😲 Did Polygon Burn $200M in One Year?
In today's edition: 🎙️ New TCB show on NFTs, 🥳 1 year of 'The Cryptopians,' 💰 Coinbase's earnings, 🙅 Polygon layoffs, and more!
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New Show Today!…
The Chopping Block: The Inside Story of How Blur Toppled NFT Giant OpenSea
Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news. This week, it’s time for a case study: Special guest Pacman, founder of Blur, explains how his upstart NFT marketplace fought OpenSea and won.
Show highlights:
what it’s like to launch a token
why Blur was created and what its strategy was for competing with OpenSea
why royalties remain a lightning rod in the NFT community
how Blur designed its liquidity mining program and the lesson learned from failed designs
the reasons why Blur succeeded in the NFT marketplace environment
Pacman’s reaction to OpenSea’s decision to not enforce royalties
why forking the Blur code won’t work for new marketplace competitors
why the NFT market remained strong in the depths of a bear market
why Pacman thinks AMMs for NFTs won’t work
whether the “death of royalties” is good or bad for the ecosystem
What’s Poppin’?
by Samyuktha Sriram
Polygon Labs Cuts 20% of Workforce
The team behind Ethereum scaling solution Polygon let go of nearly 100 employees on Tuesday, abruptly cutting their access to company systems.
Coinbase Beats Analyst Expectations With $605M Net Revenue
Coinbase’s net revenue was up 5% over the quarter, despite transaction revenue declining 12% over the same period.
ANKR Surges 65% After Microsoft Node Hosting Partnership
Ankr’s native token rose to a three-month high of $0.053 on Tuesday after news that it had partnered with Microsoft.
Half of Blur’s Volume Comes From 500 Wallets
NFT analysts have raised concerns over the skewed volume of trading on marketplaces like Blur.
📖 The First Anniversary of ‘The Cryptopians’! 🥳
In Other News…✍️✍️✍️
Sam Bankman-Fried's legal counsel is challenging the validity of a subpoena delivered to his mother, Barbara Fried, instead of himself, arguing that it is procedurally deficient according to US court caselaw.
Ethereum core developers set February 28 as the date for the release of the Shanghai-Capella upgrade on the Sepolia test network.
Paxos, a stablecoin issuer, is in discussions with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding their issuance of Binance USD (BUSD).
Two senior executives of BlockTower Capital, a leading crypto investment firm, have left the company.
Moody's downgraded the credit ratings of Silvergate Capital and its banking subsidiary, Silvergate Bank, due to a decrease in its standalone Baseline Credit Assessment from ba3 to b2.
Coinshares recorded a substantial decline in digital asset investments with outflows totaling $32 million in the previous week, marking the largest weekly decrease since December.
Daniel Cheung, cofounder of Syncracy Capital, filed a lawsuit claiming he was scammed out of nearly $1 million by Sean Full, an LA resident that led Cheung to invest in crypto.
The $$$ Corner…
Crypto risk solution provider Chaos Labs closed a $20 million seed round with participation from Galaxy Digital and PayPal Ventures.
Polyhedra Network, an infrastructure provider, raised $10 million in a strategic funding round.
Blockchain Capital led a $4 million investment in Superchain Network, a data protocol for web3.
TipLink, a crypto wallet startup, garnered $6 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital and Multicoin Capital.
ConsenSys purchased Hal, a blockchain data analysis platform that enables users to set up alerts for activities such as trading, voting, and tax compliance, for an undisclosed sum.
What Do You Meme?
📈 Your Market Update 📉
BTC is down 3.36%, trading at $24,144
ETH is down 3.17%, trading at $1,642
BTC dominance: 40.97%
Crypto market cap: $1.14 trillion
*All data as of today, 5 am ET
Recommended Reads
CoinDesk’s Eliza Gkritsi on survival strategies for miners in the ongoing crypto winter
Kofi on NFT royalties:
The New York Times: ‘Effective Altruism’ Led Bankman-Fried to a Little-Known Wall St. Firm
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