📌 Featured: ApeCoin & the death of staking - Cobie
“Staking mechanisms should be designed to support the goals of the ecosystem. They should be used to incentivise the parts of a product, community or network that requires people to do work or to take risk.
ApeCoin DAO has 7 billion dollars in it’s treasury. It should use it to incentivise people to take risks, do work, and grow the community — rather than giving it away to existing holders as an interest rate bribe for not selling.
Without utility or value capture, spending 37% of the treasury on staking emissions is not only worthless but could actually be actively harmful to the APE ecosystem’s long-term prospects.”
Read the full piece here.
📍Abstracts:
🖼 NFT + IRL
- The NBA will launch ‘Dynamic’ NFTs representing players and their playoffs performance.
- MGM Grand is testing NFT ticketing in collaboration with YellowHeart.
- Snoop Dogg’s 4/20 mix sold out for 100 ETH (fractionalized into 1000 pieces). Music NFTs are being adopted by artists as a viable model:
- EPL football player Son Heung Min is dropping an NFT collection with NFT Star.
- AMAZON CEO Andy Jassy has teased interest in selling NFTs in the future.
- Coinbase beta-launched their NFT marketplace, and is creating a trilogy film series featuring the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
🌐 Metaverse
- Punk 6529 is building OM: the Open Metaverse. Sign up to join the alpha version here.
- Hyundai will launch “metamobility” NFTs in collaboration with Meta Kongz.
💰 DeFi
- Stablecoin protocol Beanstalk suffered a $128M exploit. Check out an insider’s POV:
- $UST is now the 3rd biggest stablecoin. The Terra ecosystem continues to make cross-chain moves.
- TRON wants to fork $UST’s success by offering even higher risk-free interest rates (30%). Read the full proposal here.
- Aurora DEX Aurigami Finance has announced $2.5M in NEAR rewards for deposits.
📚 Educational (th)reads
- DeFi Llama is starting a Defi and crypto focused Wikipedia.
- “How Will Businesses Really Use Web3? Organizational Culture in the Metaverse” by nftnow:
- 3D order book display of cryptocurrency exchanges: Check out the website here.
📝 Discussions:
- Moonbirds: just hype or the next big thing? - Akara0x
- Coinbase Insider Trading? - Da Vinci
- NFTs as Investments and Opportunities in NFT Financialization - Machiavelli
Moonbirds: just hype or the next big thing?
A lot of hype has been accrued in the NFT space during the week of Easter, led by a project called “Moonbirds”, a collection of 10,000 utility-enabled PFPs.
Most interestingly, the Moonbirds “nesting” mechanism will allow holders to lock up their NFT to earn increasing amounts of rewards, a mechanism quite like “ve” in DeFi token models.
The founder of the Moonbirds project, Kevin Rose, is a venture capital partner at TRUE Ventures and a serial entrepreneur focused on investing in early-stage start-ups. His investing track record includes the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Square, Solana and Flamingo. Although Rose found his success in the Web2.0 tech start-up space, the Moonbirds launch suggests an official switch in gear (focus) to cryptocurrency and NFTs, likely due to the same potential and opportunities that have drawn all of us together.
However, Rose is not as new a kid on the block as Crypto Twitter might suggest.
Before Moonbirds, he has been hosting the deep dive podcasts “PROOF” and “Modern Finance”. PROOF features in-depth interviews of several NFT artists and projects such as Tyler Hobbs (NFT Artist at Art Blocks), Nexo (Centralized NFT Lending), and Alexis Ohanian (Co-Founder of Reddit). The Modern Finance podcast focuses more on cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, Web 3.0, traditional finance hacks, and more.
In late 2021, Kevin Rose created PROOF Collectives, 1,000 NFTs acting as member passes to the PROOF community's private Discord. PROOF Collectives are for hardcore NFT collectors and believers who want to invest in long-term NFT initiatives with strong teams, compelling storytelling/narratives, potential utilities, and a non-toxic community. Instead of a quick flip or pump and dump Discord Alpha group, Rose intended to create a community for sharing information on long-term NFT investments by organizing studies, discussions, and deep dives on projects’ value proposals.
Additionally, holders of PROOF Collectives are given the first pass to PROOF ecosystem projects such as Moonbirds, as well as many other anticipated NFT projects in the future. PROOF Collectives NFT holders have received two Moonbird mints each! Currently, the floor price of the PROOF Collective NFT sits above 120 ETH.
Meanwhile, the launch of Moonbirds seems to have verified the feasibility of NFTs as start-up funding mechanisms, perhaps first tested by BAYC.
Criticisms against the Moonbirds collection has also been aplenty. The mint price of 2.5 ETH seems quite high compared to BAYC’s 0.08 ETH, but whether the price is the result of a money-grab or simply market demand is debatable. The fact that the project sold out may suggest the latter. Additionally, the meteoric rise of Moonbird’s floor price may suggest that the collection is overhyped (33 ETH on 4/25).
Only time will tell whether the current community is composed of flippers looking for a quick profit or solid supporters serving as the foundation of growth.
- Akara0x
Coinbase Insider Trading?
Coinbase has had a trading policy for employees and contractors to proscribe trading on “material non-public information,” including when new assets will be added to the platform. Despite the company’s efforts, the exchange has struggled to stop the information leak that usually leads to price increases in the hours leading up to the announcements. The problem has been recurring and acknowledged since 2017, when the price of Bitcoin Cash continued to rise up until its listing on Coinbase. Shortly after, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, publicly declared a war against insider trading. However, we again see a 25% price increase before and only 5% after the Coinbase listing for $XLM in 2019.
Recently, Coinbase faces another insider trading allegation on $UPI and $AVT tokens by @Cobie. Just 24 hours prior to the announcement, @Cobie found an ETH address acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of the tokens.
In response to the public outrage, Brian Armstrong quickly responded that Coinbase’s goal is to “list every asset.” Nonetheless, the sequence of and the verification for the listing are obscured to the public. Insiders are bound to have an edge over the public investors, and it’s impossible to track down the wallets. It’s truly a double-edged sword, where we, anons, have to embrace the ambiguities as the company still operates in a gray area and is not highly regulated.
- Da Vinci
NFTs as Investments and Opportunities in NFT Financialization
Nansen.ai recently published performance reports for their internally curated NFT indexes, which are distinguished by NFT market segments.
- Nansen NFT-500
- Nansen Blue Chip-10
- Nansen Social-100
- Nansen Gaming-50
- Nansen Art-20
- Nansen Metaverse-20
You can check out the Index Methodology and eligibility criteria here.
“Nansen NFT indexes allow investors to track a specific NFT market segment. Alternatively, the indexes serves as a mechanism to measure the performance of the NFT market over time.”
Their analysis showed that the NFT market (68.5% YTD) is performing better than the cryptocurrency market. However, keep in mind that their data points are restricted to between January 1st - March 09 2022, when the cryptocurrency market may have been undergoing a correction. A negative correlation between NFTs and DeFi assets was also observed, suggesting NFTs to be potentially protective against crypto market volatility.
Across the different NFT sectors, Social NFTs (e.g. PFPs, Access/Memberships) experienced the most growth, accounting for 79% of the NFT market cap.
Additionally, volatility was lowest for Metaverse (5.8%) and Gaming NFTs (5.1%), and highest for Blue Chip and Art NFTs (both 9.7%).
Read the full report here.
How investors perceive NFTs as investments is likely to change with each iteration of NFT releases. New projects are conceived everyday with new promises and utility, not only at the level of individual collections, but also for all NFTs as well.
Take the example of NFT collateralized loans. This past month, 0x650d took a $8.3M loan (in $DAI) on 104 Cryptopunks. The funds were provided by MetaStreet, and the deal executed on NFTfi.
Financialization of NFTs has been long-awaited, as investors seek to earn yield on or leverage their expensive purchases without needing to part with their beloved non-fungibles.
A report by Matrixport dove into the current NFT financialization space and the opportunities that can be found within:
Focusing on the NFT Fractionalization space, the sector Renaissance Labs also seeks to contribute to, Matrixport highlighted three opportunities for innovation:
- Fractionalizing the NFT utility over potential airdrops and access to key in-game features and economic output
- Building a financial derivatives layer on top of the floor price indexes to enable granularity in pricing
- Introducing debt instruments that can be raised against the acquisition of blue-chip NFT to further improve on some of the buyout mechanisms of rare NFTs
Read the full report here.
- Machiavelli