🚀 Caring, Sharing, and Unicorns

NFT Art and Community Owned Digital Museums—and Other Magical Things

Apr 19, 2021

Good Morning. It’s Monday already—don’t feel bad about hitting that snooze button earlier, you earned it!

In today’s issue:

✨ Decentralized Autonomous Organization PleasrDAO buys Edward Snowden’s NFT and we fall into that crypto rabbit hole for you

🦎 Coingecko drops its quarterly crypto report for Q1

💼 Workspace sharing company WeWork plans on taking a second crack at going public—this time via, you guessed it—SPAC

Quick Bites

Clubhouse, the invite-only party-line app for the 21st century, is reported to be in talks with investors to raise funding in a round that would value the half-podcast, half-Zoom audio app at 4 billion dollars. This time last year, Clubhouse was worth only $1 billion.
Netflix reports first quarter earnings on 4/20, but Netflix’s numbers at the beginning of the pandemic will be hard to beat. 15.8 million new subscribers in the first quarter of last year, if you’re counting.
Crypto trading volume in the South Korean market has surpassed its stock-market for the first time (source in Korean). The crypto market beat the stock market $21.5bn to $18.8bn according to coinmarketcap and stock market data.
“Instant gratification takes too long.” —Carrie Fisher
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Pleasin’ Peeps 🐥

What do you get when you put a bunch of people passionate about art, coding, and decentralized finance in the same room? You get @pleasrDAO, a group of NFT art fans who came together to form a decentralized organization (more on that later) that invests in digital art, forming the first decentralized digital-museum.

Last month, PleasrDAO was formed by an unknown number of anonymous art fans, who harnessed Ethereum’s smart-contracts to pool Ether for the sole purpose of buying @pplpleasr’s Uniswap V3 unicorn video which sold to PleaserDAO for $525,000 in Ether.

But their sole purpose didn’t last for long because the group soon raised enough funding to purchase a second work, Edward Snowden’s NFT, (a self portrait made from pages of the famous US appeals court decision titled “Stay Free”) for $5.5 million in Ether. Snowden plans on donating all of the proceeds to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Edward Snowden @Snowden

FIVE POINT FIVE MILLION from @pleasrdao. It feels like the whole staff of @FreedomofPress is watching live, and we've never seen anything like this. This is more than a spectacle -- this is drama. All eyes turn to the dark horse.

Edward Snowden @Snowden

The @PleasrDAO juggernaut crashes into the lead with $4,300,000. This is practically the annual budget of @FreedomOfPress, and a real monument to charity. And then immediately overtaken by @xaix2k with 2,021.1337 -- $4.9M! By any measure, tonight is a landmark. https://t.co/jqVhQxXrBH

Only two-months old, and PleasrDAO is already making a impressive impression within the realm decentralized art ownership.

Okay, WTF is a DAO?

“The DAO’s passionate about decentralization and using the DAO to benefit society—not just profit.” (pplpleasr)

Do you feel like you have no say in the direction of your company? Or maybe you just hate your boss? Well, there’s a new kid in town that aims to change these realities about the workplace we’ve come to normalize over time. A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is an entity that spreads out the control of the organization across the team, community, and users. This eliminates the need for one central authority figure and allows for everyone to take part in the discussion, and ultimately, decide the evolution of the organization.

Had Us in the First Quarter 🏀

Coingecko released their Q1 2021 Quarterly Cryptocurrency Report on Wednesday, highlighting crypto’s biggest events in this historic quarter.

Some key takeaways:

By the end of Q1 2021, the total crypto market cap touched 1.92 trillion dollars— a 146% increase from last quarter
Alts lead the way. In Q1 2021, Bitcoin and Ethereum underperformed compared to their competing counterparts—such as BNB (Binance), ADA (Cardano), and DOT (Polkadot) which grew 710%, 555%, and 294% respectively
Total Value Locked (TVL) on Binance Smart Chain reaches US $19.5 billion
NFT flips DeFi. Leading up to Beeple’s historic ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ auction for $69 million in Ether, Google searches for “NFT” outshined searches for “DeFi” topping out on March 12th, 2021
NFT trading volume up 1,281x from last year. NBA Top Shots, Crypto Punks, and Hashmasks are among the highest recorded in sales

WeWork Rework Back on Track with SPAC 🏢

In case you need to be caught up, WeWork made an attempt to go public with an IPO in September of 2019, but drama ensued. Between the company’s suspicious financials and former CEO Adam Neumman’s party-boy antics, the company was forced to cancel their IPO.

With new CEO Sandeep Mathrani at the helm, can we see WeWork work with a SPAC rework? SPAC’s are a little more lax on the rules than a traditional IPO, so the company has a little wiggle room this time.

WeWork expects to make a speedy recovery from its post-pandemic downturn.

And About Last Night…

We are sure you are aware of the flash crash that happened last night in the crypto markets, and all of the ten-tweet threads attempting to explain what happened. If you are still confused, here’s the best explanation that we could find about what happened last night—click to read the thread:

Adam Cochran @adamscochran

1/22 So a lot of people think that the treasury rumor (which is painfully false) caused the crash. While *maybe* it was a contributing factor, it certainly wasn't the cause. My current working theory is that there could have been an exchange issue driving this.

You didn’t sell the dip did you? (Keep in mind this is just a theory, only the crypto gods know what really happened)

Rumors of a crypto-crackdown by the US Treasury have largely been debunked, and if you’ve been on the crypto-roller-coaster ride for a long time, you might say the dip is just another dip.

Thanks for reading! 👋

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