1/30/24: Another "Crypto" Fraud 🚨💸😿

Top News

  • 🚨 SEC charges founders of $1.7B HyperFund with fraud

  • 💸 Jupiter airdrop predicted to be the largest in history

  • 😿 Taproot Wizards 'Quantum Cats' suffers technical issues

Specs’ Insights

⌐◪-◪ → Another fund that “guaranteed” investors high returns bites the dust. How many times are people going to fall for this?

Sam Lee and Brenda Chunga — aka Bitcoin Beautee — raised over $1.7B to allegedly invest in mining operations. The problem, however, was there was no real source of revenue. It was a pyramid scheme.

This is yet another example of a TradFi vehicle being used to scam investors. Sadly the mainstream media will place the blame on crypto when that was just the bait — combined with people’s greed — in the same ol’ mouse trap.

⌐◪-◪ → Jupiter (JUP) is about to execute what may be the largest single airdrop in history, and the hype has led to a surge of DeFi activity on Solana:

  • SOL daily active addresses flipped BTC

  • SOL processed $112B stablecoin transfers in 7D

  • JUP flipped Uniswap in 24H DEX volume

It’s amazing how motivated/engaged people get for these things, I mean, I suppose it is FREE money.

My business brain questions how sustainable these practices are, because at the end of the day, it’s just an extreme version of paid customer acquisition.

Except unlike ads where users click/engage out of interest — which better qualifies them as a legitimate customer — these users click/engage out of greed.

What happens when they get their fix? They take the money and run.

⌐◪-◪ → Taproot Wizards had a rough day yesterday trying to mint out their new ordinals collection, Quantum Cats.

For the cat lovers out there, the mint was postponed to Feb. 1st at 12 pm ET: 12-5 pm for the whitelist, and 5 pm+ public sale.

Personally, I won’t be collecting any of these cats — I’ve got my fair share between CryptoKitties and Mooncats — but for those looking to learn about Ordinals, this might be your opportunity!

Taproot Wizards co-founder and beloved Ordinals maxi, Udi Wertheimer, addressed the community and failed mint in a post on X yesterday.

I suppose it’s a good thing Taproot Wizards has $7.5M in fresh capital from investors, though I wouldn’t want to have to explain this flop to my shareholders. Good luck Udi, I believe in you!

Bonus: DeeZe unintentionally experienced the entire mint fail on shrooms. Fucking cats.

Everything Else

⛓️ Crypto & DeFi

  • Vitalik gives 4 use cases for Crypto x AI

  • Coinbase to charge fees on USDC to USD conversions over $75M

  • Binance allows traders to hold funds in independent Swiss banks

  • Abracadabra Finance drained of $6.4M after MIM token depeg

  • dYdX Foundation requests $30M budget for 18 months

  • Starknet partners with Celestia on L3 data availability

  • dYdX Chain adds liquid staking support

  • OKX to enable Doginals, Atomicals, Stamps, and Runes standards

  • Phantom flips Coinbase in app store downloads

  • X receives a money transmitter license in Nevada

🏦 Wallstreet & VC

🏛️ Legal & Regulatory

  • FTX Estate sells $1B worth of SUI token warrants for $100M

🌎 Rest of the World

🖼️ NFTs & Metaverse

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