🍿 50% of Cardano’s Nodes Went Down 😱
Reading time 4m30s
GM.
A court document has been filed detailing the $700M in assets that SBF will owe the court if he’s found guilty of the 8 charges that he plead “not guilty” to. Meanwhile, Genesis has been revealed as FTX’s largest creditor at $226M in claims.
And the market seems to have “up only” syndrome, where projects of questionable quality are pumping like crazy as people play the musical chairs game of “where does this upward move stop?” Also, 50% of Cardano’s nodes went out on Sunday at once. Holy centralization, Batman!
Let’s kick the week off with a bang and crush some trivia!
What was the first blockchain-based video game?
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Today's Agenda:
SBF Could Owe EVERYTHING 😬
Aptos, AXS Melt Upward 💲
MNGO Exploiter Charged for $116M 🥴
Crypto Banks Borrowed BILLIONS 😱
Signature Bank Backs Off of Crypto 😔
So, remember the hundreds of millions in Robinhood stock that everyone was fighting about in SBF’s case? Well, even if it does belong to him now, it won’t matter if he loses.
He was hoping to use that money to pay for his legal defense team, but it turns out that he’ll owe all of that and a LOT more to the court if he loses his case — $700M total has been seized.
All this after Sam swore up and down that he only had $100k to his name.
Here’s the court order itself asking for Sam’s assets and cash, including 55M+ Robinhood shares and over $75M in USD held in different bank accounts:
They definitely aren’t playing any games. Good!!
It seems that Sam is systematically having everything taken away from him, and rightly so — it’s ridiculous that he can still be sitting in his parents’ massive Cali home and playing League of Legends right now, still denying on his Substack that he did anything wrong.
Ouch.
Related news: some of the names on FTX’s list of creditors (read: people they still owe money to) have been unredacted, and lookie here, Genesis is sitting at the top of the list.
FTX owes Genesis $226M, and that’s just ONE creditor. Freaking yikes.
Genesis filed for bankruptcy last Thursday, making it the next in a long line of dominoes that have fallen to the crypto contagion this winter.
Everyone is trying to figure out what this market is gonna do next after the massive pump back to a $1T market cap. Is this just a dead cat bounce? Is this the start of the next bull market? Will my friends finally listen to me about crypto?
But altcoins aren’t waiting for the answers to start pumping out of their minds, and that includes some questionable projects.
Aptos, a relatively new chain launched by META employees late last year, has skyrocketed up 250% in two weeks, leaving it with the #31-largest market cap in the entire crypto space.
Why does that matter?
I’ll just lay it out there — this L1 chain and its tokens kind of smell fishy. It was advertised to be able to handle 160,000 transactions per second, but on launch day, it was only processing a whopping 4 transactions per second.
Also, nearly 80% of the tokens are staked currently, meaning that they’ll likely be dumped on the market when they’re unlocked. Investors in the project and the Aptos Foundation itself received 1 billion of the tokens.
Crypto Twitter has certainly raised some questions about the project.
On the other end of the market, Axie Infinity’s token AXS has gone up by 40% in price right before a massive $64-million-token unlock. After a long downward trend, you can see how sharply it spiked in just 24 hours.
People seem to be buying in the hopes that the dev team will be announcing something positive for the project to move against the bearish implications of an unlock.
And finally, Cardano has some mixed statistics this year so far: about 50% of its nodes went down all at once on Sunday, and it just passed 3.88 million active wallets. Wild.
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Other Top Stories Today 📢
In the latest development of the Mango Markets case, Avraham Eisenberg has been accused of manipulating the MNGO token and massively inflating its price. The official quote from David Hirsch, the SEC’s head of Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit: “Eisenberg engaged in a manipulative and deceptive scheme to artificially inflate the price of the MNGO token, which was purchased and sold as a crypto asset security, in order to borrow and then withdraw nearly all available assets from Mango Markets, which left the platform at a deficit when the security price returned to its pre-manipulation level.” Eisenberg will be detained until his trial.
The US government’s Federal Home Loan Banks system (FHLB) is trying to help the two biggest crypto banks on US soil as they attempt to survive the massive increase in withdrawals we’ve seen over the past few months. The FHLB has loaned Silvergate and Signature Bank a total of $13B so far. According to Silvergate’s own report, customer deposits have decreased by almost $5B since the previous quarter, and withdrawals are only rising.
Speaking of Signature Bank, this one’s interesting — as they continue to distance themselves from crypto where they can, they’re apparently no longer supporting transactions that are smaller than $100k each. The bank services a decent amount of Binance’s customers (0.01% total), and the crypto exchange is actively looking for an alternative option. As of September 2022, nearly a quarter of Signature’s deposits came from crypto, but they’re looking to reduce that number to 20% or even 15% in the coming days in light of the crypto contagion that’s taking out company after company.
Web3 Resource of the Day
Michael Burry’s Huge Inflation Warning for 2023 - Video from New Money
If you don’t know who Michael Burry is, I highly recommend finding out now, and this video is a great place to start. Also, check out The Big Short. Burry was one of the only investors who correctly predicted the 2008 housing market crash, and he’s back with some sobering predictions for what will happen with inflation moving forward this year. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), the main measure of inflation, might look like it’s headed down, but will it stay that way?
The Start of Something Beautiful — A New Monday
Hope you have a great start to the week. I know I did while writing this — crypto news is never boring, and we’re glad to be able to bring it to your inbox.
I’m just gonna try and make sure I get outside today. You do the same. Let’s agree to not let this be us:
That’s all for today, frens!
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DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Do your own research.