Subscribe | Chat | Sponsor

⌐◪-◪ → Former US President Barack Obama just told the world how powerful Bitcoin truly is.

His tone was serious, saying that with Bitcoin “the government can’t get in” or do “simple things like tax enforcement”.

He even went as far as saying that thanks to Bitcoin, “everyone is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket”.

So with that — Mr. President, ser — we kindly welcome you as Bitcoin’s new marketing manager. The job has already begun.

Seriously though, this is an incredibly authoritarian stance and outlines how fragile property rights are when — with everything besides bitcoin — the government can just seize what they want because it was always theirs.

Make Pocket Swiss Bank Accounts Great Again.

⌐◪-◪ → Wow. For the first time, the amount of staked Ether has passed a quarter (25%) of the supply.

That is 30.1M staked ETH ($73.5B USD) staked across 942,309 validators. While staked ETH and validator count is high, staking rewards have declined from 8.6% post-Shapella upgrade in April 2023 to 3.8%, which is just under the 10-year treasury rate of 4.09%.

The most interesting statistic is that Lido controls over 31% of all staked ETH, which presents concerns for network decentralization and security.

The good news is, that users have the option to move their ETH to other staking solutions like Coinbase or Binance who control 14.4% and 4.3% of staked ETH respectively.

The market will do the right thing, right?

⌐◪-◪ → The Pandora craze doesn’t is not slowing down, with the project hitting an 11.5 ETH floor and $256M market cap earlier today.

The hype is driven by the new (and unofficial) ERC-404 token standard, which aims to bridge the gap between fungible (ERC-20) and non-fungible (ERC-721) tokens.

With this standard, Pandora issues 10,000 Pandora tokens and 10,000 Replicant NFTs. If a user purchases 1 Pandora token, 1 Replicant NFT is minted in their wallet. Conversely, if a user sells 1 Pandora token, the linked Replicant NFT is burned.

This means users have the choice of trading the asset on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or popular NFT platforms like OpenSea and Blur. Some are calling this “dual fungibility”.

Again, this new ERC-404 standard is highly experimental, so if you dive in make sure you use a burner wallet. I’ll be observing from the sidelines.

Join The Conversation!

Unlock Specs’ full potential by joining Specs Chat, where members chat with Valko, add context to the daily crypto news, and share a diverse set of perspectives.

Specs Chat is more than just a group chat, it’s a community designed to help you become a better crypto investor and operator.