GM friends.
As BTC surges to annual highs and several bullish catalysts line up, there’s plenty up for grabs for the platforms and protocols that never stopped building.
And when it comes to crypto exchanges, Coinbase just gave itself a boost by summing up the case for crypto in a viral new commercial.
Here’s what’s in today’s issue:
- Sam shares his thoughts on the new Coinbase viral ad, KyberSwap using their treasury to help victims, the SEC getting in trouble, Velodrome and Aerodrome getting compromised again & North Korea stealing crypto.
- This week on chain.
- This week’s trending coins by Rebecca.
New Coinbase Ad Hits the Right Notes
Coinbase has been standing out from the crypto exchange pack lately by looking like a company playing the long game.
This isn’t to say that it doesn’t have issues to resolve with regulators, or that competitors such as Binance haven’t been hugely influential in building out the crypto space. But after FTX collapsed, and with Binance now under the stewardship of a new CEO as CZ awaits sentencing for federal violations, Coinbase’s long-term approach is suddenly looking reassuringly stable.
And with perfect timing, Coinbase is now going viral with a new ad that hits all the right notes for generations (especially younger Millennial and after) who are done with feeling frozen out of home ownership, and for whom endlessly rising prices are starting to look out-of-control.
So that’s a lot of people, globally, whose concerns Coinbase just addressed in a little over one minute.
The ad is slick and cinematic, shows real lifestyle problems, puts the blame squarely on our debt-based financial systems, but ends on a positive: there is hope, but “we’ve gotta build our way out of it”, and “it’s time to update the system.” And that, it’s implied, can be achieved through crypto.
Whatever you think of Coinbase itself, the ad hits hard, which is probably why it went viral and picked up plaudits. Also, besides advertising Coinbase, it’s an expertly timed signal in favor of the entire crypto industry.
What do you think of the Coinbase ad, will it bring newcomers to the crypto space, and can it establish Coinbase as the go-to exchange? Reply to this email and let us know whether you agree with our take.
Treasury Grants for KyberSwap Victims
If you’ve been out of the loop and you’re not sure what’s been going on recently at KyberSwap, here’s the story so far…
- KyberSwap was hacked for $48.8 million in crypto.
- The hacker sent a casual on-chain message stating, “negotiations will start in a few hours when I am fully rested.”
- KyberSwap offered a 10% ransom payment to the hacker, but stolen assets were not returned.
- The hacker then sent insane/hilarious demands to KyberSwap, aimed, basically, at putting the hacker in charge of KyberSwap and KyberDAO (all done while calling themselves Kyber Director.)
And after all that, the latest development is that KyberSwap is offering to reimburse victims of the hack with grants funded from the platform’s treasury.
The project posted that they are supporting law enforcement and cyber security, and that they would reimburse users for “an amount up to the USD value of such funds at the time when such funds were drained from their respective liquidity pools”, and that further details would be announced within two weeks.
This looks like a welcome attempt to help out-of-pocket users who are probably getting a little tired of the hacker’s antics, and is a reminder that victims of the crime have taken a real financial hit.
SEC in Trouble With the Courts?
The SEC is, of course, in charge of driving crypto out of the US for no reason protecting US investors, and as such is usually in alignment with the courts. Except, that is, when it’s being threatened with sanctions by a judge, as is the case according to a court filing in the Utah District Court.
This is part of a case between the SEC and a crypto project called DEBT Box, which is alleged by the SEC to have been selling unregistered securities, and District Judge Robert Shelby has made clear that the SEC’s attorneys may face sanction for making “false and misleading” arguments which led previously to a federal judge ordering DEBT Box’s funds to be frozen.
Although the DEBT Box case isn’t as high profile as SEC conflicts with Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, it’s significant because it fits in with a recent trend: as mentioned, we’d generally expect courts to align themselves with regulators, but when it comes to the SEC and crypto, that just isn’t always happening.
We’ve seen it this year in battles the SEC picked with Grayscale and Ripple, which didn’t go in favor of the Commission, and we’re seeing it here in the DEBT Box case too.
Velodrome and Aerodrome Compromised (Again)
Optimism DEX Velodrome and Base DEX Aerodrome were both attacked by hackers at the end of November, and reported that their front-end websites were compromised.
The protocols warned users not to interact, and by December 1st were posting that service was resumed as usual.
However, it turns out that frontend exploits are becoming usual too, as on December 2nd they were posting of another exploit and again telling users to stop interacting on the frontends. However, this time, the all-clear for both was announced the same day, and it was highlighted that decentralized frontends remained secure.
North Korea Can’t Stop Stealing Crypto
While whoever hacked KyberSwap knows how to compose a wild post-heist message, the world’s leading hacker turns out to be Kim Jong Un, or at least, whoever works for Kim in North Korea’s cyber crime office.
That’s because the cyber crime office in North Korea is dedicated to committing cyber crime, rather than deterring it, and a new report shows that they’ve been pulling the job off effectively.
According to researchers at Insikt Group, which is part of threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, state-backed hackers in North Korea have stolen around $3 billion in cryptocurrency since 2017.
This comes as North Korea has expanded its illicit operations from focusing only on the South Korean crypto industry, to targeting the entire world, and it’s reported that the $1.7 billion stolen by North Korean operators in 2022 was enough to have funded 50% of the dictatorship’s ballistic missile program.
With security an ongoing issue within crypto, it’s fair to say that North Korean blockchain robbery isn’t the kind of nation state adoption most crypto advocates had in mind.
As Bitcoin continues to make strong gains, numbers of unique Bitcoin addresses have been increasing, reflecting the growing bullish sentiment around Bitcoin and crypto, and the level of attention that’s again picking up.
On the subject of BTC in particular, MicroStrategy made headlines recently with its purchase in November of another 16,130 BTC, taking its total holdings to 174,530 BTC.
MicroStrategy’s plans are closely interlinked with BTC, and so, it seems, is its stock price, which is correlated with BTC’s ups and downs, but with the caveat that in an uptrend, MSTR is outperforming, and also, right now, Microstrategy’s BTC average purchase price is below the current BTC price.
As Bitcoin continues to climb, it’s interesting to take a look at its performance compared to the major altcoins, by considering 60-day correlations between alts and BTC/USD daily returns.
In this case, we see falls in correlation across the board when we compare 2022 and 2023 returns, with the biggest drop occurring with XRP.
There’s been a lot happening around crypto exchanges this year, as they’re at the forefront of regulatory battles, particularly in the US, where conflicts with the authorities have been regularly grabbing the headlines.
The big story lately was Binance paying a $4.3 billion settlement to resolve a Department of Justice investigation, an outcome which was interpreted bullishly by some observers as it seemed to resolve an overhanging crypto unknown.
And when it comes to the impact of that settlement on competing exchanges, we can see that Coinbase and Bybit experienced noticeable increases in market share, with Bybit taking that gain round the clock, while Coinbase’s surge dropped off during US trading hours.
Meanwhile, new project Blast has been garnering a lot of comment since it launched, with some people jumping in to bridge funds, but with some criticism aimed at Blast too.
Either way, the platform has now seen its TVL rise to an impressive $695 million since it launched just a couple of weeks ago.
However, we can also find that there’s been a significant slowdown in deposits, with daily inflows falling from $136 million to under $20 million through the last week of November.
Don’t forget though, those deposited funds are locked up until mainnet launches next February, so even if there’s a reversal in sentiment, TVL will remain steady.
Layer 1 competitor NEAR Protocol recently launched an inscription standard called NEAT, which follows along the path set at the start of this year with the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol, and utilizes a new token type called NRC-20 (which is similar to BRC-20 tokens on Bitcoin.)
This development immediately caused a massive spike in NEAR transactions, hitting almost 14 million daily transactions on December 1st, up from fewer than 2 million daily transactions throughout the preceding month.
This spike in activity following the development of an inscription standard is similar to that seen on other chains, such as Bitcoin itself, Solana, and Polygon.
Finally, NFTs have been enjoying renewed trading activity and rising prices after a tough year, but there are still questions around whether the biggest OG collections–such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Azuki–will ever be able to reclaim previous all-time highs.
One project indicating that this may be viable is Pudgy Penguins, which is well known in the NFT space and has been around since July 2021 (relatively early days.)
The original collection just surged past its previous all-time high, with an explosion in floor prices taking it to close to 11 ETH, while it was at a little over 6 ETH just a week earlier.
Pudgy Penguins Floor Price
Here are my key takeaways from the trends this week and the market is giving bull market vibes.
- Kaspa is a Bitcoin and Ethereum hybrid coin that’s been listed on Exchangeio and Bitrue.
- Syscoin is a dual-chain combining the security of Bitcoin and the compatibility of Ethereum that’s been nominated for the best emerging L2 blockchain of the year award at India’s Blockchain Week.
- Celestia is a modular data availability network that’s launched a new mechanism called “Ethereum fallback” which will back up data availability if there is any downtime on the mainnet.
- Bonk is a Solana-based meme token that’s been listed on KuCoin, sending the price up 13% in 24 hours.
- Decimated is a post-apocalyptic game that’s been shortlisted as one of the 20 projects to pitch at the Next Block Expo in Berlin on December 4-5.
- Vulcan Forged is an NFT gaming studio that’s had its early bird Elysium Forges snapshot for its LAVA rewards.
- Bitgert is a crypto exchange that’s got traders excited as its BRISE token may be breaking out of its resistance and showing signs of a reversal. Bitgert is also teasing a Twitter contest is coming soon.
- Solcasino is a crypto casino on Solana that’s celebrating its second birthday. To mark the milestone it’s launched an NFT giveaway and launched its $100K super Christmas race.
- TENET is a liquid staking Layer-1 blockchain that’s recently launched its Oracle bringing price feeds to the network. The network is also preparing for its Tenet Wars post-mainnet launch.
- Bittensor is a decentralized machine-learning protocol that’s up 254% in 30 days as the AI hype continues. Bittensor already has 32 subnets in development.
- ORDI is the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol that’s hit a new all-time high as Bitcoin rises above $40K for the first time since May 2022.
- Pyth Network is an oracle network that’s released its XAUT/USD price feed and is prepping for its Developer Conference on December 5-6.
- Tectum is a Layer-1 blockchain that’s seen its Bitcoin softnote token listed on a Turkish exchange called XT.
- Terra Luna Classic is the original version of the Terra blockchain that’s passed its v2.3.2 upgrade proposal for sequence mismatch issue resolution. Binance has also burned 3.9 billion LUNC tokens.
- SuperVerse is a gaming and NFT ecosystem on Ethereum that’s seen its SUPER token skyrocket 275% in a week after Binance launched new futures trading opportunities. SuperVerse has also announced it will be focusing 100% on gaming.
Thank you so much for your support, and I truly hope that today’s issue will give you insights needed to help you master your wealth.
If you are reading this it means you are on the free version of the Wealth Mastery Investor Report, which is great for news and tips on the crypto markets.
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Wealth Mastery (Lark Davis, and the Wealth Mastery writing team) are not providing you individually tailored investment advice. Nor is Wealth Mastery registered to provide investment advice, is not a financial adviser, and is not a broker-dealer. The material provided is for educational purposes only. Wealth Mastery is not responsible for any gains or losses that result from your cryptocurrency investments. Investing in cryptocurrency involves a high degree of risk and should be considered only by persons who can afford to sustain a loss of their entire investment. Investors should consult their financial adviser before investing in cryptocurrency.
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Hi! My name is Lark Davis!
I’m a cryptocurrency investor with years of experience and I’ve been making consistent profits in the crypto space.
I’m passionate about helping others do the same, so I run multiple educational channels on crypto investing.
