Wild week. Rumors spread that CZ of Binance is an international fugitive. Elon pumps Dogecoin. American Politician, Elizabeth Warren, wants to launch an anti-Crypto army.
I barely watch shows anymore because nothing’s as entertaining as Crypto.
Here’s’ what we got today:
- The CZ FUD – How a Single Tweet Rocked the Crypto Market.
- The Billion-Dollar Drama – Inside Arbitrum’s First Governance Proposal.
- An Introduction to LayerZero – The Ominchain Interoperability Protocol.
- Around the Web – The Dogecoin Pump, Warren’s’ Anti-crypto Army, and more.
Reading time: ~ 7 minutes.
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Here’s’ your Edge 🗡️!
📉 THE MARKETS
Sources: Coingecko, DeFiLlama, Fear & Greed Index.
“Selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the seeds” – Peter Lynch
The CZ FUD – How a Single Tweet Rocked the Crypto Market
CZ hasn’t had it easy these past few weeks. Last week, the CFTC sued Binance. Earlier this week, a rumor spread that CZ was on Interpol’s most wanted.
What happened? A rumor started spreading that Interpol had a Red Notice against him.
An Interpol Red Notice is an international alert issued by Interpol to request the arrest of a wanted person for extradition purposes. For context, Do Kwon (Terra) had a red notice issued against him.
You can imagine this would be a major issue if true.
How did the rumor spread? Cobie is an OG crypto influencer with tremendous influence over the space. (He has 750k+ followers on Twitter and hosts UpOnly, one of the most popular Crypto Podcasts).
He posted an encrypted message to his Twitter. When someone cracked it, it read “Interpol Red Notice for CZ.” Since CFTC suing CZ was still fresh on everyone’s mind, the idea of a Red Notice seemed entirely plausible.
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What Happened? His message was encrypted using the SHA-256 hash function, which some people use to prove they know something without actually revealing what that ”something” is.
Cobie posted the encrypted message after hearing the rumor. If he’s’ right, he can reveal that he knew about this and that he’s a genius. If he’s’ wrong, he can just delete or ignore it, and nobody will care.
He probably never expected the message content to be decrypted. Cobie has stated that someone with whom he discussed the rumor might have revealed the seed, leading to the message being decrypted.
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This event really demonstrates the immaturity of our market. Millions in liquidations happened because of a single false tweet.
Moral of the story: Don’t believe everything you read – or hear – on the internet.
Inside Arbitrum’s’ First Governance Proposal
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There’s a billion-dollar drama happening live in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
The source? Arbitrum’s first-ever governance proposal. This proposal suggests several things, including transferring 750MM $ARB (worth nearly a billion $USD) to The Arbitrum Foundation.
The vote is ongoing. However, currently, it looks like the proposal won’t pass. Blockworks Research was the first major delegate to point out the issues inherent in the proposal:
- 750M $ARB would be under the direct control of only three directors of The Arbitrum Foundation.
- The fund would be used for “special grants.” But clarity around these grants is lacking.
- These tokens are from the Arbitrum DAO treasury; however, the transfer wasn’t approved by the Arbitrum DAO.
The proposal also had additional problems, including trying to squeeze several different requests into a single proposal. And so many of the major delegates have voted against it.
What’s the big deal? The team had already transferred the 750MM $ARB – before the proposal was passed. From that, 10MM $ARB has been sold for fiat. And 40MM was loaned to Wintermute to be a market maker. Understandably, the community was enraged.
What’s even the point of voting if the proposal’s suggestions have already been executed?
What’s the Arbitrum team saying?
They acknowledged the communication mistakes.
- They stated it was a ratification proposal rather than a request.
- They explained that special grants are needed to compete against others.
- The % allocation to The Arbitrum Foundation is similar to other foundations.
The team was responsive to the negative feedback. They’ve’ suggested a plan for addressing the community concerns.
- The remaining $700MM won’t’ be moved until the community approves.
- They published a transparency report about the Foundation’s’ initial setup.
- Published two new AIPs. One on “Lockup, Budget, and Transparency”. Another one is “Amendments to current founding documents”.
Despite this drama, the Arbitrum team still has a lot of goodwill in Crypto Twitter. And it appears that the proposed strategy will get the community’s support.
Edgy’s’ take:
So much of this could’ve been avoided if they’d mentioned that 7.5% was allocated to the foundation in the tokenomics documentation.
LayerZero – The $3 Billion-Dollar Protocol
Considerfoundation’sto is in a bear market. This is an incredible feat. The 33 backers of this round included major firms like a16z and Sequoia Capital.
What is LayerZero? In technical terms, it’s’ an “omninchain interoperability protocol.” It helps developers create dApps that work across chains, aka omnichain dApps.
This is possible due to their cross-chain messaging technology. With LayerZero, smart contracts on one chain can execute transactions on another. Now, dApps can execute transactions in both Solana and Ethereum (and more). Below are some starting points where you can read more about the technical side of LayerZero:
LayerZero solves a major problem for crypto users: Bridging. Users will no longer have to worry about which chain they are using. They can simply use their application of choice. All the crypto stuff will be handled by devs on the backend. This constitutes a substantial UX improvement for crypto.
According to the team, LayerZero has found massive adoption as well:
- The TVL has crossed $7B.
- The transaction volume has crossed $6B.
- Top protocols – like Uniswap, SushiSwap, and PancakeSwap – have already integrated LayerZero to allow cross-chain transactions.
For believers in the multi-chain world, LayerZero is an obvious winner. A bonus: They don’t have a token yet. And there are tons of guides available on how to farm LayerZero airdrops. Go check those out if you’d like.
🐶 The Dogefather Does It Again
Above is Dogecoin’s’ seven-day price chart. On April 4th, a big jump is clearly visible – a 30% rise in price.
What is Dogecoin? It is the OG memecoin. The Bitcoin of memecoins. It was originally created in 2013 as a joke on crypto speculations. Elon Musk, aka “The Dogefather,” was responsible for making it a household crypto name in the 2021 bull run.
Why was it pumping? Elon Musk replaced Twitter’s blue bird logo with the image of Doge for desktop users.
Elon posted ” As promised” on Twitter, along with an old Twitter conversation of someone asking him to replace Twitter’s’ logo with Doge.
The hypothesis: Elon is the owner of Twitter. Could Elon integrate Twitter payments with Dogecoin? Imagine if you could pay for Twitter Blue using Dogecoin or tip content creators using Dogecoin. He has accepted Dogecoin for his other company (on a smaller scale). This would give a massive use case for Doge, and that’s what people are speculating on.
How likely is this? Who knows. I don’t think it’s likely, personally. Creating Twitter’s virtual currency and having vertical integration makes more sense.
This event illustrates the importance of “pumpamentals” in deciding crypto prices. The upcoming Double Your DeFi cohort has an entire session dedicated to it.
🌎 What’s’ Happening?
📰 Industry News
OpenSea launched OpenSea Pro. It is a rebrand of Gem v2, which OpenSea acquired. It has several advanced features to target professional NFT traders.
3AC founders, Su Zhu, and Kyle Davies launched their new exchange, OPNX. It aims to support trading in bankruptcy trades tied to FTX. But they only had less than two dollars in volume on the first day.
Elizabeth Warren is running an anti-crypto re-election campaign. She uses the slogan ” Elizabeth Warren is Building an Anti-Crypto Army.”
US Government sold 9,800 $BTC on March 14 via Coinbase. They are planning to sell another 41,500 $BTC. These will be sold in four batches over the year.
Bittrex Exchange is winding down operations in the US, effective April 30, 2023. They cited regulatory uncertainty as the cause.
🍿 DeFi Bites
PancakeSwap launched its v3 on BNB Chain and Ethereum. It is a fork of the Uniswap V3, whose license expired just a few days before.
Euler Finance retrieved all of the recoverable funds from the hacker. This is one of the largest recoveries of stolen assets in blockchain history.
DefiLlama added another feature to their tool, tracking token unlocks. Users can now see token emissions and monitor major changes in unlock schedule.
dYdX has launched the private testnet for dYdX v4. With v4, they are moving away from the Ethereum ecosystem to become a standalone Cosmos app-chain.
SushiSwap is discussing the removal of Jared Grey as the Head Chef. He was served with a subpoena regarding his involvement in Sushi. His unresponsiveness regarding the matter is the cause of the proposal.
Ethereum MEV bots lost over $25 million in an attack that exploited a mechanism vulnerability in ultrasound relay. The team has since fixed the vulnerability.
Gnosis, the team behind Gnosis Chain and Gnosis Safe, has launched a hash oracle aggregator for blockchain bridges. It should make bridges more secure by requiring multiple bridges to validate a withdrawal.
🧠 Twitter Alpha
😂 Meme
