March 2nd, 2023: Weekly Web3 Newsletter by Sujith Godavarthi

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Gm, web3 people! Sujith.eth is back with another weekly edition! Coinbase’s L2 solution, Big NFT dump ever, Solana down? and more…

What’s Happening in Web3

Before getting into the hot updates, have a look at my weekly profits for some motivation:

1. FTX

Updates on the most painful event that happened in 2022.

FTX Japan saw more than $50M in withdrawals after enabling them on Feb 21. The lesson from FTX Japan.
SBF is charged with more than 300 illegal political donations.
Former FTX engineering director Nishad Singh pleads guilty to criminal charges.
Binance shuffled +$1 Billion in customer assets without customer permission, just like FTX, according to Forbes. CZ labels it a ‘FUD article’ and said “I am deeply disappointed that Forbes continues to write baseless articles, losing their own credibility”. Whom should we trust, on this?
FTX funds were used to buy a $3.5M castle in the Czech Republic.

2. Coinbase’s L2 Solution

Coinbase is launching its own Layer 2 solution called ‘Base’, built using Optimism’s OP Stack to offer a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build DApps on-chain.

They confirmed that there won’t be a token, so don’t go crazy with airdrop farming!!

It was built using Optimism’s OP Stack, and it offers full EVM equivalence at a fraction of the cost the network is secured by Ethereum 🔒

And btw… They also announced the Base Ecosystem Fund, which is to invest in and support early-stage projects building on Base that meet predetermined investment criteria. 💰

3. OpenSea vs Blur

Blur (57%) and OS (34.5%) in market share based on the number of trades in the past week:

I think the big question is can Blur still dominate OpenSea once the rewards wear off? My answer is no. But let’s see..

But for now, Blur is rocking!!

OpenSea’s share in the total trading volume across marketplaces plunged from 44% before the launch of the $BLUR token to a little over 14% on 24 February.
BLUR has achieved an incredible trading volume of $1.04 billion in the last 30 days, which is more than double the trading volume of OpenSea, which stands at $479 million.

And on the other hand, Bitcoin Punks are on 🔥

4. Big NFT Dump

Here is an interesting story of the week:

Recently, Mando & OSF (the team behind RektGuy NFT) sold a lot of NFTs.

They sold:

⏺️ 72 BAYC
⏺️ 32 Otherside
⏺️ 17 Beanz Official
⏺️ 11 MAYC
⏺️ 7 Azuki

All of that equated to $9.9M liquidity🔥 and the floor price wasn’t affected by this at all!

And from the other side, an NFT Whale ‘Machi Big Brother‘ put big Blur bids on Apes to potentially get a big airdrop (aka airdrop farming for the upcoming Blur token rewards) from Blur Marketplace.

He got (bought) 72 apes, and that made him a 182 Apes HODLer 😦.

Just to add context to the $BLUR Airdrop, he received 1.8M $BLUR in the last airdrop. And then he sold it all. In total, he received $1.3M for his 1.8M Blur tokens, selling at an average price of $0.707.

And….. He sold 1,010 NFTs in 48 hours🤯. One of the largest NFT dump ever!

⏺️ 90 BAYC for 5707 ETH
⏺️ 191 MAYC for 3091 ETH
⏺️ 112 Azuki for 1644 ETH
⏺️ 308 Otherdeed for 582 ETH

In total, he sold 1010 NFTs for 11680 ETH ($18.6M) and bought 991 NFTs for 9833 ETH in the past 48 hrs.

5. Hacking The Hacker!

Remember the 2022 Wormhole exploit?? Wormhole, one of the largest bridges between Solana and other blockchains has been hacked for about $320M, or 120,000 $ETH.

Now, Jump Crypto & Oasis teamed up to steal back $225M from the Wormhole hacker. How?

The stolen funds most recently sat in an Oasis crypto wallet after moving multiple times. The High Court of England and Wales ordered Oasis to recover the stolen assets. Oasis teamed up with Jump Crypto (Wormhole’s parent company).

With the help of a few white hat hackers, they realized that Oasis could upgrade its smart contract and exploit it through a vulnerability. Oasis made the upgrade that triggered the smart contracts and successfully recovered $225M!!

After considering the DAI repayment to retrieve the collateral, the net return from the counter exploit was around $140M (according to Blockworks).

Yay!! All good. Everyone goes home, happy! Yeah, that’s what I thought too…

But, if all it takes is a court order to exploit their own wallet….…

Quick Bites

Justin Sun (founder of Tron) to move crypto exchange Huobi’s Asia HQ to Hong Kong.
Audius, the blockchain-based music streaming platform has announced integration with TikTok. And that means users can share songs from Audius in their TikTok videos.
Robinhood gets subpoenaed by SEC over crypto listings.
Mastercard collaborated with Immersive (Web3 payment protocol) to allow crypto payments in Web3 via $USDC settlements.
Two Tacobell lovers tied the knot in the Metaverse.
Degens are gambling Goerli ETH (#GETH) testnet tokens.

According to the judge, NBA TopShot NFTs meet security requirements under the Howey Test and denied Dapper Labs (creator of these NFTs) request to dismiss the lawsuit (Yes, a lawsuit was filed against Dapper Labs alleging NBA Top Shot NFT moments are unregistered securities). “They Are Coming For Our JPEGs”

Spotify Is testing ‘token-enabled playlists’. This will allow holders of NFTs to connect their wallets and listen to curated music.
3AC NFTs are for sale (worth about $10M). My bid got rejected, for bidding 0.069 ETH.
ConsenSys acquired HAL.
Erika Wykes-Sneyd, the web3 lead for Adidas, mentioned the popular sportswear brand was compelled by the idea of token-gating future sneaker drops.
Playboy announces plans to launch ‘MetaMansion’ Virtual World this year.
Mitsubishi and Fujitsu are working to build the “Ryugukoku,” or “Japanese Metaverse Economic Zone.”
Google Cloud 🤝 Tezos .
Artifact Labs collaborated with RMS Titanic to bring Titanic’s physical artifacts into Web3 as NFTs. 5,500 physical artifacts as an NFT collection, called “ARTIFACTs.”
Uniswap’s NFT marketplace will now let traders use any Ethereum-based token to buy digital assets. You can use USDC to buy a Punk (if you are rich!).
The digital key that came out of a monkey’s ass was sold for $1.6M. Mongraal
won “The Key” by ranking 1st in the Sewer Pass games and was sold for 1000 $ETH ($1.6M).

Binance denied using client assets without consent after a Forbes report said the crypto exchange moved “$1.8 billion of collateral meant to back its customers’ stablecoins.”
Coinbase will suspend trading for Binance USD (#BUSD) on March 13, 2023.
Drake lost $400k in Bitcoin on the bet he made on Jake Paul to win the fight by knocking out Tommy Fury. Tommy won.
YugaLabs is releasing 300 NFTs on Bitcoin. Just riding the hype train IMO!
SEC Chair Gensler: “everything other than Bitcoin” is security.

Polygon partners with Eclipse, a provider of roll-up technology to enable developers to migrate their Dapps from Solana to Polygon through the use of the Polygon SVM.
Solana goes down… once again! And the reason for the outage is unknown.
The SEC is now coming after emojis, after a judge rules that emojis like these… 🚀📈💰indicate financial returns in the Dapper Labs (creators of NBA TopShots) case.
MetaMask has launched an SDK (software developer kit) in the Unity store.

Interesting Numbers

43.6

Banks around the world dropped cryptocurrency exposure by 43.6% in 2022 – Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

700k

$700,000 drained from BNB Chain-based DeFi protocol LaunchZone.

9.6M

MyAlgo, a native wallet for Algorand, advised its users to withdraw their funds. This was in response to a $9.6 million exploit that it encountered last week.

284k

4 unknown people robbed investment blogger Yuri Boytsov. Attacked Boytsov at his villa, forcing him to unlock his phone and give them the passwords to his crypto wallets. And they forced him to transfer $284000 in bitcoins to their accounts.

108 ETH

Jason Williams burned his 108 ETH worth of BAYC NFT just to move it to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Interesting Reads

Do You Know?

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian spent $15,000 to buy 50,000 $ETH (average price: $3.33) in 2014, which is now worth $82.4 million. “In hindsight, I didn’t invest nearly as much as I should have,” Ohanian told Forbes.

My regret: I should have created Bitcoin even before Satoshi did it.

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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