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Wassup web3 people. Sujith.eth is back with another weekly issue of web3 updates.

What’s Happening in Web3

What do you think the price of Bitcoin would be in 2025?

I’d say “$49,000”

1. Justin Sun & SEC

Tron founder, Justin Sun is being sued by SEC for securities and market manipulation. SEC claimed Sun conducted over 600,000 wash trades of TRX.

Several celebrities were accused of illegally promoting the assets, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, & Lil Yachty.

2. FTX & SBF Stuff

Bribing. Borrowing…. What haven’t he done??

• FTX is trying to recover $460M of customer funds that were allegedly misappropriated from venture capital firm Modulo Capital (one of the largest investments made by FTX under Sam Uncle’s leadership).
• SBF borrowed over $10M from Alameda in 2021 and gave all the money to his father as a gift (by using his lifetime estate and gift tax exemption). That’s the cash he’s now using to pay his lawyers.
• SBF charged with bribing Chinese government officials with $40M: Chinese authorities froze Alameda’s crypto trading accounts on two of China’s largest exchanges in 2021. And these accounts contained over $1B worth of crypto. SBF reportedly transferred around $40M worth of crypto from Alameda’s main trading account to a private cryptocurrency wallet, and at the same time as the payment, the accounts were unfrozen.

3. Home As An NFT

An Atlanta home tokenized as an NFT and was sold for $214,882 in less than three minutes.

The property was divided into 6k tokens, each representing a fraction of the ownership so that investors can own a portion of the property without having to purchase the entire asset (aka Real Estate Tokenization).

4. YouTube Channel Hack

Youtube Channel: Linus Tech Tips, got hacked and the scammers promoted two scams (Elon Musk’s giveaway, and ChatGPT AI coin promotion).

Stay #SAFU

These Elon Musk Tesla scammers are getting out of control these days. And AI coins too 🤦‍♂️

5. $372M Lost 😢

$372M were lost to crypto scams and exploits, since Jan 2023 (Q1). Only $1.4M (0.3%) was recovered.

The good part?

The $372 million reflects a 71% decrease from the $1.2 billion recorded in the first quarter of 2022.

Biggest losers:

• Euler Finance: $196M
• BonqDAO: $120M
• CoinDeal: $45M

BNB Chain suffered 18 episodes out of 47 recorded during the first 3 months of the year.

6. Coinbase Updates

1/ Political Donations:

• Coinbase to start donating to pro-crypto candidates in US elections.

2/ Buy the dip like Cathie Wood: 

• ARK invest sold Coinbase shares on Tuesday, then bought an even larger haul on Thursday after word of the SEC’s warning tanked the price.
• Purchased nearly $18M worth of $COIN shares shortly after the exchange was threatened by the SEC [check out what Coinbase’s Cheif Legal Officer has to say on the SEC actions]. The SEC issued a wells notice to Coinbase. The notice is related to securities violations.

3/ On-chain Staking:

• Coinbase moves to on-chain staking for Tezos, Cosmos, Solana, and Cardano.
• It will pause staking and unstaking, beginning on March 24, and will resume those capabilities on the 29th. And Algorand (ALGO) staking will be discontinued on March 29th.

4/ Brian Armstrong:

“What we’re going to do is start putting out content where people can contact their congressman, donate to pro-crypto candidates, show up at town halls, and make your voice heard. We are going to elect pro-crypto candidates in this country to make sure that our success is ensured.”

7. Kwonnnnnnn

Do Kwon was arrested in Montenegro.

He has been charged with eight separate counts after the arrest, including commodities fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to defraud and engage in market manipulation.

Do Kwon’s business partner Hon Chang Joon was also arrested.

8. 2 Addresses. $2M 🤑

2 Addresses got $2M worth of $ARB.

“So what? They might be some crypto whales”

Well, the twist here is they got $2M worth of $ARB from almost 1500 wallets, and those are linked to two wallets.

What does that mean? Airdrop farming!!

According to lookonchain, one address received 1.4M $ARB($1.92M) via 866 addresses and added all 1.4M $ARB to Uniswap to provide liquidity. The other address received 933,375 $ARB($1.28M) via 630 addresses.

What you need to know:

Most of the activity before airdrops is basically farming and not really using the product. The same happened (happening) for BlUR and probably the same for ARB’s ATHs recently.

9. Tarzan in Metaverse

Australia-based XLABEL and marketplace X2Y2 will launch a 9,999-token Tarzan: Lord of the Apes NFT collection for 0.05 ETH (about $90) each on March 28 for people added to an allow list.

The public sale to follow on March 30 for the remaining supply at 0.06 $ETH (about $110) each.

Also, each version of the Tarzan character sold in Ethereum NFT form will be compatible with Unreal Engine, the game development software developed by Epic Games that powers Fortnite and many other popular video games.

10. Punk GONE 😢

A CryptoPunk NFT worth 77 $ETH was sent to a burn address to be permanently destroyed. However, the collector intended to borrow some money against it to buy another NFT.

While going through the unfamiliar process of wrapping NFTs, Riley accidentally sent the asset to a burn address – which permanently deleted the NFT from circulation.

11. No Second Best!!

Microstrategy purchases 6,455 more Bitcoins and Michael Saylor announces they repaid its $205M loan to Silvergate.

This recent acquisition of 6455 $BTC for $150M took the total holdings of MS to 138,995 BTC (∼ $4.1B).

4 Billion Freaking Dollars worth of Bitcoin.

12. Euler Finance Hack Update

Out of the $200M that got hacked from the Euler Finance protocol, the hacker returned 51000 $ETH (approx $90M). (Fun Fact: The hacker only paid 99 cents in fee for this transaction)

In another transaction, 7737 ETH was sent, worth over $13M (Also, on March 18th, the hacker sent 3,000 ETH to the protocol, worth nearly $5.4M).

Final Update: The hacker has returned $177M of the stolen funds as of now (86%).

“The rest of the money will be returned ASAP. I only look after my safety, and that is the reason for the delay. I’m sorry for any misunderstanding,”  – Jacob (the hacker)

13. Disney Is Not Into Metaverse

Last year, Meta, the company had spent $15B on “metaverse” had laid off 11k+ employees (13%).

Now, Disney is laying off about 7,000 employees, including the 50-member team that was supposed to spearhead its metaverse efforts. [WSJ]

14. Binance vs CFTC

Binance and CZ were sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The U.S. regulator alleged that Zhao and his company violated trading and derivatives rules, according to a lawsuit filed by the CFTC in a Chicago federal court.

CZ’s response.

15. Crazy Crypto Story!

All crazy things happen in crypto.

Aiden Pleterski (the Canadian who calls himself ‘Crypto King’) allegedly raised $41.5M from investors but only invested $670,000, using the rest of the funds for personal expenses like private jet rentals, vacations, and high-end cars.

In December 2022, Pleterski was kidnapped and tortured for three days as a result of a botched crypto investment scheme. Kidnappers demanded $3 million for his release. They released him 3 days later after torturing him.

Also, only $25 million in creditors have come forward in the bankruptcy filings. (March 16th).

Pleterski has admitted that greed took over and caused more losses.

I mean…”Stealing. Kidnap. Ransom. Torture…..”😢

Quick Bites

• Uniswap is set to launch its V3 iteration on Avalanche with over $1.5B in TVL.
• Ethereum addresses holding > 0.01 ETH hit an 8-month high.
• You can now send USDT to your telegram contacts.
• France to ban influencers from promoting crypto-related products.
• The Fed announced it’s raising interest rates by 25 basis points. This is the second interest rate hike this year.

• zkSync Launches Alpha Mainnet.
• Nasdaq to launch crypto custody service for BTC, ETH in 2023 to inaugurate digital assets arm.
• When Animoca Brands initially unveiled its plans for the metaverse fund in November 2022, its target was $2 billion. This was then cut in half to $1B in January 2023. Now, it’s $800M according to Reuters.
• Bored Apes collab with GUCCI.

• Another hack! A bug allowed an exploiter to burn a majority of $SFM tokens in the Safemoon liquidity pool, artificially raising the token’s price so the contract’s WBNB could be drained in one transaction. Almost $8.9M in total was lost to the hacker.
• Consensys introduces an innovative Layer 2 solution for Ethereum! Their own zkEVM network called Linea.
• Liquid staking protocol Lido (LDO) to stop providing staking services for Polkadot (DOT) and Kusama (KSM) on Aug. 1. Also, it’s not accepting new staking deposits for Polkadot, Kusama.
• Polygon Labs announced the launch of Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta, and Vitalik performed the first transaction on the platform.

Over 75% of y00ts NFT ($37M+ worth of NFTs) made the move from Solana to Polygon in just over 24 hours.

Interesting Numbers

257k

On March 23rd, the gas fee spent inscribing ordinals in a day hit an ATH of $257,460.

500k

The Ethereum Foundation has doubled the maximum bug bounty to $500,000 for identifying vulnerabilities related to the upcoming Shapella upgrade. 

50M

Eigen Layer announces they have raised a $50M Series A Round led by Blockchain Capital.

31.6B

$31.6 billion will be incrementally unlocked over time, once the Shapella fork gets activated on April 12th.

1B

Crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital reported a net loss of $1 billion for the financial year. Q4: $288M loss. They made $1.7B in profit the prior year.

Interesting Reads

• cryptocp0x.nft wallet has the “highest degen score” ever
• Airdrops to hunt this week
• Reflections on Post-SVB Market Dynamics from Circle (USDC) founder

Do You Know?

The Total Value Locked (TVL) in Arbitrum is 2x the TVL in Polygon, right now.

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.