November 23, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • For the week ending November 19th, digital asset products saw inflows of $154 million.

  • MoonPay, a crypto payments infrastructure firm, raised$555 million at a valuation of $3.4 billion.

  • Mercado Libre, the largest e-commerce company in Latin America, is set to enable users to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies.

  • Citigroup will hire up to 100 new employees to support its digital asset division for institutional clients.

  • 31% of hedge fund managers plan to add crypto to their portfolios.

  • Royal, an NFT music platform, closed a funding round for $55 million, led by a16z.

  • Celsius Network invested an additional $300 million into Bitcoin mining companies, bringing its total investment to $500 million.

  • Brazil plans to launch a central bank digital currency pilot in 2022.

  • The South China Morning Post, a 118-year-old newspaper, released a whitepaper detailing a new NFT standard.

  • NFT receiver Odell Beckham announced his intention to take his entire salary in Bitcoin.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

El Salvador, the country that recently accepted Bitcoin as legal tender, has plans to further develop its own crypto rabbit hole. How? By building “Bitcoin City” along the Gulf of Fonseca near a volcano that would (eventually) provide energy for the city and bitcoin mining.

 

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele announced plans for the city on Saturday, revealing that Bitcoin City would have zero taxes on income, capital gains, property, payroll, municipalities, or CO2 emissions. In order to keep Bitcoin City clean, Bukele said the proposed city would institute a 10% sales tax on purchases.

  

The bond comes via a deal with Blockstream and iFinex, which will see Blockstream tokenize a $1 billion bond on the Liquid Network. Once El Salvador raises the $1 billion, it plans to market buy $500 million worth of Bitcoin. The remaining $500 million will be used to build out energy and Bitcoin mining infrastructure, according to a press release from Blockstream. A report from The Block says the bond will mature in 2032 and hold a 6.5% coupon.

 

Interestingly Bitcoin purchased from this move would have a five-year lock-up, forcing El Salvador to HODL. “Of that $500 million that the president buys, after a five-year lock-up, they will start selling some of that bitcoin to give an additional coupon to all the investors in the bond,” revealed Blockstream’s Samsom Mow on stage.

 

Bukele’s and Mow’s words came during a presentation at Bitcoin Week in El Salvador. You can watch the full, raucous announcement here:

Recommended Reads

  • The Generalist on Terra:

  •  Mechanism Capital on crypto gaming:

  •  Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song on Taproot:

On The Pod…

The Tokenomics Episode: Why ‘EIP 1559 Is Like Catnip for Investors’

Two tokenomics experts, Yan Liberman, co-founder of Delphi Digital, and Viktor Bunin, protocol specialist at Coinbase Cloud, discuss their experiences building tokens, their thoughts on the recent ENS/PSP airdrops, and what “fair” token distribution looks like. Show highlights:

  • the definition of tokenomics
  • what factors (such as utility, fairness, liquidity, security, etc.) token designers are incentivizing for
  • what Yan learned from helping design Astroport tokenomics
  • what Vikor learned from helping design Threshold, the token that was built to facilitate the merge of NuCypher and Keep
  • how the EIP 1559 burn has changed Ethereum’s tokenomics
  • how EIP 1559 has improved investor outlook for Ethereum
  • why Viktor is worried about people actually using Ethereum going forward
  • what Viktor and Yan think about how the ENS airdrop farming issue was handled
  • what Viktor and Yan think about ParaSwap’s PSP airdrop and why Viktor thinks ParaSwap made a “mistake”
  • how Viktor and Yan would go about airdropping a token to good actors instead of bad actors
  • how improvements in on-chain identity could help future airdrops
  • fair launch tokens versus VC-backed tokens
  • what the definition of fair is in terms of tokenomics
  • why Viktor thinks a token’s distribution is more important than a token’s launch
  • what could be the optimal way to distribute liquidity mining rewards
  • how community affects tokenomics
  • how to incentivize NFT-based tokens, like the forthcoming Bored Ape Yacht Club token, for the right goals

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Feb. 22. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians