December 21, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Digital asset investment products saw an outflow of $142 million for the week ending Dec. 17th.

  • The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s discount is at an all-time high.

  • Instagram’s CEO said the company is “actively exploring” NFTs.

  • The Weeknd is releasing seven NFTs on Ethereum.

  • Stablecoin supply grew by 388% this year.

  • WisdomTree amended its bitcoin ETF filing.

  • Mergers and acquisitions activity in crypto grew by roughly 130% this year.

  • Figment, a crypto staking provider, raised $110 million at a $1.4 billion valuation.

  • JPMorgan is set to develop a blockchain-based payment system for Siemens.

  • Mini Royale, a Solana-based game, has over 2 million players registered on its platform.

  • Elad Roisman, a commissioner at the SEC who has often agreed with Hester Peirce (aka “Crypto Mom”), is stepping down at the end of January.

  • An NFT data provider is selling the rights to its platform through the sale of a CryptoPunk.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Terra Broke $80 for the First Time

Even with the majority of the crypto market down (excluding $YFI and its possible tokenomics overhaul), Terra’s native token, LUNA, reached a new all-time high of $81.61 Monday. Terra is a layer-1 blockchain that supports smart contracts, along with the minting of UST, a dollar-pegged stablecoin.

LUNA’s ATH coincided with three distinct flippenings.

  • Terra flipped Avalanche, a competing layer 1 blockchain, in terms of market capitalization. As of 6:30 pm ET yesterday afternoon, Terra ranked as the ninth-largest token by market cap at $29.93 billion. Avalanche now sits in tenth place at ~$27 billion.

  • Terra flipped Binance Smart Chain, Binance’s Ethereum look-alike chain, in terms of total value locked to become the second-largest chain by TVL, data from DeFi Llama shows. Shockingly, Terra has amassed over $17.75 billion in value-locked via 13 protocols. (for context, Binance Smart Chain, which holds 17.03 billion in TVL, has over 225 protocols.) Nearly 1/10th of Terra’s TVL has flooded in via Astroport, a Terra-native DEX that, on December 14, began incentivizing liquidity providers to lock up liquidity on its platform through its token, ASTRO.

  • UST, the decentralized stablecoin native to Terra, flippedDAI to become the fourth-largest stablecoin on the market. UST currently sits at a market cap of $9 billion. According to data from Messari, this marks more than a 3x increase in UST supply in just two months.

In addition to a new ATH and the three flippenings, Terra is relevant because Terraform Labs, the development firm behind the blockchain, recently filed a response to the SEC regarding the regulator’s subpoena of Do Kwon, the CEO of Terraform Labs. The SEC famously served Kwon with a subpoena at Messari’s Mainnet cryptocurrency conference earlier this year. In response, Kwon filed his own lawsuit, saying the agency had violated his rights to due process.

In their response, filed last Friday, Kwon’s camp argues that because Kwon is a citizen of South Korea, the SEC lacks jurisdiction in its subpoena. “TFL is incorporated under the laws of Singapore and maintains corporate offices in Singapore and South Korea. Mr. Kwon is a citizen of South Korea and resident of Singapore. By statute, the SEC cannot serve administrative subpoenas outside the United States,” explained the Terraform team in the filing.

Recommended Reads

  • Variant Fund’s Li Jin on the web3 renaissance:

  • Punk6529 on why NFTs are a big deal:

  • The NYT on how big-time web2 companies are handling the mass exodus of employees to crypto startups:

On The Pod…

This Noble Family’s Art Was Taken by Nazis, But Is Being Saved by NFTs

The House of Lobkowicz has managed thousands of pieces of art and cultural artifacts, such as hand-annotated manuscripts by Mozart and Beethoven, for hundreds of years. Their collections were confiscated under Nazi and Communist regimes but were returned roughly 30 years ago. Now, the family intends to preserve, study, and share the collection with the world — and is using NFTs to make that happen. Hear how Will Lobkowicz, director of digital media & innovation for House of Lobkowicz, and Michelle Choi, NFT strategist, used NFTs to raise funds to maintain and preserve this collection. Show topics:

  • the Lobkowicz story of how a Bohemian noble family ended up in charge of a 20,000-piece collection spanning 100 different locations
  • how William and Michelle started working together
  • what effect COVID-19 had on the House of Lobkowicz’s preservation efforts
  • how Michelle and William formulated their plan for NFCastle from Michelle’s garage
  • what Michelle and William learned from interviewing hundreds of people in the NFT space
  • why Michelle thinks blockchain is an improvement upon the traditional art world’s use of physical ledger systems
  • William and Michelle’s favorite NFT projects from NFCastle
  • what projects the money raised from NFCastle will restore for the House of Lobkowicz
  • what William and Michelle learned from hosting NFCastle
  • how NFCastle went about determining royalties for secondary sales for their NFTs
  • what’s next for NFCastle

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