June 16th, 2021 | Sign Up

Good Morning. After a 10-week break from Twitter, inspiration for The Big Short, Michael Burry, came back online to tweet an ominous message yesterday:

People always ask me what is going on in the markets. It is simple. Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in All Things. By two orders of magnitude. #FlyingPigs360

Make of that what you will…

Price Check 🏷 7-day Change

🚀 Bitcoin: $40,131 (+19.6%)

📈 Ethereum: $2,530 (+0.1%)

📉 Dogecoin: $0.31 (-2.6%)

🚀 Amp: $0.09 (+86.3%)

📈 Polygon: $1.61 (+8.6%)

📉 Aave: $311.54 (-5.9%)

dPrices as of 6 AM PST 6/16, data from Coingecko

• Markets: Stock futures are flat ahead of the conclusion of the two-day Fed meeting at 2pm today. High inflation, high unemployment, and labor shortages leave the Fed with a tough decision as far as thinking about increasing interest rates.

• Covid: California had its “Grand Reopening” yesterday, lifting capacity limits as well as mask and social distancing requirements for those who are vaccinated. Unvaccinated people are still required to wear a mask indoors, and businesses can require masks if they choose.

• World: President Biden is meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in a diplomatic effort to repair strained relations. The meeting is expected to last at least five hours, but Biden has been training to go the distance.

REGULATION

Congress’ Crypto Club ⚖️

The regulation talks continue this week, keeping crypto investors and stablecoin farmers on the edge of their seats.

During a hearing yesterday in front of the House Financial Services Committee’s fintech task force, Rep. Maxine Waters said house Democrats have formed a “working group focused on cryptocurrencies.” Unfortunately, Ms. Waters did not specify the requirements to join the club.

Waters, who chairs the full House Financial Services Committee, said that as cryptocurrencies continue to grow, she’s “organized a working group of Democratic members to engage with regulators and experts to do a deep dive on this poorly understood and minimally regulated industry.” Oh, Maxine. Listen our DM’s are open, let’s talk.

SEC update

The SEC yesterday said it had no plans for crypto regulation in 2021, instead focusing their attention to short selling and the meme stonk investors. Giving you more time to jump from ponzi to ponzi….JK!

NFTs

Boomer Media Betting on NFTs 👴🏼

Fox Entertainment and its animation studio Bento Box Entertainment are the latest entities to hop on the NFT train.

The media giant announced the launch of a $100 million creator fund via it’s newly formed business arm, Blockchain Creative Labs. The company will be headquartered in LA, and headed by Bento Box CEO Scott Greenberg.

Entrepreneurs at our core, FOX and Bento Box are uniquely situated to bring exciting offerings to the digital goods, token and NFT marketplace

Sounds about right…

What To Expect

• Digital marketplace for Dan Harmon’s Rick and Morty universe

• Upcoming animated comedy series “Krapopolis,” which will make it the “first animated series to be curated entirely on the blockchain.”

• NFTs of one-of-a-kind character and background art and GIFs, as well as tokens that provide exclusive social experiences to engage and reward super fans.

INFLUENCE

Celebs and Crypto 💃

It seems like every other day another celebrity is trying to cash in on the crypto craze, some more genuine than others. While Soulja Boy has taken up most of the spotlight (and laughs), a couple of other celebs have come out of the crypto closet, from being an early investor to shilling low-quality projects.

How I Met Your Bitcoin

CoinFlip, the leading global cryptocurrency ATM operator, announced a new marketing campaign promoting the use of Bitcoin. The ad “So Flippin’ Easy,” features actor and long-time hodler Neil Patrick Harris unveiling the company’s new Bitcoin ATM.

Niel Patrick-Harris shared in an interview with Forbes crypto about his Bitcoin story, hearing about the corn years ago and giving it a shot “without risking too much”. Can we submit a Bitcoin improvement proposal to replace Michael Saylor with Neil Patrick Harris?

Neil told Forbes Crypto,

Now, my investment has grown tremendously and multiplied in value, even major corporations and traditional investors are all jumping on the bandwagon. My goal is to let everyone know how easy and accessible it is to invest in cryptocurrency and join the future of finance.

Keeping Up With The… No

After 20 seasons of their reality show, you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians made their crypto debut. Sure enough, on Monday Kim K shilled Ethereum Max to her 228 million Insta followers. Followed by many questions, reports, and forum posts by people who question whether or not Ethereum max is legit, a scam, or just legitimately bad. Ethereum max is often made fun of by the OG Ethereum community and its price actually dropped after Kim’s post.

Let’s talk about shilling and what you can generally expect to come of it. Shilling is a negative term used to describe a person promoting something in exchange for money, even if they don’t believe in what they are promoting—and often the shiller resorts to flat-out lying. A celebrity shilling new cryptocurrencies is usually a signal of a low-quality project. If there was already demand for the project, the team would not need to pay influencers to “shill” their coin, and people would be talking about it because they like it or use it, not because they are being paid. Most teams leading legitimate projects would rather pay half a million dollars to a god-tier developer to vs. a single IG post from a celebrity. Good projects invest, bad projects shill.

3 potential reasons a person will shill a crypto project

1. An influencer and was paid to promote the crypto.

2. A shiller may have bought some crypto and hopes to dump tokens on their audience when they’re in a profit. They tell them how great it is so they buy it, which increases the demand, and then the shiller can sell at a higher price to their followers than they received or bought at.

3. A shiller may be paid to mud-sling a project to promote an alternative. They (falsely) tell their audience how bad a crypto project is, which causes investors to sell and buy the shilled crypto instead (can also be called FUD).

Summary

Keeping in mind an influencer or celebrity’s intentions when they talk about crypto is usually a good idea. The cases of Neil and Kim are very different, with Neil being a long-time crypto investor and partnering with an established crypto company that provides a product/service. Whereas Kim disclosed that she was paid for the single Instagram post. But hey, maybe we are being too harsh — maybe celebrities who are brand new to the crypto space (Paul Pierce, Floyd Mayweather, and now Kim K) were truly promoting Ethereum Max because they did their own research and they believe in the project (it was hard to type that with a straight face)

The bottom line 👉 Do your own research and don’t make investments based on social media posts, or newsletters 😉

Small Bitez 🗞

• The U.S. Space Force is launching an NFT line. Yes, you read that right.

• 98% of CFOs say their hedge fund will invest in Bitcoin by 2026

• Indonesian central bank prohibits cryptocurrency as a payment tool

• Court denies SEC request for info on Ripple’s recent XRP transactions

• DeFi exchange dYdX closes $65 million raise led by Paradigm

• Silvergate Bank cuts ties with Binance, disabling USD deposits and withdrawals

• South Korean exchanges halt trading on certain cryptos as regulatory pressure mounts

• Shiba Inu, Chiliz, and Keep Network soar after being added to Coinbase Pro

DATA

Mining Stonk Comeback ⛏

Riot Blockchain (RIOT) went from being worth less than $200M at the start of 2020— to a peak of $6.12 billion in February of this year. Since then though, RIOT and other mining companies have seen their share prices level out.

After a healthy pullback in May, The Block’s data shows mining stonks gaining their footing since the beginning of June, signaling a potential 2nd-half comeback for the Bitcoin mining industry.

Bitcoin’s recent mini-comeback has helped mining stonks recover as the biggest cryptocurrency breaks above the $40,000 thousand mark once again since the El Salvador (and volcano, don’t forget the volcano) news.

Beating Bitcoin

Since the end of 2020, crypto mining stonks have actually outperformed Bitcoin significantly. While bitcoin’s price rose 334% since, a handful of mining companies, Marathon, Riot Blockchain, Hive, and Canaan have risen to 3,119% in the past year (in Marathon’s case).

Further reading. The Director of Research at The Block Crypto, Larry Cermak gave his thoughts on the current market this morning with a Twitter thread 👇

Larry Cermak @lawmaster

I've been asked by a few people what I think about the current market and the honest answer is that I have no fucking clue right now. I think no one knows. CT has just been a lot of noise and not much substance lately. Everyone is still down a lot and coping. My brain dump:

June 16th 2021

13 Retweets50 Likes

Thanks for reading! 👋

written by Bay & JB

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