Crypto Over Coffee #2 — Thursday, May 11th 2023

TLDR;

$PEPE holders who bought the top of the memecoin mania are hoping for a repeat of the face-melting run up after centralized exchange listings, the SEC has 3 days to respond to Coinbase’s request for regulatory guidance on securities laws, and crypto markets holistically have cooled off considerably. Despite predictable reporting on inflation and key economic metrics, crypto has struggled to keep up the upward momentum it has seen throughout April and early May.

The Crypto “Need to Know”

👨‍⚖️ Time is running out for the SEC. A week ago, The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission has 10 days to respond to Coinbase’s mandamus petition requesting clarity on the application of securities laws to crypto. The SEC has 3 days left to formulate a response. What will they say?

🐸 $PEPE holders bet big on notable centralized exchange listings for the memecoin at a $700M market cap as of May 4th, and the viral memecoin exploded past the $1B market cap milestone after Binance and others listed the coin. At its peak, it reached $1.85B in market cap, before plummeting over $1B as capital exited the coin. Profit taking and liquidity exit ensued leaving $PEPE down 65% at the time of publication.

⚖️ Last week, a jury found Nathanial Chastain, former OpenSea Product Manager, guilty of wire fraud and money laundering. The trial pertained to allegations that Chastain had bought and sold NFTs based on non-public information about NFT collections that would be added to OpenSea’s ‘featured collections’ page.

🐙 Kraken, a US-based crypto exchange, partnered with a popular social media persona, Kitboga, to expose and infuriate a crypto scammer. In this incredible video, Kitboga is armed with a fake $455K Bitcoin portfolio provided by Kraken with which he lures a crypto scammer. By the end of the “support” call, the crypto scammer is incensed, lobbing insults at Kitboga. It is a must-watch.

🦄 Uniswap on Bitcoin? Recently trends have emerged related to Bitcoin Ordinals and “BRC-20” token issuance on Bitcoin, whereby fungible tokens like $PEPE can be minted and traded natively on the Bitcoin blockchain. In response to this growing trend, developers have launched the Uniswap smart contracts on Bitcoin, seeking to catalyze a DeFi ecosystem native to Bitcoin. However, the explosion of activity related to Bitcoin Ordinals and tokens have prompted controversy amongst Bitcoin proponents and users, with transaction fees spiking and scam-friendly tokens thriving on Bitcoin.

📈 PayPal reported in its financials recently that it is now holding well over $900 million in crypto assets on behalf of its customers, with over $300 million of that being added in 2023. It is unclear where the capital inflow is coming from or which user base is primarily using PayPal to hold or use cryptocurrencies like $BTC and $ETH.

🔐 Webacy, the company behind a powerful web3 security tool suite, just released version 3.0 of its dApp. With Webacy 3.0, users can evaluate their wallets’ risk score (risk of exploit), monitor wallet activity in real-time, and set automated actions to recover assets from lost or compromised wallets. Webacy’s suite of tools is like Simplisafe for your crypto, you can choose which tools you wish to use to level up your cryptocurrency wallet security. The Wallet Watch tool, which enables you to get alerts for incoming/outgoing transactions, contract calls, etc. is a free tool you can start using today to get notified if your wallet is being used without your knowledge. Quick identification of a wallet compromise can be the difference between total loss of assets and partial recovery. Try Wallet Watch here using Hashoshi’s affiliate link.

Biggest Movers: Winners and Losers

Portfolio Moves

• Continuing to hold $USDC until buy-in opportunity for $BTC, $ETH. Targets below $26.5k $BTC and below $1650 $ETH.

Alpha

👀 This FREE NFT MINT could be a nice opportunity to get in early on a very secretive Cardano project. The NFT mint does not have any cost, and all you will pay is the transaction fee for the mint. The date is set for Friday, May 12th at https://tokenriot.io/. (link pasted in full for verifiability) There will be further mints scheduled in the future, so keep an eye out.

🧐 Researching latest updates to Zeitgeist, a Polkadot ecosystem project that serves prediction market use cases. This is a project I invested in early, and it took a long time to come to fruition. However, new updates on the horizon for the project and steady development efforts make this an appealing long term opportunity that I am weighing as we speak.