February 7, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Ethereum Name Service Director of Operations Brantly Millegan has come under fire for homophobic and transphobic tweets from 2015.

  • Tron founder Justin Tron is being accused of initiating a governance attack on Compound.

  • The SEC delayed its decision on Grayscale’s bitcoin ETF proposal.

  • The Bank of England says it is unlikely to develop a retail wallet for a CBDC.

  • The Treasury Department released a report detailing how NFTs are used in money laundering schemes.

  • Nike is suing StockX for selling unauthorized sneaker pictures as NFTs.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

  • Tickets to this week’s NFL Super Bowl will come with souvenir NFTs.

  • 100 Thieves, an esports organization, gave away 300,000 NFTs on Polygon.

  • Senator Ted Cruz disclosed a bitcoin purchase.

The $$$ Corner…

  • Qredo, a crypto infrastructure firm, raised $80 million.

  • Arca, a crypto asset management firm, raised $50 million to purchase NFTs.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Another GameStop Pump and Dump

Last Thursday, GameStop announced a partnership with Immutable X, an Ethereum layer 2 solution (and, disclosure, a former sponsor of my show), to launch its own NFT marketplace. The gaming giant had been teasing NFT plans since last May, when it went on a crypto-engineering hiring spree and published a website hinting at future NFT plans.

 

As part of the deal, Immutable X set up an incentive fund for GameStop that will provide up to $150 million in IMX tokens for the gaming company’s expansion into the NFT space. Based on a document filed by GameStop, the firm has already received roughly 39.17 million IMX tokens (&108 million at the current price of $2.76), or about 70% of their total grant for executing the first few milestones of the contract.

Notably, based on data from Etherscan, it appears the tokens were unvested and that GameStop has already begun dumping IMX tokens. The gaming giant sent out 6,500,000 IMX, 400,000 IMX, and 8,089,293 IMX in three transactions last week (two of which came before the IMX announcement).

At the time of writing, GameStop’s Ethereum address holds 24.18 million IMX tokens worth over $60 million. In total, the gaming company has received just over 39 million IMX tokens – which amounts to roughly 15 million IMX tokens ($41 million) being sold (or sent somewhere else).

With IMX’s token supply at approximately 225 million, GameStop’s IMX token transfer equated to roughly 6.5% of all IMX tokens being moved, which might be why the token experienced quite the plunge after the announcement on Thursday.

Recommended Reads:

  1. Coinbase Institutional’s Samantha Messing on Bitcoin in 2022:

  1. Vitalik Buterin on block times:

  1. RAC on how NFTs have changed his music career for the better:

On The Pod…

Are Democrats Against Crypto? These Two Congressional Candidates Say No (Bonus Content: I wrote a summary of the episode on Medium, which can be found here.)

Shrina Kurani, a Democrat running for a House seat in California, and Morgan Harper, a Democratic candidate running to represent Ohio in the US Senate, explain why they are running pro-crypto campaigns. They discuss how crypto will affect the 2022 midterms, justify being both pro-crypto and pro-environment, and talk about the importance of educating regulators about Web3. On this episode of Unchained, they highlight:

  • how Morgan’s work at the American Economic Liberties Project and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau led her to run for Senate on a pro-crypto platform

  • why Shrina chose to mint NFTs on Solana to help fundraise for her campaign

  • what issues Morgan and Shrina have with the current financial system (and how they believe crypto could help solve such issues)

  • why both Shrina and Morgan stress that education is the key to making effective crypto policy in the US

  • what message Shrina and Morgan want to send to fellow Democrats about the crypto industry

  • why Morgan believes that single-issue voting for crypto candidates could be dangerous

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