February 11, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• Optimism, an Ethereum scaling solution, disclosed that it recently patched a critical bug earlier this month.

• Crypto mergers and acquisitions ballooned nearly 5,000% in 2021.

• Salesforce is reportedly working on an NFT cloud.

• Russia shut down darknet sites that had made $263 million in crypto.

• The price of FLOW tokens jumped after an officially-licensed Olympics-themed P2E game was launched on the Flow blockchain.

• Robinhood wants to expand globally, with crypto taking the lead.

• Least Authority, a security audito firm, believes that Atomic Wallet, a popular crypto wallet supporting 300+ coins, could be at risk.

• Fitch downgraded El Salvador’s rating over debt concerns.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

• Gucci bought land in The Sandbox.

• YouTube’s chief product officer thinks web3 has “incredible potential.”

• Crypto.com (disclosure: a sponsor of my show) bought the naming rights to the Miami Grand Prix.

• The EU will, in 2023, formally consider legislation regarding a digital euro.

• OnlyFans, the NSFW platform, is integrating NFT profile pictures into its app.

The $$$ Corner…

• Binance invested $200 million in Forbes and Magnum Opus Acquisition Limited, which is a SPAC, to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. (Disclosure: Forbes is my former employer.)

• Everyrealm, a virtual real-estate investor, raised $60 million in a funding round led by a16z.

• Ethernity, an NFT marketplace, raised $20 million in seed funding.

• Dom Hofman, the co-founder of Vine and creator of Loot, raised $12 million from Paradigm for Sup, the parent company of the NFT project Blitmap.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

SLP Tokenomics Lead to Major Price Surge

Axie Infinity’s reward token, Smooth Love Potion (SLP), is up 274% over the past seven days.

Why? Because the tokenomics have changed. Drastically.

Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-like play-to-earn game where players collect and breed NFT monsters and battle them for rewards. SLP is the token players can earn for winning battles, while AXS is the governance token for Axie Infinity.

On February 3rd, Axie Infinity announced that Season 20 of the play-to-earn game would coincide with a “variety of important economic balancing changes.” Specifically, in Season 20, Axie Infinity is cutting down the issuance of SLP by over 50%. For those of you in the weeds of Axie Infinity, the game is doing this by eliminating adventure mode and daily quests – which was essentially a way for users to easily win SLP. Axie is also restructuring its arena reward structure to reward winners with AXS, the game’s governance token, rather than SLP.

In addition, Axie is working on extra burn mechanisms (dubbed “token sinks”) for SLP. Essentially, they are building out more use-cases for SLP. In its blog post, Axie Infinity announced that SLP can now be used to purchase skins, upgradable body parts, in-game emojis, breeding events, and Axie names, among other metaverse items.

The move to restructure SLP’s tokenomics comes as the token is down 91% from its all-time highs in May and June 2021. The core issue has been SLP’s high rate of inflation. Axie Infinity reports that roughly 4x more SLP was created than burned every day – causing the price to tank.

However, with Season 20 now live and issuance cut by half, SLP now has a chance to redeem itself.

Recommended Reads

1. Tascha Che on public blockchains as the nations of the metaverse:

2. Twitch co-founder Justin Kan on NFTs:

3. (Recommended Watch) Gary Vaynerchuk dropped quite a monologue on why crypto and NFTs are misunderstood:

On The Pod…

How Law Enforcement Tracked Down $3.6 Billion in Bitcoin

On Tuesday, the US government seized $3.6 billion in bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack and arrested two individuals, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, on charges of money laundering. Tom Robinson, cofounder and chief scientist at the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, breaks down how law enforcement was able to seize the BTC, what techniques the alleged money launderers used to avoid capture, and who could have pulled off the initial hack. Show highlights:

• background on the 2016 Bitfinex hack

• who was arrested this week and why

• how the US government gained access to the private keys in Lichtenstein’s and Morgan’s control

• why AlphaBay, a now-defunct darknet website, was crucial to law enforcement’s effort to track down the stolen Bitfinex funds

• what money laundering techniques were used to cash out the stolen Bitfinex funds before this week’s arrests

• whether, as blockchain analytics technology advances, it will always catch up to be able to trace the movements of crypto as its laundered

• why using Monero, a privacy coin, to cash out stolen funds is a red flag

• why Tom does not think the two individuals arrested this week for money laundering the stolen Bitfinex funds were the original hackers

Book Update

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