount of $LUNC Binance has burnt in the first period. It is equal to $1.9M. [Tweet]

437,365: That’s the total number of ENS (.eth) names registered in September. [Tweet]

14,500: A 14,500-page Celsius court filing with the names and recent transactions of all users on the platform has been leaked. [Tweet]

12000: That’s the number of crypto projects that have ceased trading this year, Nomics reports.

Interesting Reads

Do You Know?

Around 20% of the 21M bitcoins that will ever exist are gone. Like gone forever!

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.

.

.