Riding The Wave News Summary #16
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News
Table of Contents
Tweets
DoJ seizes $3.6B in crypto and arrests two in connection with 2016 Bitfinex hack
Crypto start-up Alchemy tops $10 billion valuation amid blockchain funding frenzy
RSS3 aims to be the decentralized information processor of Web3
Sequoia-Led Group Buys Polygon’s Crypto Token for $450 Million
UN to Mark International Women's Day With Boss Beauties Ethereum NFTs
Tweets
Disco Solaris a story-driven retrotopia NFT project on Cardano (CNFT) was minted this week (will be writing an article about the project in the next couple of weeks, I minted 2 and bought 2 because I liked the project). Feel free to check out their Twitter here, full collection here, & collection by rarity here
Technical indicators have continued to become more bullish for Bitcoin
If you ever steal massive amounts of money/commit a major crime know the news & internet will find everything you have posted that is cringey. Be warned the video above isn’t the worst they have posted but it’s still pretty bad. (Person in the video stole $3.6B in crypto, following story covers the situation)
DoJ seizes $3.6B in crypto and arrests two in connection with 2016 Bitfinex hack
Authorities in the United States have made arrests and announced the seizure of $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency more than five years after hackers stole 119,756 Bitcoin (BTC) from the Bitfinex exchange.
In a Tuesday announcement, the U.S. Department of Justice said it had ordered the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan for allegedly conspiring to launder crypto connected to the 2016 Bitfinex hack. The 119,756 Bitcoin (BTC) — worth $72 million at the time hackers breached security at the exchange in August 2016 — is now valued at more than $5.1 billion.
“Today’s arrests, and the department’s largest financial seizure ever, show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “In a futile effort to maintain digital anonymity, the defendants laundered stolen funds through a labyrinth of cryptocurrency transactions. Thanks to the meticulous work of law enforcement, the department once again showed how it can and will follow the money, no matter what form it takes.”
Crypto is honestly one of the worst ways to steal money as it’s easily trackable due to its open-source nature. For larger heists like this one, it’s normal for exchanges to lock the funds out making it nearly impossible for the thieves to cash out.
Happy to see this resolved and how much publicity it got across different news outlets, the government being able to enforce the law on the crypto networks increases the odds people trust crypto.
Crypto start-up Alchemy tops $10 billion valuation amid blockchain funding frenzy
Crypto start-up Alchemy has nearly tripled its valuation in a matter of months, with the company saying Tuesday it’s now valued at $10.2 billion after its latest funding round.
The $200 million investment was led by Lightspeed and Silver Lake, and Alchemy’s previous financing round in late October valued the company at $3.5 billion. Earlier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Pantera also participated.
It comes amid a flood of venture capital dollars into crypto. Tech investors are looking for winners in what some describe as the future of the internet, or “Web 3.” Blockchain funding soared 718% last year, topping $25.5 billion for the first time, according to recent report from CB Insights.
Web3 has become a blanket term to describe any application built on blockchain — the technology behind cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Proponents describe it as a better, decentralized version of the internet. But Web3 has also attracted high-profile skeptics like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey.
This type of investment rush reminds me of the dot com bubble hype. Hopefully, it won’t be as bad due to bitcoins halving based growth cycle with regular bull and bear markets every 4 years but a drop could still be painful for larger funds.
Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All
On a basic level, Helium is a decentralized wireless network for “internet of things” devices, powered by cryptocurrency.
The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies. These hot spots, which cost roughly $500 apiece and can reach 200 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi hot spots, share their owners’ bandwidth with nearby internet-connected devices — like parking meters, air-quality sensors or smart kitchen appliances.
Anyone can use the Helium network, although most of its users so far are companies like Lime (which has used Helium to keep tabs on its connected scooters) and the Victor mousetrap company (which uses it for a new line of internet-connected traps). More than 500,000 Helium hot spots are in use around the world, with thousands being added to the network every day.
Here’s where the crypto part comes in: In addition to transmitting data, Helium hot spots reward their owners for participating in the network by creating units of a cryptocurrency called $HNT. These tokens can be bought and sold on the open market like any other cryptocurrency, and the more a hot spot is used, the more $HNT tokens it generates.
Helium, which was founded in 2013, didn’t start off as a crypto company. Its founders originally tried to build a long-range, peer-to-peer wireless network the old-fashioned way — by persuading people and businesses to set up hot spots and stringing them together. But they struggled to get enough participants, and the network stalled.
This, I’ve learned, is one of crypto’s superpowers — the ability to kick-start projects by providing an incentive to get in on the ground floor. Not everything could be improved by attaching itself to a cryptocurrency mining scheme. But in Helium’s case, crypto made sense as a way to encourage participation and give hot spot owners the satisfaction of building something they owned.
Could Helium have worked without crypto technology? Not really. The company tried the non-crypto approach, and it nearly went bankrupt. But adding tokens to the mix solved what technologists call the “cold start problem” — the fact that attracting the first users to a new network is often hard, because the network isn’t very valuable yet.
Helium isn’t perfect. Like many crypto projects, it exists in a regulatory gray area, and users could be in for a shock if Washington decides to crack down.
Putting a Helium hot spot in your house might also technically violate your internet service provider’s terms of service, since it involves reselling a portion of your bandwidth.
At this point, crypto is starting to be used as a buzzword for companies which doesn’t surprise me. When large investment groups and the media start jumping in they usually become buzzwords to help with marketing and to help pull in funding (even if the actual project never ends up using crypto-based tools or other functionality).
It’s also great to see smaller projects using crypto to jump-start their projects. NFT’s & tokens allow projects to create a plan, market, sell, & then use the funding their fans have provided to develop. It allows projects to sell their company without having to be on the stock market to raise capital & share ownership amongst investors.
RSS3 aims to be the decentralized information processor of Web3
Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the first information distribution protocol that saw massive adoption across the internet, is all set to take on Web3 with a decentralized information processing protocol called RSS3.
In a technical white paper released on Monday, RSS3 laid out plans for taking its popular internet feed update to Web3. RSS3 would offer every entity an RSS3 file that will act as source data and be updated continuously. The source data file then can be used as an aggregation of all the cyber activities, which can then be used to build out social media, content networks, games and other data-driven applications. The source data will have control over what information to broadcast and what to keep private.
RSS is a feed file containing a summary of a website’s updates, usually in a list of articles with hyperlinks. These feed files were meant to be decentralized and have played a key role in exchanging information across the internet. However, the monopoly of centralized web hosting services providers has led to the creation of the decentralized RSS3.
This could be exciting if development continues and pans out into a functional project as RSS is already extremely useful in the current internet by allowing different sites to talk with each other directly. This being available within crypto would only help web 3.0 to match & surpass web 2.0.
Sequoia-Led Group Buys Polygon’s Crypto Token for $450 Million
Polygon, the operator of an eponymous protocol used by developers to make Ethereum transactions quicker and cheaper, raised $450 million by selling its Matic crypto token to investors led by Sequoia Capital India.
SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund 2, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, Tiger Global, Alexis Ohanian and Animoca Brands Corp. were among more than 40 investors participating in the funding. Polygon’s token, capped at 10 billion units, is the closest analog to holding equity in the protocol. Matic traded at a high of $1.94 on Tuesday, according to data from CoinGecko.
Polygon is one of a number of so-called Layer 2 operators, offering tools for developers who want to create decentralized apps (or dapps) and tackling the issue of network congestion, which is a growing problem on Ethereum as its popularity rises.
This also reminds me of the dot-com crash. I’m hopeful the big investors don’t get scared off when the bear market comes. Even if they do this is still good news for now as it will help fuel the growth of the crypto market in the short term (next couple of months).
UN to Mark International Women's Day With Boss Beauties Ethereum NFTs
The women-focused Ethereum NFT collection Boss Beauties is debuting a one-of-one collection called Boss Beauty Role Models in New York City on March 8—International Women’s Day—that will become the first complete NFT collection ever shown at UN headquarters.
The original Boss Beauties NFT collection of 10,000 assets has a current floor price—or minimum “Buy Now” price—on OpenSea of 2.3 Ethereum—roughly $7,000 per asset. The project, launched in September, as of this writing ranks 123rd on OpenSea’s top NFT collections of all time, based on secondary volume trading sales.
Last year, the UN backed a competition called DigitalArt4Climate, where artists were asked to design different climate change-themed NFTs, with the winning artworks displayed at the Climate Change Conference in Scotland.
I’m happy to see the UN dipping their feet into NFT art, hopefully, it will inspire them to look into the plethora of use cases NFT’s provide.
Disclaimer: The information in this Newsletter is not financial, legal, or tax advice. I only trade on Etoro; if you are reached out to by people requesting you join a group or provide money, it is not me. My only public social media accounts are this Substack page, my Youtube page, my Twitter page, and my Etoro page; any others you see online are not me.