May 25, 2021 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk had a “potentially promising” conversation with North American Bitcoin miners; MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor hosted the meeting
- Goldman Sachs set its Coinbase price target at $306
- One River filed for a carbon-neutral bitcoin ETF with the SEC
- Crypto funds saw a net outflow for the second straight week
- A former Goldman exec to start as Coinbase’s chief policy officer in June
- European bank HSBC is not interested in BTC as an asset class
- Solidus Labs raised $20 million with plans to fight market manipulation
- Bitcoin miner Marathon to house ~73,000 Bitcoin miners in Texas
- Uniswap made its Wall Street Journal debut barely one month after this tweet:
What Do You Meme?
CoinMarketCap data shows that the crypto market is up 20% from yesterday (thanks to a big push from DeFi tokens). However, the crypto industry is still down 36% from its mid-May peak of a $2.5 trillion market cap.
With the 36% dip properly contextualized, perhaps a few Unchained Daily readers will relate to this meme:
What’s Poppin’?
Coindesk’s annual conference, Consensus, kicked off yesterday. The three-day event is chock full of panels, workshops, and conversations between some of the biggest and most influential people in the crypto industry.
Day one did not disappoint, as a multitude of headlines arose from the first day of the conference.
Here’s what we learned:
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Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio owns “some bitcoin” and would “rather have bitcoin than a bond.”
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Senator Cynthia Lummis announced that the Financial Innovation Caucus will formally launch tomorrow with intentions to study payments, settlement, and digital currencies, amongst other things.
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Shark Tank “shark” Kevin O’Leary believes turning Bitcoin mining green could be “the reason it goes to a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand.”
- Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, a division chief for the IMF, thinks that Bitcoin (or Dogecoin) does “not serve the purpose of an international reserve currency.”
- Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon owns cryptocurrencies.
Recommended Reads
- Jimmy Song on Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and post-modern investing:
- Here is an insightful thread on what is happening in China regarding the Bitcoin mining ban:
- Interested in actually using crypto? Here are 100 different ways to use Ethereum right now:
On The Pod…
How Solana and Binance Smart Chain Could Take Ethereum’s Lead
Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, and Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, debate the merits of Ethereum, Solana, and Binance Smart Chain. In this episode, they discuss:
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why Ethereum is losing market share to Solana and BSC
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whether decentralization matters and at what point decentralization becomes redundant
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why they think Solana and Binance Smart Chain need to be taken seriously as competitors to EThereum
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whether BSC or Solana is the bigger long-term threat to Ethereum
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the biggest obstacle to Ethereum’s success (and it’s not gas fees)
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how Ethereum will navigate fragmented Layer 2 solutions
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Solana and its lack of developers
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what differentiates DeFi from CeFi
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why Solana has an edge on Ethereum in terms of composability
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how Ethereum will onboard new users
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why Kain is such an ardent backer of Ethereum
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why both Kyle and Kain think EIP 1559 and the potential for higher ETH prices is bad for Ethereum
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if Synthetix would ever consider launching a cross-chain product
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the viability of a multi-chain world
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why Kyle believes the future holds a winner-take-most blockchain ecosystem
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 Nov. 2nd. Pre-order it today!
You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians
