A weekly recap of the largest crypto events and narratives, with an extra dose of insight.
Here’s what we have for you:
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Crypto volatility says hello
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friends.tech goes parabolic
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Lootbot Telegram partnership
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FTX <> BIT <> MNT proposal
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OpenSea royalties
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Leverage is here
Liquidated
Last Thursday, we had a good old nuke. Given the crab market we’ve been living in for the past year, this was quite exciting, to say the least as long as you weren’t one of the individuals out of the >$1B that got liquidated.
No one really knows why crypto nuked. A few conspiracy theories out there were that Evergrande filed for bankruptcy, and SpaceX sold all of its $373M in Bitcoin. The Evergrande news is notable because at some point Tether held Evergrande bonds as part of the collateral that backed USDT. However, Evergrande defaulted late last year so this shouldn’t be a surprise.
The second theory of SpaceX selling all its Bitcoin is also not important, given that it’s unclear if SpaceX even held Bitcoin in the first place. What actually happened was a trader on Deribit, the largest crypto options exchange, got completely obliterated. From there, other exchanges with a large amount of OI such as Bybit and OKX got completely wiped.
Volatility has been relatively low for the past half a year, as we traded within a narrow range, and in fact, volatility was at all time lows, and it seems like we got the fireworks everyone was waiting for. This was the largest day of liquidations since FTX happened, so it was very significant, and I think it caught many off guard, including onchain degens who suddenly had to deal with a 400 GWEI gas fee.
-RektRadar
Friends.tech Goes Parabolic
We’ve been talking about friends.tech for a while now, especially after they announced their points system. We’re back again. This time, as a result of Paradigm, one of crypto’s largest VCs, investment into it.
Unique users and total volume have both been on the uptrend, and to date, the protocol has had 60K unique buyers and sellers, along with over 17K ETH in volume.
Where does friendtech go from here?
For one, there’s a 10% fee that is applied to all trades. 5% goes to the friend share owner, and the other 5% goes to the friend treasury. Some influencers such as Cobie and Ansem have made $90K and $30K respectively already.
0xfoobar just created wrapped friends, which gives one the ability to mint your own ERC20 straight from the factory contract. This opens up the door to creating LPs for your shares, trading without the 10% slippage, fractionalize high-value shares, and much more. Whatever you can dream of, you can do with your tokens now.
This is a left curve, but OnlyFans has 190M active users and makes $2.5B a year. If you’re paying for OnlyFans right now, you get a few sexy pics a week, but you have no upside to the creator’s earnings. A platform like friends.tech could completely change the game.
Thinking beyond OnlyFans, any creator such as a musician, sportsman, writer, influencer, or youtuber could give themselves a public valuation. And the world that opens up is absolutely mental. Imagine if you got lucky and longed Mr.Beast while he was wat sub 1,000 subscribers? That’s something that is possible today with friends.tech depending on how you view the shares.
Lootbot Telegram partnership
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Last week, Lootbot announced a collaboration with Telegram’s blockchain, TON. We’ve mentioned both of these in the past, but for a quick refresher, Lootbot is an airdrop farming assistant while TON is a blockchain deeply integrated with Telegram.
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We’ll likely see more and more partnerships pop up across the telegram bot space, as projects compete for attention in a hyper-competitive battlefield. One way to stand out is to form an exclusive partnership which is exactly what Lootbot has done.
FTX <> BIT <> MNT
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In the ongoing migration, BIT holders are able to convert their tokens 1:1 into the new token, MNT. This is a part of a branding revamp by BitDAO, for a new L2 that uses EigenDA.
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FTX previously swapped 100M BIT tokens for FTT, and apparently still holds that amount. DAO community members don’t really want FTX having such a large ownership in the new DAO, and so they’re proposing to pause migration and implement a new contract to blacklist FTX from migrating.
Royalty’s go optional
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OpenSea, which was one of the largest NFT exchanges, has made creator fees optional. This was a direct result of a lack of creators opting in to enforce creator fees.
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It’s interesting because royalties were once touted as the largest use case of NFTs and crypto. Returning value to creators through an open permissionless blockchain with more value captured and returned. However, it seems like users just don’t like paying fees. Shocker.
Leverage Is Coming To The US
Two years after filing with the National Futures Association, Coinbase has finally gotten approval to offer eligible US customers access to futures. This means that Coinbase can now allow users to trade BTC and ETH, on leverage.
Sure, it isn’t the 20x leverage that we are used to on our perp DEXs, or the 100x leverage that we get on Rollbit, but users will be able to leverage up to 4x.
What does this mean?
First of all, it means that in the US, we are slowly getting more and more regulatory clarity. Regulation takes time to play out, but US-based users have never had access to leverage in crypto. And US was likely the most active/wealthy region that participated in the last crypto bull run. This could bode well for the next bull run, whenever that may come.
In addition, there are rumours that the SEC will approve the ETH futures ETF, and this may eventually pave the way to a spot Bitcoin ETF, and perhaps even a spot ETH ETF. If either of these happens, the fireworks are truly on.
