wagmi ⚽️

December 17, 2021 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

Shopify announced the beta release of an NFT marketplace, where businesses can “mint and sell” branded NFTs with Shopify and Shopify payments from their own storefront.
The Block reported that Dune Analytics, a crypto analytics company, is raising money at a valuation of $1 billion.
South Park makes Crypto Twitter feel seen… (clip)
Melania Trump, the former first lady, is launching an NFT endeavor on Solana.
Nexo, a crypto lending platform (and, disclosure: former sponsor of my shows), is partnering with Three Arrows Capital to allow users to borrow money using NFTs as collateral.
H&R Block is suing Block, formerly Square, for infringing on the firm’s logo and brand name.
Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z announced the board members of their Bitcoin trust.
Shrina Kurani is running for a House seat in California and is dropping 2,022 NFTs on Solana representing potential Web3 policies.
El Salvador’s Bitcoin-friendly President received an 85% approval rating in a recent poll.
Uniswap released a new upgrade to improve pricing and optimize gas costs for swaps on Uniswap v2 and v3.
Crypto scam revenue hit $7.7 billion in 2021.
Robinhood is launching a new feature that lets users gift cryptocurrencies.
Nansen, a crypto data company, raised its latest round at a valuation of $750 million.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Watch Out, Crypto Might Be Coming for a Sports Team Near You

The relationship between crypto and sports has proven strong in 2021.

Athletes have flocked to crypto. Steph Curry uses a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT as his Twitter profile pic, while Tom Brady’s profile pic shows off a bright red pair of laser eyes. Multiple athletes, like Russell Okung and Sean Culkin, have converted part of their multi-million dollar contracts into Bitcoin. Aaron Rodgers and Kevin Durant have also made crypto headlines.

Professional sports organizations like the Houston Rockets, Philadelphia 76ers, and New York Giants are sponsored by crypto companies (NYDIG, Crypto.com – disclosure, also a sponsor of my shows – and Grayscale, respectively). In Miamiand Los Angeles, two stadiums are named after crypto companies. Heck, FTX, the Sam Bankman-Fried led crypto exchange, is the official exchange of Major League Baseball.

With that being said, this week, it appears that the Crypto x Sports trend is going from athlete interest and organizational sponsorship to ownership.

Yesterday saw two announcements of crypto-natives purchasing soccer teams.

According to a press release, WAGMI United is in “advanced negotiations” to purchase an English Football team. It claims to be the “first time” a sale of a sports team could be partially financed through cryptocurrency. (Side note: please visit their website with your volume up.

Once the sale is completed, WAGMI United has big plans to leverage the social aspect and community of the cryptocurrency industry to give fans a “personal stake in a professional sports team like never before in history.”

“From minting club-centric NFTs that let fans support their team while also unlocking exclusive access to moving toward a more decentralized and transparent form of ownership and operation,” explained the team in a press release. Adding, “WAGMI United plans to bring a cutting-edge and crypto-centric approach to running the club — and the engagement of the global crypto and NFT communities in this project is absolutely essential to its success.”

The WAGMI team is loaded with sports and crypto heavyweights.

Source: WAGMI United’s Press Release

Interestingly, WAGMI United was not the only crypto-native to announce the purchase (or soon-to-be purchase) of a soccer team.

Peter McCormack, host of What Bitcoin Did, a Bitcoin-centric podcast, took to Twitter to announce the purchase of Bedford FC, a small club in England’s tenth division away from the Premier League.

“I will establish our club as the #bitcoin club, a team that operates on a #bitcoin standard,” wrote McCormack. “Where local teams can only tap into a local community of fans/companies to drive revenue, we have a global army of #bitcoin holders and companies who can get behind this,” added the avid Bitcoiner.

In conjunction with McCormack’s purchase, Real Bedford unveiled a new partnership with Compass Mining, a bitcoin mining company.

But that’s not all! A new DAO, dubbed linksdao, was created this week for the express purpose of purchasing a top 100 private golf course:

The project immediately caught fire and has already garnered 5,000 followers on Twitter and 2,000+ members on Discord. Greg Norman Jr., the son of Greg Norman, who spent 331 weeks as the world’s Number 1 Official World Golf Rankings ranked golfer in the 1980s and 1990s, was very excited about the idea.

On The Pod…

$12 Billion Has Been Lost in DeFi Value to Crime. Here’s How

Jess Symington, research lead at Elliptic, a blockchain forensics company, discusses the massive upswing in DeFi hacks during 2021, resulting in over $10 billion of DeFi value lost. Show topics:

the state of crime in DeFi
how much value has been lost to exploits
whether the majority of hacks are the result of user or developer error
the various types of exploits
how to confirm when a project did, in fact, rug pull
which blockchains are most susceptible to having exploits
what has been happening recently in ransomware
how DeFi hackers cash out
why ransomware attackers, who usually request payment in Bitcoin, have a tougher time cashing out than DeFi hackers
whether hackers trend towards a specific profile/demographics
how easy it is for law enforcement to find hackers
whether blockchain’s transparency is proving to be a helpful tool for regulators
Jess’s advice on how to prevent hacks for both protocols and users

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