March 14, 2022       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • The SEC rejected two spot bitcoin ETFs from NYDIG and Global X last Friday.

  • Russians are reportedly looking to trade crypto in favor of property in the United Arab Emirates.

  • Polygon’s network went down for eight hours over the weekend.

  • Jamaica is giving $16 of its CBDC to the first 100,000 who sign up for the program.

  • Block’s hardware crypto wallet will include a fingerprint sensor instead of PINs, passwords, or seed phrases.

  • Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation asked Tether to freeze Russian transactions.

  • A $4 billion hedge fund is shorting USDT.

  • Polychain and Arca proposed more sustainable yields on Anchor.

  • Bored Ape Yacht Club is asking users to register their identities in order to gain access to a new project, prompting criticism.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

  • A provision in the EU’s Markets in Crypto Crypto Assets (MiCA) legislative framework could lead to limited use of proof-of-work style cryptocurrencies.

  • Ukraine has bought 410,000 packed lunches, 5,550 bulletproof vests, 500 ballistic plates, 3,125 thermal imagers, 500 helmets, 3,427 medicines, and 60 walkie-talkies with funds donated in crypto.

The $$$ Corner…

  • Hedera’s HBAR Foundation will spend $100 million to support solutions using Hedera DLT network in an eco-friendly way.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Meebits and CryptoPunks Volume Explode After Yuga Labs Acquisition

By Mark Murdock

 

Yuga Labs, the creator behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced the acquisition of intellectual property rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections.

With the purchase, Yuga Labs says it owns the “brands, copyright in the art, and other IP rights for both collections, along with 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits.”

As a first step, Yuga Labs is granting CryptoPunk and Meebits NFT owners full commercial rights to their tokens. “With this acquisition Yuga Labs will own the CryptoPunks and Meebit brands and logos, and as they’ve done with their own BAYC collection, Yuga Labs will transfer IP, commercial, and exclusive licensing rights to individual NFT holders,” wrote the team in a press release. Yuga Labs envisions the transfer of IP and commercialization rights leading to a “vibrant” new community that will incorporate CryptoPunks and Meebits into different metaverse (and physical) projects.

As of now, Meebits and CryptoPunks holders have not received the new terms and conditions for their IP and commercialization rights – though Yuga Labs says this is coming soon.

Yuga Labs also clarified that they would not try to “shoehorn” the new collections into the Bored Ape Yacht Club model. Instead, the firm hopes to be “thoughtful stewards” in bringing additional utility to the NFT collections.

The news comes after a few months of frustration from CryptoPunk holders over CryptoPunks creator Larva Labs’ opting not to give clear guidance on IP benefits for holders.

The acquisition is a massive merger in the NFT space. According to CryptoSlam, CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and Meebits are four of the ten most popular NFT collections by all-time volume. The news led to CryptoPunks volume spiking on Friday (data from CryptoSlam) and Meebits volume and number of sales exploding over the past seven days (data from NonFungible).

Recommended Reads

  1. Punk6529 on Yuga Labs purchasing CryptoPunks:

  1. Real Vision’s Raoul Pal on network effects and digital assets:

  1. Decrypt on NFTs and mainstream critics:

On The Pod…

How Justin Sun Has Allegedly Tried to Manipulate Markets and Escape Regulation

Chris Harland-Dunaway, a freelance reporter for The Verge, talks about his most recent investigative story on Tron founder Justin Sun, which details a long string of questionable decisions and actions by Sun. Show topics:

  • why Justin Sun fled China after the Tron ICO

  • why Chris’s 15 sources were granted anonymity for this story

  • why Chris believes that Tron’s market-making team was performing insider trading

  • how Justin Sun has tried to evade US securities law

  • what “Operation Couch Cushions” was and how it led to 300 BTC being sent to Poloniex

  • where Justin Sun is looking for citizenship

  • what Chris knows about a grand jury investigation into Justin Sun

  • what Justin Sun had to say about Chris’ allegations

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!

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