Sui is Coming, WTF Happened to NFTs, Is Bitcoin Bad for the Environment & The Latest News

In This Issue

• I share my thoughts on the state of the market, WTF happened to NFTs, Sui is coming & this week on chain.
• Rekt Capital has the latest technical analysis for you on the market. 
• Erik is debunking the “Bitcoin is bad for the environment” misconception.
• Rebecca breaks down the latest news.

Premium Subscription highlights this week:

• Wombat on Arbitrum: Defi Dad has a tutorial for you on how to earn up to 37.6% APR with frxETH with Wombat on Arbitrum.
• Airdrops: Every week Jesse has new airdrops and testnets for you to take advantage of!

What’s On My Mind by Lark

The State of the Market

It is crazy what a year can do to sentiment in the market. Last year when Bitcoin was around 30k it was a general panic. Now the first big move above 30k has brought waves of joy and relief. Markets are crazy and I love it. 

Anyway, while Bitcoin and Ethereum have faced a bit of a cool off and correction after their big week last week, the new hot topic for crypto is meme coins… again… 

A new meme coin called Pepe did a 1,000X this week. Did you miss it? Me too. And, no, this is not some endorsement of Pepe. I am not the biggest fan of meme coins in general. But, what I do find interesting is that meme coins tend to show that the crypto markets are moving back into a heavier risk on stance. Meme coins tend to be right at the far end of the risk spectrum. 

While some think that this could be an early sign that a wider altcoin rally could be fueling up. Perhaps it is more of a cautionary tale of extreme greed entering the market. Since the launch of Pepe just a few days ago there have been dozens of other meme coins pop up. Many of which have done insane overnight gains. 

Also, let’s salute the dude who bought $215 bucks worth of Pepe last week which is now worth about 2 million dollars now. This is basically like winning the lottery. 

Also, a reminder that while one or two of these may rise to prominence like Shiba Inu did, the vast majority of these coins will go to zero sooner rather than later. 

One other thing to watch is that Bitcoin dominance got rejected at a key level of resistance as you can see here. 

This can often lead to a broader move in the altcoin markets. 

However, I don’t think a huge amount of new capital has shown up yet. A lot of the money in crypto right now is money that has been in crypto. The same dogs, chasing the same cars. 

One final note here on the state of the market. This week the fear and greed index hit 69. Which is not yet extreme greed. But, for reference, it is the highest reading since 2021 when BTC was trading at over $50,000! 

So maybe the high greed readings couple with a frog meme coin shooting up from basically zero to a hundred million dollar valuation was something of a short term cooling signal. 

WTF Happened To NFTs?

Do you remember how crazy everyone was for NFTs this time last year? 

It seems like forever ago. But once upon a time Crypto Punks and Bored Apes were trading for 100 ETH a piece. And many other “top collections” had floor prices dramatically higher than they are now. 

Since last year though hundreds of new NFT collections have flooded the market. The vast majority of which are total trash and will go to zero. Many NFT collections also raised insane sums of money on their IP and the general NFT hype. In many cases this was just a cash grab for founders. The NFT space, AKA illiquid altcoins with pictures, has been messy. 

That being said, top collections such as Crypto Punks could be long-term very interesting pieces to hold onto. There will be a small handful of collections that go on to reach cult status. They are collected by the same people who buy rare art and other high-value collectibles. 

The tricky part is figuring out which collections could reach that status that are not already there. I mean, sure you can always just drop 50 ETH on a Crypto Punk, but finding the next Crypto Punk or Bored Ape is where the real money will be made. But it is like finding a needle in a haystack. For the NFT enthusiasts out there, make sure you are reading Sam’s weekly reports. There is some serious alpha there and inevitably the next big thing in NFTs too.  

Sui Is Coming 

Sui, the Aptos killer, which was itself the Solana killer, is coming! Major exchanges like Bybit are going to be offering the SUI token. 

I suspect that we will see a lot of hype around this coin. These new-gen blockchains like Sui, Aptos, and Solana have a good market fit in crypto as being cheap to use and fast as heck blockchains. Solana has capitalized on this big time and still maintains a massive number of daily users and total transactions. 

Aptos so far has not really taken off. Although the price is massive. Currently, it is about the 30th biggest crypto in the market. This is despite not having that much to show in terms of dapps and users. 

So what does that have to do with SUI? Well. A new opportunity. You see the one thing that Aptos did well was to pump like crazy… after the initial price dump. It went from $13 to $3 in 2 months at the end of 2022. Those were different times though. Still though, what we often see with new launches is a high initial price followed by a cooling period, before going to on a pump again.

This is one I will be keeping an eye on for a swing when prices cool off. 

This Week On Chain 

The total number of addresses holding 0.1 Bitcoin has just reached a new all-time high at 4,308,379. This is, to me, largely representative of the growing retail cohort who can afford to buy $3,000 or more worth of Bitcoin. As you can see by the chart this is a number that just keeps rising.

This chart shows that over the last few months, we have seen a pronounced increase in the correlation between gold and Bitcoin. Perhaps the idea of a self-sovereign store of value is catching on? 

Also, this Bitcoin chart really shows where we are in the cycle. An early bull period, but far from the top. This is the realized cap HODL wave. Currently around 19%. In 2019’s bear market rally, this number got up to 40%. Bull market peaks are usually around 80%. 

Arbitrum has been going insane ever since the airdrop. This chart here shows that one day this week Arbitrum beat Ethereum on daily on-chain volume. Although the 7-day still remains at half of that Ethereum has been doing. Also, interesting to note that Arbitrum which is worth much less than Binance Coin, Polygon Matic, or Avax is dramatically ahead of all of them when it comes to daily and weekly volumes. 

Trader Joe has been exploding with an increase of over 300% in the last month of daily active users. Still low by total numbers, but it shows a move in the right direction. 

Ethereum withdrawals from the staking contract have slowed right down. This chart is actually insane. While there were big validator unlocks on the first day, that was very short-lived, and largely from Kraken who has been forced to unstake their coins by the SEC. The situation now is that staking deposits are still rolling in, and that validator exits are almost nothing right now. 

Position Updates

• Small nibble of BTC at $29,200. 

Market Analysis by Rekt Capital

In today’s newsletter, I will cover 6 Altcoins, specifically:

• Avalanche (AVAX)
• Nano (NANO)
• Crypto Com (CRO)
• Fetch ai (FET)
• Fantom (FTM)
• Oasis Protocol (ROSE)

Let’s dive in.

Avalanche — AVAX/USDT

Since recovering from the late 2022 lows, AVAX has rallied into the psychological $20 resistance (blue horizontal), experiencing a reject earlier this year but with this rejection transitioning in a U-Shaped formation.

AVAX, to confirm the U-Shaped formation and subsequent breakout from it, needs to reclaim the psychological $20 level as support.

Upon doing so, AVAX could then follow the black path.

Generally, consolidation within the orange box here is fine as long as the box holds as support, as that would preserve the U-Shaped formation.

Nano — NANO/USDT

As a preface to today’s analysis on NANO, here are my thoughts from mid-February 2023:

And here’s today’s update:

NANO indeed followed the orange path, successfully retesting the blue Range Low as support and then rallying +30% to the Range High resistance.

Overall, NANO is non-trending, moving sideways — consolidating.

The major trend-shift would occur when NANO Monthly Closes above the Range High resistance and retests it as support, as historically that has preceded tremendous upside.

Yellow circles highlight the important of a successful retest of the Range High resistance as new support to confirm the breakout.

---

Go Premium to Keep Reading

Subscribe to the Wealth Mastery Premium Investor Report to read the rest of this article AND gain full access to the premium archives.

Is Bitcoin Bad for the Environment by Erik by Erik

If you’re a bit like me, unable to contain yourself in your enthusiasm about the invention called bitcoin, you will become ‘that bitcoin guy’ in the minds of your friends. Consequently, you will get messages like ‘Hey, here’s an article in such and such mainstream media, which says bitcoin is destroying our planet. Thoughts?’ Depending on the character of the sender, they may or may not explicitly ask you to reconsider your investment in this devilish, ocean-boiling, vaporware money. Let’s give you some ammo for answering the question of “Is Bitcoin bad for the environment?”

If it wasn’t so misguided, it would be funny how the rage of the likes of Greenpeace and American senator Elizabeth Warren is directed at bitcoin in particular. There seems to be something about bitcoin that enrages them more than any other industry that consumes energy, for example, the gold-mining industry, the tobacco industry, etcetera. All these industries are more harmful, not just in terms of CO2 emissions, but also in terms of ecological destruction in the case of the goldmining industry.

Bitcoin Mining Emissions Compared to Other Industries

Consider this image by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance: a visual representation of the CO2 emissions of different industries. In the big scheme of things, Bitcoin isn’t so huge. It makes you wonder why organizations like Greenpeace don’t go after gold mining and the tobacco industry.

Other industries’ CO2 emissions compared to Bitcoin mining. Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

But just the argument that Bitcoin is less bad for the environment than gold mining, the tobacco industry, or the US army protecting the dollar, will not be enough to change all critics’ minds. They will also have to let go of the idea that a digital, proof-of-work currency like Bitcoin is ‘backed by nothing’, ‘just belief’, and ‘has no intrinsic value’. Because if they don’t accept that Bitcoin has value, they will still see the bitcoin mining industry as harmful, even if and when it will become carbon neutral.

Let’s first start with the ‘other forms of money also consume energy’ part of the argument. And then tackle the ‘Bitcoin does have value’ argument.

The yearly number of Megatons CO2 emitted by mining, as a percentage of the total

Other Forms of Money are also Backed by Nothing Energy

Bitcoin has ‘no intrinsic value’? What on earth has? Does gold have ‘intrinsic value’? Sure, it has some industrial purposes. But its large use case is sitting in vaults, doing nothing productive. Still, it has been immensely useful to people over the millennia, protecting their savings against inflation.

So what about the dollar, what is it backed by? If you glance at a dollar bill, you will see: ‘backed by the full faith and credit of the American government.’ Wow. Not just the faith, but the ‘full’ faith! And credit! We are so lucky. But seriously, what does this mean? If we cut the fluff, it means: 

‘Just trust us. Just trust us that these pieces of paper or numbers on a screen have value.’

But if this foundation is so shaky – after all, trust is easily betrayed – why would anyone want dollars or other fiat currency? Well, the government creates demand for their currency by collecting taxes in their own currency. If you don’t pay taxes, you will go to jail, to put it bluntly. This enforced demand creates value.

Notice the word ‘enforced’ there. Force. What in the end gives the dollar or any other government-issued currency value, is that there is an entire enforcement apparatus that will keep citizens in line. In the case of the US dollar, it’s an entire navy that keeps other nations in line to keep paying for oil in dollars. 

Without even arguing that this state of affairs is bad – the fact still stands that this all consumes a lot of energy!

Next, consider an industry that is arguably more damaging to the environment than bitcoin mining: gold mining. If gold wasn’t so scarce and hard to mine, the metal couldn’t have a such high monetary value. Scarcity is a requirement for hard money and scarcity means: you will have to work (spend energy) for your money!

In the end, if you follow the principles that back money, you will end up at some source that consumes energy.

Bitcoin Encourages Renewable Energy Production

Since bitcoin mining is such a hyper-competitive market, miners can only be profitable if they can buy or produce extremely cheap forms of energy. Lucky for us, because:

1. Miners don’t compete with industries or consumers for energy. With the prices you and I pay, a miner would never be profitable. 
2. The cheapest sources of energy are most often sustainable sources like wind, hydro, or solar.
3. Bitcoin miners can ‘subsidize’ renewable energy facilities. Wind or solar farms are expensive to build. With bitcoin miners on the site to buy energy when households and industry are in sleep mode, renewable plants become more profitable.

The latter point is not just theoretic: In 2022, a company called Gridless began using bitcoin mining to incentivize and sustain the deployment of small river hydropower in eastern portions of Africa. 

What causes more harm to the environment?

Bitcoin mining speeds up innovation and deployment of cheaper clean energy production, unlocking clean energy sources for all purposes.

Energy is Not a Scarce Resource

While there can be temporary shortages of energy, keep in mind that energy is abundant. Technologists predict that the future price of energy will trend toward zero. Why? As only a fraction of the combined amount of solar and wind energy is enough to power our civilization, it’s just a matter of improving our technology to harvest this abundance.

Energy consumption is not a zero-sum game

Bitcoin Has a Purpose and is Easily Worth Every kWh of Energy

As long as critics will keep viewing Bitcoin as a speculative toy or money for money launderers, they will probably view any form of energy spent on it as wasted. So, let’s look at three core pillars of why Bitcoin is valuable.

It is Digital Property 

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to secure property in a world that is increasingly digital? But can we even possess something in a realm where everything can be copied at near-zero cost? Well, that’s the whole point of Bitcoin. A ‘time chain’ (blockchain) of who owns what in a globally available, constantly updated ledger, without a central authority that can claim the property.

But wait, can’t we also own any other digital currency, like money in a bank? Nope. Your bank deposit is legal money you lend to a bank. Sure, if the bank goes bust, the government backs your money. But that tells you at whose mercy you are.

What about a future central bank digital currency? Nope, you don’t own it. Who controls the ledger owns the property. A central bank can print more of its own currency, shrinking your part of the monetary pie. That’s not possible in Bitcoin. But even more in principle: you own the keys, you own the coins. The central bank can’t prevent you from spending, which is Pandora’s box that might open with central bank digital currencies.

Being able to own property is crucial, if we don’t want to replicate the online version of the fate of people in communist countries, where everything is state-owned. Without an online version of digital property, the future could look quite bleak.

It Could Bank 3 Billion People

An estimated 3 billion people in the world have no bank account and thus no access to the online economy. But most of these people have mobile phones. They can just install an app and start transacting in Bitcoin. 

For money launderers? Or for the unbanked?

Bonus Misconception: the ‘Costs per Transaction’ Metric

‘Bitcoin mining costs x crazy amount per transaction!’ 

Why is this a misconception? Because the energy is used for securing the network against transaction censoring, regardless of how many transactions are occurring. Around 2% of the total value of all bitcoins is spent on this ‘security budget’. View it as a vault of energy. 

Here’s a graph from Lyn Alden’s article about BTC energy consumption. It shows that the miner revenue as a % of Market Cap is going down with time. So securing BTC is becoming cheaper in relative terms. Roughly 2% per year currently. That’s not so crazy. If you would store 10.000 dollars worth of gold in a bank vault or other professional storage facility, would it be excessive for them to charge you 200 dollars yearly? That’s what Bitcoin miners charge these days – and that figure is dropping.

Secondly, layers on top of Bitcoin such as Lightning make a near-infinite amount of transactions per second possible. The Bitcoin network is only the base layer. 

Conclusion: Debunking Can Work

Frens, this will no doubt be a long and hard battle. 

To win the hearts and minds of your friends, first, you should challenge their intuitions about what money is. What is the relationship between money and energy, traditionally? If you think Bitcoin uses a lot of energy or emits a lot of greenhouse gases, what do you compare it with? Does any currency have intrinsic value? This is a nice source that goes deep into the monetary rabbit hole: What is money, anyway? by Lyn Alden.

Also, considering that Bitcoin could bank billions of unbanked people, and secure everyone’s digital property in an increasingly online world, isn’t that worth a fraction of a percent of the world’s energy consumption?

We can’t win it by rational arguments only, even if rational arguments should always be the foundation. Maybe use some humor, some memes as icing on the cake. It will amplify the message and make it stick.

An ironic example of this was the Greenpeace campaign Change the code, funded by Ripple (!). The artist that was commissioned to make an artwork that would highlight the polluting effect of bitcoin mining, reconsidered his stance: ‘dumb me’. After the artwork was revealed, he was approached by bitcoin mining experts. He said:

‘I made the Skull believing that Bitcoin Mining was a simple black-and-white issue. I’ve spent my entire career trying to reduce real-world physical waste, and PoW felt intuitively wasteful. Of course, I was wrong. Few things in the world are black and white. Dumb me. ‘

And now the ironic part: Bitcoin believers now use the skull artwork as their profile picture.

Benjamin Von Wong’s ‘Skull of Satoshi’. After revealing his creation, the artist admitted that the issue isn’t so simple as he thought

In Case You Missed It by Rebecca

Crypto Market News

• Coinbase is set to help the UK with regulations, taxes, and increasing collaboration between the banking and Fintech sectors. Source

• Coinbase will potentially leave the US if the regulatory pressures continue. Source

• Twitter has partnered with eToro to integrate crypto and stock trading features into the social media platform. Source

• Warren Buffett has called Bitcoin a “gambling token” in a new interview with CNBC. Source

• Hong Kong’s virtual bank, ZA Bank, is set to offer crypto account services and facilitate crypto to fiat exchanges. Source

• JP Morgan has said in a research report that the US banking crisis may be a “vindication of the crypto ecosystem.” Source

• Mastercard is launching an artist accelerator program for musicians with access only possible through its NFT Member Pass. Source

• LCH, the clearinghouse arm of The London Stock Exchange Group will begin offering services for Bitcoin index futures and options. Source

• The National Bank of Canada has increased its MicroStrategy shareholdings by 8.8% during Q1. Source

• El Salvador has granted its first crypto licence to exchange Bitfinex. Source

• MetaMask has suffered a third-party provider hack exposing the email addresses of 7K users who submitted a customer service ticket between Aug 1 2021 and Feb 10 2023. Source

• Sweden is abolishing its Bitcoin mining incentives for data centers from July which will see a 6,000% increase in taxes per kilowatt hour of energy. Source

• Shaquille O’Neal has finally been served a class action lawsuit for promoting FTX. Source

• CME Group will be expanding its Bitcoin and Ethereum derivatives product suite from May 22. Source

• Intel will reportedly be discontinuing its line of Bitcoin mining chips in an effort to cut costs. Source

Coins and Projects

• MicroStrategy has integrated the Bitcoin Lightning Network into its corporate work email addresses. Source

• Bitcoin miner CleanSpark has expanded its mining operations after buying 45,000 ASICs for $145M. Source

• Over $2B worth of ETH validator rewards will be available for “partial withdrawals” after the Shanghai upgrade. Source

• Tether’s market cap is almost at record highs despite the crypto crackdown. Source

• Adidas has launched Chapter 1 of its Ethereum-based ALTS NFT collection as it expands its Into the Metaverse project. Source

• Ethereum’s pending withdrawals have topped $3B after launching its Shanghai hard fork upgrade to allow users to withdraw staked ETH tokens. Source

• Starbucks is launching its second NFT collection on Polygon called The Starbucks First Store Collection to pay homage to its first store which opened in 1971 in Seattle. Source

• Binance has announced it will support staked ETH withdrawals from April 19. Source

• SushiSwap has released a plan to return the stolen funds to users affected by the latest hack. Source

• Uniswap has finally launched its iOS mobile wallet after having problems with Apple not allowing the listing on the app store. Source

• Uniswap is set to launch on Polygon’s zkEVM after all 191 UNI token holders voted in favor of the proposal. Source

• BNB Chain has updated its red alarm list by adding 191 high-risk projects and dApps. Source

• PancakeSwap is looking to lower its token inflation to 3-5% per year which is way below current rates of over 20%. Source

• Avalanche has seen daily active wallets surge to a 6-month high after hitting 80,000 on April 12. Source

• Avalanche has seen TradFi companies sign up to test its Evergreen subnets including T. Rowe Price, Wisdom Tree, Wellington, and Cumberland. Source

• Solana’s Web3 Saga smartphone will go on public sale on May 8 and pre-ordered devices will start shipping immediately. Source

• Grayscale has launched a Solana Trust and is publicly trading under the ticker GSOL. Source

• Hundred Finance, a lending and borrowing DeFi protocol on Optimism, was hacked and exploited for $7M. Source

• Optimism’s OP token rallied after an a16z engineer shared a cryptic tweet of a picture of an orange circle and “coming soon” with speculation a Layer-2 network is on the cards.  Source

• Boba Guys, a popular US bubble tea shop, has partnered with Solana to build its on-chain loyalty program featuring NFT-gated experiences. Source

• Maple Finance is planning to launch a new liquidity pool that invests in US Treasury bonds. Source

• Arbitrum’s proposal to return 700M ARB tokens to Arbitrum’s DAO treasury was rejected by 84% of the votes received. Source

• Lido DAO will vote on using the claimed ARB airdrop tokens as emission rewards to incentivize the adoption of wstETH on Arbitrum. Source

• Gala Games will airdrop a new version of its native token to users on May 15. Source

• Gnosis Chain has announced a $5M project with the aim to increase network validators. Source

• LimeWire has launched a new Web3 game to revive the pirating music nostalgia of the early 2000s, and rewards users with its ERC-20 token, LNWR. Source

• Hollywood actors Danny Trejo, Mena Suvari, and Emilio Rivera have been cast in a dystopian sci-fi series by Gala Film, a division of Gala Games. Source

• Ripple-based payment system MoneyTap continues to grow in Japan after being adopted by three local banks. Source

Macro News

• US inflation rose 0.1% in March and on a year-on-year basis, the CPI came in at 5% which is lower than the 5.2% expectation and down from 6% in February. Source

• US Congress has introduced a new draft bill for stablecoins that could result in up to 5 years in prison and a $1M fine for failing to register as a stablecoin issuer. Source

• US SEC Chair Gary Gensler has been questioned by House Republicans about his approach to crypto and has admitted to never owning any crypto or digital asset. Source

• The UK’s new Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology will work to advance the country’s metaverse and Web3 strategy. Source

Follow Rebecca on Twitter and Instagram.

Start your Wealth Mastery Premium Subscription today!

Click Here To Go Premium

Final Notes

Watch the video below to find out why Bitcoin hit $30,000, and what comes next for crypto in 2023. 👇

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.

If you really want to take advantage of fastest growing asset class EVER, I highly recommend you to check out my new Altcoin course: Mastering Altcoin Investing

In this course we’ll teach you all about how to spot, choose and acquire the winning altcoins of the next bull market. 

Learn how to build your portfolio so that growth is ensured and risk is mitigated. Let me help you build a strategy that’ll change your life forever in the upcoming bull run.

Are you ready to make it?

See you next time!

Lark and the Wealth Mastery Team

Recommended Services

💰 BINANCE: BEST EXCHANGE FOR BUYING CRYPTO IN THE WORLD 👉 10% OFF FEES & $600 BONUS

🚀 BYBIT: #1 EXCHANGE FOR TRADING 👉 0% SPOT FEES AND $4,450 IN BONUSES

🔒 BEST CRYPTO WALLET TO KEEP YOUR ASSETS SAFE 👉  BUY LEDGER WALLET HERE

Legal Disclaimer

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.

You can find a full disclosure of all my crypto & venture investments here.