Nov 7th, 2022: Weekly Web3 Newsletter by Sujith Godavarthi

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Gm! sujith.eth is back with another interesting weekly edition of web3. From NFT & crypto pumps to hacks, numbers, and more… We have a lot to catch up on.

This Week in Web3

Let’s begin the show…

1. Art Gobbler NFT Collection

In the first 1 hour of minting Art Gobblers has done 6800 ETH volume, which is more than the total volume of ETH NFTs on OpenSea, the day before.

The collection made 37,000 ETH ($59M) in secondary volume in just four days and reached an ATH of 25 ETH, all thanks to the overhype on crypto Twitter. Now, they are back to 7ETH.

Here is a Twitter thread explaining the project.

Rememeber Pixelmon? 😅

2. Arbitrum is in full swing!!

It has more TVL (Total Value Locked) than Solana. That’s not it! This L2 solution now makes up 62% of all trades on Ethereum.

And also the total transactions recorded an astronomic 550% rise since the Nitro upgrade.

3. XLS20 goes live! 

What does that mean?

Well, this marks the launch of native NFT support on XRP Ledger. With a ‘no-smart-contracts approach’, XLS-20 supports a cut from secondary sales which can be directed to the original minter, and also people can co-own NFTs.

4. Meta & NFTs = 🔥 

Meta is pushing NFT adoption to the next level.

Instagram users will soon be able to mint, buy and sell NFTs directly on the app. Here’s the UI walkthrough of that feature.

Meta has chosen Polygon as the blockchain to mint NFTs, and Arweave to permanently store digital collectibles. And of course, the news has impacted the price of these tokens ($MATIC, $AR).

[Twitter Thread]

5. Andre Cronje is back!

Andre Cronje (Godfather of DeFi) is the founder of Yearn Finance & Keep3rV1. He is also the former Technical Advisor for the Fantom Foundation. After disappearing because of death threats, he is now back again at Fantom Foundation.

6. Vitalik says ‘Slow Down’

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin urges DeFi to slow down integration with Traditional Finance. Why?

“I don’t think we should be enthusiastically pursuing large institutional capital at full speed. I’m actually kinda happy a lot of the ETFs are getting delayed. The ecosystem needs time to mature before we get even more attention.”

He added, “Regulation that leaves the crypto space free to act internally but makes it harder for crypto projects to reach the mainstream is much less bad than regulation that intrudes on how crypto works internally.”

Read the full Twitter thread here. And because we are talking about Bitalik Vuterin…here is an unseen pic of him.

7. The Non-Saylor Experiment

What if Michael Saylor had bought Ethereum instead of Bitcoin? Before getting to, here is a fun fact: Bitcoin is less volatile than S&P 500 and Nasdaq.

Microstrategy would have earned almost $1.7B from a stash of Ether worth $5.7B today, instead of a 1.3B paper loss on Bitcoin. That’s not it! They (MicroStrategy) could be earning 100M$ per year in staking yield.

That’s just a fun number to know!! Nothing to take seriously as we don’t know what the future might hold. I could have become a billionaire if I had created Facebook, but I didn’t, so… 

Someone made a website that track these numbers. And loved the URL they put.

8. Bitcoin mining in big trouble?

Core Scientific Inc., one of the world’s largest miners of Bitcoin, warned that it may run out of cash by the end of the year and could seek relief through bankruptcy protection.

In a recent SEC filing, the Australia-based Bitcoin mining firm Iris Energy said that while it can generate $2 million in monthly gross profit by mining bitcoin, monthly principal and interest repayments on its debt stands at $7 million, representing a $5 million monthly shortfall. 

Similar situation for Argo Blockchain, another Bitcoin mining firm. In a news release, the firm stated: “Should Argo be unsuccessful in completing any further financing, Argo would become cash flow negative in the near term and would need to curtail or cease operations.”

“Miners are struggling for a multitude of reasons right now,” Nick Hansen, CEO of crypto-mining firm Luxor, said to TechCrunch. “We’re seeing historically low hash price, which means that miner revenues are at all-time lows.”

9. Market Overview

On Nov 5th, the global Cryptocurrency market cap reclaimed $1.1 trillion for the first time since September. Arweave (+41.18%), Matic (+23.73%), and Fantom (+22.13) are some top gainers to take note of. While the Meta announcement pumped the first two, Andre Cronje coming back pumped FTM and other Fantom ecosystem coins.

10. Crypto is the way!

Many Lebanese people are storing their wealth in cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin) and making payments using a Stablecoin like Tether.

Stat: Among the Middle East and North African countries, Lebanon ranks second only to Turkey in terms of the volume of cryptocurrency received.

As a country whose banking system is fundamentally broken after decades of mismanagement, it left no option for its people when it comes to saving money. Read the full story here.

When $1 is worth 15 cents, crypto is the way!

Quick Bites

  • India rolled out its digital rupee(CBDC) pilot on November 1st.
  • Reddit NFTs on Polygon passed 10M$ in sales.
  • Nikolai Muchgian, co-founder of MakerDAO passed away.
  • Vitalik Buterin shares the updated roadmap of Ethereum.
  • Dapper Labs, which created the NFT marketplace NBA Top Shot, is laying off 22% of its staff, citing the “macroeconomic environment.”
  • To make accessing Solana data simpler, Google Cloud is introducing support for the Solana blockchain in BigQuery. This will happen in the first quarter of 2023.
  • HBO and Warner Bros partnered with Nifty’s, the eco-friendly NFT marketplace to launch official Game Of Thrones collectibles. No official launch date yet.
  • Because of a misconfiguration of the p.Network bridge (cross-chain bridge provider), someone minted $1B worth of pGALA tokens out of thin air. “All GALA tokens on Ethereum as well as the underlying bridge collateral are SAFE”, pNetwork tweeted.
  • Binance has decided to liquidate the remaining FTT tokens.
  • Instagram and Facebook have integrated support for Solana NFTs.
  • Cross-Chain DEX Rubic lost $1M as hackers gained access to private keys.
  • Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson put forward a proposal to make Dogecoin a Cardano sidechain, claiming that he is willing to do the migration for free.
  • China is known for banning (or trying to ban) crypto every year. But do you know that the Chinese government holds $3.9B in Bitcoin?
  • BNB Chain now has the highest number of unique addresses outside of Bitcoin.
  • An attacker stole $2.3M worth of tokens from FriesDAO.
  • In September & October, Solana saw $2B of Stablecoin outflow.
  • Hodlnaut lost $190M in Terra crash.
  • Hop Protocol crossed $3B in cumulative cross-chain volume.
  • Despite the bear market, developer activity has not slowed down on Polygon.
  • The attacker who exploited Team Finance for $14.7M, has returned $7M. The attacker will keep 10% of the funds as a bounty.
  • GameStop launched a new NFT gaming marketplace in partnership with Ethereum layer-two solution ImmutableX.
  • 4.4M users joined the Tron ecosystem in the past 30 days.
  • $APE staking delays have cost holders millions of dollars as the token value declined.
  • Apollo will offer Bitcoin and crypto custody for institutions. They are well known for managing assets worth 500B$+.
  • Mastercard is showing people how to buy NFTs using MATIC on Polygon.
  • Aave might be deployed into zksync testnet 👀
  • 60% of Ethereum L2 volume comes from STARKs.
  • “We want to help bring Twitter into web3 when they are ready”. CZ (Binance CEO)
  • Elon Musk mentions Doge as a payment option for Twitter.
  • Solend Protocol was exploited for $1.26M (in oracle attack) this week.
  • Hong Kong to consider legalizing retail crypto trading.
  • South Africa’s largest grocery store Pick n Pay now accepts Bitcoin.
  • J.P. Morgan has executed its 1st LIVE trade on a public blockchain.
  • Crypto Punks enter Guinness World Record Book.
  • Crypto Exchange Derbit hacked for $28M.
  • A user disrupted the Lightning Network with a single transaction when he allegedly created a non-standard Bitcoin transaction that prevented users from opening new Lightning channels.
  • Dogecoin is up 115% over the last month and 80% over the past week. All thanks to Elon Musk – Twitter Deal and also this photo.
  • Skyward Finance was hacked for 3M. The hacker reportedly drained the platform of 1.1 million NEAR tokens.
  • India, at present, is home to more than 450 Web3 startups, which have raised $1.3 billion in funding in the last two years (until April 2022), NASSCOM reported. 11% of the world’s crypto and Web3 talent is in India.

Numbers Of The Week

$303M

OpenSea volume fell to $303 million in October, the lowest since June 2021. This is 94% lower than all-time high of $4.86 billion in January 2022.

52%

A survey by Grayscale found that 52% of Americans agree cryptocurrency is the future of finance, with 44% saying they will include crypto in their portfolio.

$760M

A record amount of 760M dollars were stolen in exploits during October. #Hacktober.

$545M

Coinbase has reported a net loss of $545 million in Q3 2022.

97.7%

According to this research, 97.7% of the tokens launched on Uniswap were rugs.

$284M

Stablecoins worth $284M were sold to Crypto Exchanges by Alameda Research.

Interesting Reads

Do You Know?

Ethereum has a larger market cap than the Bank of China. [Tweet]

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.