Riding The Wave News Summary #2

Riding The Wave News Summary #2

Welcome to Riding The Wave. If you have questions or feedback, please reply to this email. If you are new to the Newsletter, please check out what we provide on our about page and consider subscribing. Within the Newsletter, I provide Etoro Strategy updates, News summaries, weekly status updates, & Longer Form Articles (Ex: How do I pick which coins/tokens to buy?). More details here

For any free tier users interested in the paid tier, I will be offering membership for $10 monthly or $100 annually until January 10th, 2022. It is temporarily available at this lower price to reward early subscribers who join prior to an established substack track record & an archive of available content (I aim to have 10 articles out by January 10th). After this point, the price will move to $15 monthly & $150 annually. 

News

Table of Contents

1. Is Crypto Taking Over Silicon Valley?

2. Hackers & Scams

3. Bitmex Token

4. Credit Union FOMO

5. JPMorgan and Blockchain

6. The US Treasury doesn't want to wait on Congress

7. Fomo ahead?

8. Coin/Token upgrades for ETH & DOT

---

Is Crypto Taking Over Silicon Valley?

High-level Executives across different tech companies in Silicon valley are migrating to Crypto.

When they join Crypto, they aren't just bringing one person; they are bringing a large chunk of their professional network.

When Sandy Carter left her job as a vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing unit this month, she announced in a LinkedIn post that she was joining a crypto technology company. She included a link for open positions at the start-up.
Within two days, she said, more than 350 people — many from the biggest internet companies — had clicked the link to apply for jobs at the firm

With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires.

The pull is so strong that Companies attempting to adopt crypto, like Meta, are still losing their leaders

And David Marcus, the head of cryptocurrency efforts at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that he was leaving by the end of the year to follow his “entrepreneurial DNA.” Mr. Marcus, 48, plans to work on his own cryptocurrency project, two people with knowledge of his plans said.

and those that aren’t adopting crypto, are so worried about losing their employees that they are holding employee retention as a major topic in regular meetings

At Google, concerns about keeping employees — including not losing them to crypto companies — grew so pressing that the issue became part of the executive agenda discussed every Monday by Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, and his top deputies, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

This shift is likely partly fueled by the risk to reward ratio of staying within traditional tech versus moving to crypto. Many executives and software developers have little to lose as tech pays comfortably enough that an employee looking to switch can save funds with their extra pay before leaping. With the spaces massive growth over the past year, even if the coin/token they join fails, they can use their resume to move on to a new project that might require more experience, allowing them to move up even in the case of failure.

This shift also appears to be driven in part by employees’ thirst for an environment that better aligns with their views on privacy.

Ms. Carter, the former Amazon vice president, said people were interested in working at crypto firms for more than just money. Some were drawn to the ethos of web3, which strives to decentralize power and decision making. It’s an alternative to how Google and Facebook came to dominate the internet by sucking up personal data from users to sell targeted ads.

It will be interesting to see how this growth holds up if we see another bear run as that typically flushes many projects out of the market.

For readers who are looking to invest in Altcoins, they may want to look into this as a metric. If many Google/Facebook/etc. executives join a project, that can help you determine how they may approach problems internally and perform.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/technology/silicon-valley-cryptocurrency-start-ups.html

---

Hackers & Scams

There is a new Scam nicknamed the "Pig Butchering" floating around the cryptocurrency space. It previously started in China in 2019 but it has recently become more common in the US. It mainly targets wealthier tech familiar Americans with higher levels of education & uses a combination of trust via familiarity & escalating requests (foot in the door technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique).

The scam roughly follows this format: