Hi there, 👋
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An active member of our investing community is "sitting in the corner sulking" after he predicted a crypto winter last month. (He's not the only one).
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As you know, the prices took a decidedly bullish turn at the end of July.
Oops.
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If you failed to catch the recent crypto wave, learning how Bill Hwang lost ~$20 billion dollars in two days might make you feel a little better.
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​Today's stories and snippets include:

• PartyBid: Combining capital to win NFT auctions
• The $600 million Poly Network hack
• Should you buy sites on Flippa or simply do market research?
• Bitcoin lobby loses
• John Oliver buys JudgeForYourselves .com and then jokes about it
• An investment entity specifically for cannabis

As always, thanks for being here,
Juliet.
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​P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with your friends and colleagues.
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NFT Auctions Go Social

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We're not tempted to drop $5M on a CryptoPunk - even after discovering that reports of their demise were exaggerated.
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​But, what if you could collaborate with others to purchase high value CryptoPunks and NFT's?
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Companies like Rally have already popularized the concept of fractional ownership in everything from sports cards to collectible cars.

It should come as no surprise that purchasing collectible assets, like NFTs, has now metamorphosed into a social pursuit.
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While trawling through Product Hunt a few days ago, we came across PartyBid.
​PartyBid is the first product developed by PartyDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that builds and ships crypto products.
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​The platform allows groups of people to combine their capital and bid on NFT auctions together.
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Anyone can create or join a PartyBid, contribute ETH, and place bids as part of a collective.
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This is exactly what a bunch of people calling themselves the Party of the Living Dead did last Friday.
In an effort to compete against the whales investing in the CryptoPunk space, they bought this Zombie Punk for 1201.725 ETH ($3,888,313.427).
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The traditional auction model rewards only one winner, favoring investors with deep pockets over the community of supporters that contribute and add value to an NFT project.
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PartyBid appears to have hit on the perfect response.
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Yes, PartyDAO has a mascot.
Meet Kazoo:​
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How to Lose $20 Billion in Two Days

It would be hard to find someone who lost as much money as quickly as Bill Hwang did in March 2021.
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The previously unknown Wall Street whale and his family firm, Archegos Capital, triggered losses of more than $20 billion in just two days.
The result was one of the most spectacular implosions in modern financial history.

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Crypto Roundup
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1️⃣ Bitcoin Lobby Loses

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​US Senate rejects changes: Following days of negotiations, the Senate struck down a bipartisan amendment to overhaul and clarify newly proposed cryptocurrency tax-reporting requirements.
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The unamended provision “sweeps in non-financial intermediaries like miners, network validators, and other service providers," Toomey (R-Pa.) said in a statement, arguing such parties "never take control of a consumer's assets" and don't have the required user information needed to report income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
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This deals a potentially massive blow to a slew of companies concerned they could be forced to hand over user-transaction information to the IRS.
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2️⃣ Massive Crypto Hack
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Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network was attacked on Tuesday, with the alleged hacker draining roughly $600 million in crypto.
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Poly Network, a protocol launched by the founder of Chinese blockchain project Neo, operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.
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Tuesday's attack struck each chain consecutively, with the Poly team identifying three addresses where stolen assets were transferred.
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At the time that Poly tweeted news of the attack, the three addresses collectively held more than $600 million in different cryptocurrencies, including USDC, wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), wrapped ether (WETH) and shiba inu (SHIB), blockchain scanning platforms show.
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Cryptocurrency wallet addresses disclosed by Poly show transfers early Tuesday of 2,858 ether tokens worth about $267 million, 6,610 binance coins worth more than $252 million and roughly $85 million in USDC tokens on the Polygon network.
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Soon after the hack, Tether, the company behind the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, froze roughly $33 million in USDT tokens associated with the alleged hacker’s wallet address.
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The $600 million figure would place the Poly Network hack among the largest in crypto history.
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​Latest News Update: In an unusual twist, the hackers returned about half of the $610 million or so they pilfered on Tuesday. The online pirates said they took the funds “to keep it safe” after spotting a bug in the computer code.
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3️⃣ Record Crowdfund for Luxembourg

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​Blocktrade closes Luxembourg’s largest crowdfunding to date: The €22 million Series A round saw participation from over 6000 investors from 33 countries.
​Blocktrade CEO Bernhard Blaha stated: "We are building a complete ecosystem around digital assets."
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4️⃣ The Data on Coinbase

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​Coinbase beats expectations: Coinbase reported another period of impressive results in its second quarter earnings report.
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During the quarter, Coinbase’s total revenue reached $2.23 billion, which helped the company generate net income of $1.61 billion in the three-month period.
It's notable that Ethereum trading volume beat bitcoin trading volume. More data.​
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International SEO

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Have you considered that the keywords and content you use in one market may not have the same impact in another?
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Plus, if you only have an 'English' version for non-native speakers, then you probably won't rank for the popular queries searched by users.
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This is also true for different countries with the same language, as the preferences and search terms can change.
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Easier said than done, right?
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Aleyda Solis is an international SEO consultant. She's just shared the Google worksheet templates she uses to coordinate any international content optimization efforts.
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You'll find a link to the worksheets on her website.
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Domain Snacks
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👉 A Public Dunking

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"What kind of f—ing idiot would set up an important website and not buy the .com?”
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For the low down on the domain, skip to the 21 minute mark in the video.​

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​👉 Million Dollar Domains

Where are the domain names that were (publicly) sold for one million or more registered?
Elliot Silver provides the registrar information for the publicly reported million dollar domain name sales found on NameBio in this post.​
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✅ Snippets to Send You on Your Way

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🔷 Should you buy sites on Flippa or simply do market research? Authority Hacker explores how to spot good opportunities, how to use a Flippa listing to find out more about your niche, and what to look for when buying websites in this podcast.​
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🔷 We hate Google's CAPTCHAs: Clive Thompson says: "Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects - traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses - just so I can finish a web search. I also don't like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems. But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason: The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing."
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🔷 Turkey’s first $10B startup: $1 billion is cool. $10 billion is dope. Trendyol, an e-commerce platform based in Turkey, has raised $1.5 billion in a massive funding round that values the company at $16.5 billion. General Atlantic and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, were among the investors. The company serves around 30 million shoppers who generate around 1 million packages per day.
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🔷 Leafly going public via SPAC: Seattle-based Leafly, an online cannabis marketplace and content provider, announced that it is going public through a planned merger with a blank-check acquirer, Merida Merger Corp.
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🔷 Startup Xayn has raised $12 million in a new funding round: Xayn combines privacy-protecting AI technology and clean design to provide users a safe and secure, yet easy to interact with search and discovery experience. The company expects to use the new capital to propel further product development, as well as begin expansion plans in the Asian market, commencing with Japan. To date, the firm has raised in excess of $23 million.
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🔷 A growing business: Scotts Miracle-Gro is looking to cannabis companies to grow its balance sheet. The company announced an investment entity specifically for cannabis.​
Called The Hawthorne Collective, the entity is said to be pursuing minority investments in companies not currently being pursued by Scotts Miracle-Gro’s cannabis subsidiary.
The Hawthorne Collective’s first investment comes in a $150 million convertible loan to Toronto-based RIV Capital, a cannabis investment and acquisition firm.
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🔷 Investors look for home runs in sports tech startups: Investment in sports tech - technologies involving data, analytics, fitness and biotechnology to help athletes play and perform better - has picked up in the last year.

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