The entire crypto market took a beating to start the week, likely as a result of uncertainty in the Chinese markets. For those just catching up, the fecal matter really hit the fan after a Chinese company dubbed Evergrande – with $305 billion in debt – essentially collapsed. The news quickly sent jitters across global markets, including crypto.
The Bad News:
The Evergrande fallout sparked a huge selloff in prices as many traders rushed back to fiat in a flight to safety. More than 205,000 users lost their crypto futures trading positions in one day as global markets panicked. As a result, Bitcoin is down roughly 16% since the weekend and perhaps has shed some of its early-fall momenta.
Furthermore, common retail investors are frustrated to see the crypto markets slide right along with the traditional markets during times of panic.
But, as always, let's not overreact just yet.
The Good News:
As of today, prices look like they have found a new floor and have already started to recover. And while the strong correlation to traditional markets might not look good at first blush, we are reminded that Bitcoin isn't simply a hedge against the stock market. Instead, it's a hedge against wealth confiscation in any form.
The Big Picture:
No one said it better than Marty...
"I can't tell you how this will affect Bitcoin in the short to medium-term, but I can tell you that I am extremely thankful that Bitcoin exists in this type of environment. The ability to hold an asset that is completely disconnected from a global financial system built on paper promises is a godsend. A transition to a global Bitcoin Standard would make it much harder to put the global economy in such a precarious situation as it will be impossible to issue the amount of debt the world is currently drowning in."
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Weekly price swings/ volatility doesn't mean a thing for VCs...
Over the past week, all while prices were taking a nosedive, we saw roughly $2 billion worth of capital raises announced across the crypto universe...
- Sorare, a fantasy soccer NFT platform scores $680 million raise led by SoftBank
- Blockdaemon, a startup that builds blockchain nodes, raises $155 million in Series B funding
- Genesis Digital Assets, a Bitcoin mining firm, raises $431 million
- Orca, a Solana-based decentralized exchange, raises $18 million
- Metrika, a Blockchain monitoring startup, raises $14 million
- TrueLayer, an open banking startup, raises $130 million from Tiger Global
- Avalanche, a POS blockchain promising the industry’s fastest smart contracts, raises $230 million from Polychain and Three Arrows
- Ripio, a crypto services startup, raises $50 million
- Dapper Labs, an NFT startup, raises $250 million
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Digital currency in your 401(k)? Now you can and why you should
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How much of your digital currency profits will go to capital gains taxes? Probably too much, but now you have a choice. You can eliminate capital gains taxes on digital currency profits with the Alt401(k) from ForUsAll and Coinbase. By using after-tax contributions for your digital currency investments, you can buy, hold, and trade those assets in a retirement plan, making future gains tax-free. That can mean a big boost for your retirement.
The Alt401(k) adds potentially higher growth than traditional retirement investments, like stocks and bonds, without significantly adding risk. That’s because, historically, digital currencies haven’t gone up and down at the same time as stocks and bonds. And because digital assets in the Alt401(k) are held in offline cold storage, they’re safe from online hacking.
Read the eBook to learn more.
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Two mainstream apps are getting major updates for their crypto users... while one mainstream app just met its crypto competitor. Let's take a closer look:
- PayPal launches its Super App combining payments, savings, bill pay, crypto, and shopping
According to the press release, the new app will introduce the PayPal Savings service in partnership with synchrony bank, a savings account that offers APY rates of 0.4% with no monthly fees or minimum necessary balance. (While this is still well below rates offered by many crypto lending services, it still dwarfs the national average interest rate of 0.06%.)
Notably, the new app will also offer users the ability to “buy, hold, and sell crypto” and “a finance tab that includes access to high yield savings and crypto capabilities.”
- Robinhood is rolling out crypto wallet and transfer features
Currently, Robinhood only offers crypto buying and selling services. But their new wallet feature will allow customers to store and move their crypto holdings, meaning customers can send their crypto to other wallet addresses and receive supported cryptocurrencies into their accounts.
Unfortunately, Robinhood only supports BTC, BCH, BSV, DOGE, ETH, ETC, LTC as if we're all living in 2017 again.
- Introducing the crypto-powered music streaming service
Blockchain-powered music discovery platform Audius was in the headlines this week after attracting some big-name backers and linking up with TikTok.
Decrypt wrote up a product/app review, allowing consumers to see how it matches up against Spotify and Apple Music.
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Shocker: The NFT Scammers Are Here
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As the value of anything increases, so does the propensity for scammers to try to take advantage of that value.
And now, with NFTs being all the rage, we are seeing that exact formula play-out as we are seeing more and more people reporting being scammed out of their JPEGs.
Here's the story of how individuals are "socially engineered" out of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of NFTs and how (sometimes) the community helps claw them back.
Related: A Data-Driven Overview of NFTs
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This report written by Nic Carter and Ross Stevens attempts to explain why the ability for Bitcoin to offer sound money to billions of people, far outweighs any short-term environmental impact.
In it, you will learn, courtesy of Troy Cross, that:
- Bitcoin is a lifesaving hedge against monetary and political incompetence and injustice.
- Yeah, it uses energy. So does your dryer and so does human civilization. What'd you expect?
- Energy use is paltry on the global scale.
- Many factors point to a future of lower emissions, even if we 10x in price in the next decade: halvings, a decarbonizing grid, and better capture of waste and curtailed energy.
- We can accelerate this trend, and indeed are doing so, by buying offsets, renewable energy, renewable energy certificates, moving to better locations.
“Even in our most aggressive, high price, scenario, in which Bitcoin reaches $10 trillion by 2030, its emissions amount to only 0.9 percent of the world’s total, and its energy outlay is just 0.4 percent of the global total.”
Read. Share. End the FUD.
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Leaked: Chainalysis Used An IP-Scraping Block Explorer To Aid Law Enforcement
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Documents leaked on the dark web and first reported by CoinDesk show blockchain tracing firm, Chainalysis, advertising its use of an affiliated wallet explorer as a means of gathering IP information to aid in police investigations.
In doing so, Chainalysis has effectively weaponized an unassuming website without disclosing its ties. It has never publicly associated itself with the site, although a note at the bottom of the site’s homepage says its “author” now works at Chainalysis.
The company assumed that bad actors would use the site to check transactions without fear of “leaving a ‘footprint’” on crypto exchanges. But because Chainalysis owns the explorer, it can "scrape" the IP addresses of suspicious” users.
“Using this dataset we were able to provide law enforcement with meaningful leads related to the IP data associated with an address... It is also possible to conduct a reverse lookup on any known IP address to identify other BTC addresses.”
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Messari Founder Announces Senate Run
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Messari founder Ryan Selkis said he’s planning to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024 after a securities regulator showed up to his event, Mainnet, and served one of the attendees with a subpoena.
We had heard rumors of the subpoena earlier in the day when Indiegogo founder, Slava Rubin, tweeted: “lol I just witnessed a guy get served by the SEC at the top of the escalator at #mainnet2021 right before going on stage for his panel”
Later that day, Selkis took to Twitter to address the situation:
"If you’re wondering when I actually decided to run for Senate, it was when these ****ers came to my event, didn’t buy a ticket, and served one of the speakers a subpoena. Enough talk. More war on our out of control regulatory state. Selkis 2024. Time to activate the crypto political machine."
Well, Ryan... you've got our vote.
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The Signs Are Clear: THIS Type of Market Crash Is Next
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It’s actually much bigger and more important than what happens to the Nasdaq or S&P. Some of the world’s best investors are practically drooling in anticipation.
Because this crash will create a slew of 100%-plus opportunities... backed by legal protections that stocks can only dream of.
Our top analyst, Tim Melvin, believes this could happen within months – and you must prepare now. Get the full story here right away.
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Other Content You Might Enjoy
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- Vitalik Buterin makes Time's 100 most influential people of 2021
- Snoop Dogg Reveals Himself as Ethereum NFT Whale With $17M Collection
- US Treasury Sanctions Russia-Based Crypto Exchange For Laundering Over $160 Million In BTC
- Meet the Colombian artist trying to move a ton of cocaine... NFTs
- US probe into Binance reportedly expands to investigate insider trading
- Coinbase drops plans for crypto lending product after SEC tussle | To propose a federal regulatory framework for crypto to US officials within the next month
- Watch: Bitcoin: A Weapon for Us To Fight Oppression
- Brave Launches Brave Talk for Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing
- Compass Mining launches 'at-home' bitcoin mining service
- Invesco and Galaxy Digital team up to develop crypto ETF suite
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