November 29, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Adidas announced a partnership with Coinbase while teasing partnerships with Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gmoney, and PUNKS Comic.

  • A cryptocurrency called Omicron is up 137% since the naming of the latest Covid-19 variant.

  • El Salvador bought 100 more BTC during the market dip.

  • Celsius expanded its Series B from $400 million to $750 million at a valuation of $3.25 billion; Celsius announcedthat it had suspended an employee following rumors of its CFO Yaron Shalem’s arrest in Israel.

  • South Park mocked a “bitcoin only” future in its latest episode.

  • Crypto data platform DappRadar is decentralizing via a token.

  • Dapper Labs unveiled a first look at All Day, its NFT platform purpose-built for the National Football League.

  • The Infinite Machine, a book by The Defiant’s Camila Russo on Ethereum, is being turned into a feature-length film.

  • ConstitutionDAO’s PEOPLE token hit an all-time high over $.16 last week, up from $.004 when the DAO announced its intent to refund participants.

  • Coinbase acquired BRD, a crypto wallet firm.

  • A plot of virtual land in Axie Infinity sold for $2.48 million.

  • Hacked cloud accounts are being used to mine crypto, according to Google.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

The Metaverse Boom

 

“The Metaverse is estimated to be a trillion-dollar revenue opportunity across advertising, social commerce, digital events, hardware, and developer/creator monetization,” wrote Grayscale, the world’s largest digital asset manager, in a recent report.

 

And based on recent metaverse activity, it appears that Grayscale could be correct. For example, in the past week, there have been three high-profile virtual land deals.

 

  • On Thanksgiving eve, a plot of “Genesis” land in Axie Infinity sold for 550 ETH (~$2.3 million). The purchase marks “the largest sale ever for a single plot of digital land,” according to Axie Infinity’s Twitter account.

  • However, on Thursday, the record-breaking Axie Infinity sale was outdone by the Metaverse Group, which announced “the largest metaverse land acquisition in history.” According to the press release, the company recently finished buying a 116 parcel estate in the heart of Decentrand’s Fashion Street district. The land was purchased for 618,000 MANA, worth roughly $2.5 million at the time of announcement.

 

  • The Sandbox, a yet-to-be released blockchain game, made headlines by reserving a parcel of land for Adidas.  In addition to the Adidas real-estate play, The Sandbox also saw the Metaflow Super Mega Yacht, an NFT boat designed by The Fantasy Collection for use in The Sandbox, sell for 149 ETH on Tuesday. SAND, The Sandbox’s native token, is up roughly 75% on the week, bursting into the top 40 tokens by market capitalization.

Recommended Reads

  • Arthur Hayes, co-founder of 100x, on DAOs:

  • @RealNatashaChe on investing in L1s:

  • @DeFiVader, a blockchain analyst, on guilds versus VCs:

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