July 19th, 2021 | Sign Up

Happy Monday. 

Price Check 🏷 7-day Change

📉 Bitcoin: $31,741 (-7.5%)

📉 Ethereum: $1,898 (-11.4%)

📉 Dogecoin: $0.18 (-14.5%)

📉 Sushi: $6.89 (-15.7%)

📉 Axie Infinity: $16.83 (+8.6%)

📉 Aave: $250 (-18.1%)

Prices as of 6 AM PST 7/19, data from Coingecko

Small Bitez 🗞

• Binance stops stock token sales, stating only that it would be shifting its “commercial focus to other product offerings.”

• the Crazy Horse 3 gentlemen’s club in Las Vegas starts accepting Bitcoin via Lightning Network

• Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum and crypto entrepreneur, says he’s quitting crypto, partially due to “safety concerns.”

• Tether hasn’t issued USDT on Ethereum since May, CTO says it’s chill

• Sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sells for $1.56 million, setting the record for the highest priced video game skae

• Warner Bros and Nifty’s Inc. team up to launch social NFT platform

FINTECH 💲

Twitter Boss Wants to Kill Ethereum

Maybe we’re being dramatic, Jack never said he wanted to kill Ethereum….directly. But the Twitter+Square CEO’s recent announcement suggests that he’s building a product that sounds like an ‘Ethereum killer’.

jack @jack

Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD.

July 15th 2021

6,275 Retweets34,530 Likes

Much of the Twittersphere pointed out to Jack that what he’s describing already exists, with a growing ecosystem of developers, designers, and users—called Ethereum.

Aside from that, others pointed out that the Bitcoin blockchain is not built for running complex applications, and Jack’s “DeFi on Bitcoin” must be built on a centralized sidechain by Square in order to exist.

Mihailo Bjelic @MihailoBjelic

@jack 1. This is not possible to build on Bitcoin, especially in a non-custodial, permissionless manner. 2. This already exists on Ethereum. We have hundreds of DeFi apps, secure L1, tools, wallets and scaling solutions like @0xPolygon (you recently used it to sell your first tweet).

July 16th 2021

40 Retweets352 Likes

ChainLinkGod.eth 2.0 @ChainLinkGod

@btcdentist @jack The Bitcoin mainchain is not expressive enough for such applications (doesn't support a turing complete language), it will have be done on a sidechain with different trust assumptions

July 16th 2021

1 Retweet29 Likes

The Clap Back

Jack’s announcement prompted the founder of popular Decentralized Finance platform Aave to make an announcement of his own. In response to Jack’s tweet, Stani tweeted out that Aave should build a decentralized version of Twitter on Ethereum. Aave’s founder later confirmed that he wasn’t kidding according to the crypto news publication Decrypt.

stani.eth rAAVE 👻 =(⬤_⬤)= 👻 🦇🔊 @StaniKulechov

Since @jack is going to build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum

July 17th 2021

362 Retweets3,578 Likes

Although social media is somewhat outside of Aave’s wheelhouse, the protocol’s main product lets users lend or borrow cryptocurrency via smart contracts. Stani’s quotes imply that the same philosophy that guides decentralized finance, can also apply to social media.

“We believe that content creators should own their audiences in a permissionless fashion, where anyone can build new user experiences by using the same on-chain social graph and data,” he said.

REGULATION 👩‍⚖️

Stablecoin Haters

If you don’t already know: stablecoins, are a specific subset of cryptocurrencies that have a value pegged to a real-world asset, such as a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar.

Stablecoins continue to make headlines as Jerome Powell and friends re-state their disdain for decentralized dollars, and crypto in general in a two day congressional hearing last week. The Fed chief went as far to say “the main incentive for the U.S. to launch its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, would be to eliminate the use case for crypto coins in America.”

There is another hearing on stablecoins scheduled today July 19th led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to examine stablecoin regulation and risks, and to find suggestions for future work around this issue.

What does this mean for crypto?

It’s really hard to say how this will affect the crypto markets as a whole, due to the fact that all of this crypto stuff is so new and unprecedented. Don’t worry though, we’ve got you covered on all the breaking regulatory stablecoin news.

NFTs 🖼

The Hottest New Job in the Philippines

Axie Infinity is a NFT-based blockchain based trading and battling game, the game features the play-to-earn model allowing players to earn income through NFTs and crypto by breeding, battling and trading digital pets called Axies.

Players earn the AXS and SLP coin by playing and use them to decide on the future of the game.

Somehow unaffected by the slump in the rest of the crypto market, the NFT game Axie Infinity has seen tremendous growth in the first half of the year, with the in game currency $AXS up 3000% in 2021 so far.

The game was earning more in fees than Bitcoin and Ethereum at one point, and nearly more than both BTC & ETH combined.

The Jiho @Jihoz_Axie

This week, the Axie protocol generated more fees than Ethereum & Bitcoin from: • A 4.25% Marketplace fee • Breeding fees Player-owned digital economies will continue to shock the world. $axs

July 15th 2021

449 Retweets1,617 Likes

A Craze in the Philippines 🇵🇭

Almost 60% of Axie Infinitie’s half a million daily active users come from the Philippines. This could be due to the country being hit hard by the pandemic. GDP contracted 9.6% in 2020, the largest annual decline ever recorded since data collection began. A youtube documentary interviews some of the players earning a living by playing the game.

“At first I’m not convinced that this game is actually earning by playing, but I tried it,” said one gamer in the documentary named Art. “Due to the pandemic, we have no means of earning money. That’s why it spread here in Cabanatuan City.”

BEAR MARKET 🐻

Surviving the Long Winter

Where is the market going?

Remember. Nobody really knows, no matter how long the Twitter thread or how fancy the chart is, it’s all a guess.

Two possible scenarios

#1 The market shakes everyone out and runs back to all time highs in the fall/winter

#2 We have truly entered the bear market and all crypto assets will slowly bleed until another big catalyst comes along in a year or more when everyone has forgetten about crypto

How far down will we go?

Another one that nobody really knows. A good place to start is the previous bull cycle’s all-time-highs, which are around $19K for Bitcoin and $1.4K for Ethereum. Most investors and traders will be watching those price levels closely if the crypto market does in fact continue its current downtrend.

Either way, if you believe all this stuff is going to be worth immensely more one day than it is today, we wouldn't worry about the day to day noise.

If you’re hibernating with the bears until the next bull cycle and still want to generate some yield, check out our yield farming guide.

These newsletters are not financial advice. We are not financial advisors