February 25, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️
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China’s Supreme Court ruled that raising money from the public via digital assets is illegal, according to a statement released on Thursday.
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Arthur Hayes and Benjamin Delo, founders and executives of the crypto exchange BitMEX, pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act on Thursday, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.
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$400,000 in BTC was sent to “Come Back Alive,” a Ukrainian pro-military group, yesterday.
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Ukrainians are paying $1.10 for a single USDT (which is supposedly pegged to the dollar) on the cryptocurrency exchange Kuna.
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Over $680 million in short and long positions were liquidated between Wednesday and Thursday afternoon.
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Celsius, a centralized crypto lender, is the first CeFi lender to launch a pool on Maple Finance, a DeFi lender.
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$500 million in ETH could be liquidated if ETH prices drop below $2,100.
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Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is “very upset” by Russia’s decision to enter Ukraine.
- Hotly anticipated NFT project “Invisible Friends” has done 5x the volume of any other NFT project in the last 24 hours and currently has a floor price of 9 ETH.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
The $$$ Corner…
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Former Meta coders are raising $200 million at a $2 billion valuation to bring Diem/Libra back to life.
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Aligned, a web3 infrastructure company, raised $34 million in seed funding.
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What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
Crypto exchange Coinbase released its Q4 2021 shareholder letter yesterday, recapping the final months of 2021 and summarizing the year as a whole. Here are five tidbits that stand out:
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The firm reported $2.5 billion in net revenue in Q4 2021– nearly doubling its net revenue of $1.31 billion from Q3.
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Monthly active users on Coinbase quadrupled between Q4 2020 (2.8 million) and Q4 2021 (11.4).
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Coinbase noted that it is “proud to welcome or expand relationships with Anheuser-Busch, Brex, Enfusion, and Franklin Templeton on the Coinbase institutional platform in Q4.”
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In Q4 2021, Bitcoin and Ethereum each accounted for 16% trading on the exchange, with “other digital assets” doing 68% of volume (for context, BTC and ETH averaged a trading volume share of 41% and 15% in 2020).
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Retail traders made up the minority of trading volume on Coinbase in 2021 at 47%. However, just under 95% of Coinbase’s net transaction revenue came from retail customers.
As for Block (formerly Square), its payment firm Cash App, which offers retail users the chance to purchase and send BTC, had a big Q4 too. Notably, Cash App generated $1.96 billion of revenue from Bitcoin in the fourth quarter of last year. Of that, it turned a $46 million profit (a 14% increase from Q4 2020). For the full year, Cash App brought in $10.1 billion in revenue via Bitcoin and turned a $218 million gross profit.
With the entirety of Cash App bringing in $2.07 billion in gross profit for 2021, this means Bitcoin sales accounted for roughly 10% of Cash App’s gross profit last year.
Recommended Reads
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CoinDesk on all things Russia-Ukraine and crypto:
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Barnabé Monnot on rollup economics:
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Knower on DeFi 3.0:
On The Pod…
How Writing ‘The Cryptopians’ Shaped My Views on Ethereum
In a fun change of pace, Steven Ehrlich, editor of Forbes Cryptoasset and Blockchain Advisor, joins Unchained to interview me about my book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which came out this week. We discuss…
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where the inspiration for “The Cryptopians” title came from
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why I wanted to write a book about Ethereum
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how Vitalik’s role changed over the course of Ethereum’s founding
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who the main characters in The Cryptopians are
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the biggest challenges Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation faced in its early days
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Ethereum’s “red wedding” day
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what issues with crowdfunding and US securities laws were faced by early Ethereum founders
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how The DAO hack, along with the Shanghai attacks and Parity drama, shaped Ethereum
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what I discovered about Ming Chan’s time as the Ethereum Foundation director
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my biggest takeaways from researching ICOs
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why I think DAOs could be the next big thing
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whether or not I have an idea for a new book…
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