Red Notice

September 29, 2022

What is this? Probably Nothing. Every week we showcase growing trends in web3 and crypto.

What's on the block:

⛓ Red Notice issued for Do Kwon's arrest

😅 A protocol accidentally alt + f4'd their chain

📈 Reddit NFTs are doing surprisingly well

🤑 Advertisement King Pin land $200m for NFT project

🛠 Getting you hooked, the best new tool for devs

🔥 Special Edition: The Merge

👮🏼‍♀️ Interpol is after the Luna Co-Founder  

No Ryan Reynolds here. It seems the lunacy still hasn't reached its final chapter as Coindesk and multiple news sources state that Interpol has put out a Red Notice for Do Kwon's arrest. This effectively means that any police force in the world has the right to arrest and extradite the Luna co-founder. The Singapore authorities however say Do Kwon isn't at his home in the country.  

DYOR

  • Coin telegraph says that Do Kwon tried to cash out $67m after the crash

  • Coinage has an exclusive 70-minute interview with Do Kwon last month on the Tera collapse

😳 Optifi accidentally alt + F4 their mainnet

Accidently taking down production isn't a new thing in development and usually not something a restart and a well-time PR article cannot fix. However, in Defi it can mean losing your funds forever.

  • Automated market maker Optifi Labs accidentally used the close program command on their solana-based application

  • The funds are locked in the Program Derived Address (PDA) that is closed

  • $661k USDC was lost, 95% of the funds are from a team member

  • All users' funds lost will be compensated

Probably Nothing?

  • An expensive lesson and they are largely a new company that started experimenting with their own funds.

  • In their press release, they also released some great Command-Line Interface (CLI) recommendations for Solana to stop this from happening in the future.

DYOR

Optifi did a good job DYOR themselves on this so I'll just leave their tweet here for everyone to learn from going forward.

🥵 Are Reddit NFTs working?

Reddit quietly entered the NFT market over the last year however it's seeing mixed results. Their original Crypto Snoo led off with a bang last year with the highest fetching a price of 115eth to Kraken Co-founder Jesse Powell.

Let's talk about Reddit's cryptocurrency $MOONS and Reddit NFTs.

$Moons is the native cryptocurrency token isolated currently to the r/cryptocurrency subreddit which currently has 5.4m members.

  • Currently has a fully diluted market cap of $29.2m with a fixed max supply for 250m $MOONS

  • Moons are distributed every 28 days based on total karma earned during a timeframe. Reddit's version of contribution and popularity of content/comments from a user or Competitions

  • It was originally launched purely on Rinkeby but now it's migrated to the Arbitrum L2 Nova network

  • Any special features outside of NFT avatars for Moons are currently isolated to the r/CryptoCurrency Subreddit

The first initial free airdrop collaboration featured Meme Team, Drip Squad, Aww Friends and The Singularity which we're airdropped for free to active contributors. The current prices of these are around $10-$100.

There are continuously new paid collaborations being released with some fetching high prices that can be purchased with Moons or Fiat.

  • B•E•N•O•T•A•F•R•A•I•D had 777 pieces and mint #1 sold for 8.5 ETH

  • The Hands another small collection had 100 limited pieces and #002 sold for 15 ETH this week

Probably Nothing?

  • The 'minimal' $10-$30 prices the free NFT airdrops are selling for, is more than some Redditors' monthly incomes. Win! A great intro into crypto for Reddit's ecosystem of users

  • Is the power of a Reddit avatar worth more than just using a regular NFT as your Reddit avatar?

  • Reddit keeping verification of NFTs to their own collections on profiles is a powerful distribution method for their ecosystem

🐙 Slaying the Kraken - Jesse Powell steps down

Jesse Powell Co-founder of Kraken one of the world's largest crypto exchanges announced his stepping down as CEO this week to focus on advocacy for US crypto policy.

The ocean has been coming to a boil at Kraken over the last couple of months, last quarter the company came out with a 31-page culture document defining its commitment to diversity of thought.

Encouraging people that didn't agree with these values or thought their co-workers are not up to their expectations of character to leave, offering 4 months' severance. It's self-reported that less than 1% of people took up the offer.

Probably Nothing?

  • If you don't define your own culture your employees will do it for you

  • Crypto advocacy from people that built projects at scale is a critical part of the globalisation of decentralised, borderless transactions

DYOR

💰👀 Funding

👑 Magna raises $15m Seed Round to be the Carta for Crypto

Magna raised $15m @ $70m valuation from Tiger Global and Tusk Venture Partners to focus on token distribution from token warrants and ESOP agreements.

Probably Nothing?

  • Magna solves a key issue in web3 of token distribution and unlocks for projects

  • Having a globally accepted platform with audit-tested smart contracts is an important step in the trust and safety of on-chain investment

  • Bruno is one of those founders that continues to ship and is surrounding himself with a killer team

💥 Limit Break comes out stealth raising $200m from Paradigm

Limit Break has come out of stealth this week with a $200m raise from Paradigm. To pioneer a new form of Free to Own (F2O) games for web3.

They launched their first project Digidaikus as a free mint comprised of 2,022 anime-themed characters that currently have a floor price of 12eth with a 7.8k trading volume since mint.

How did a little unknown project raise $200m? I'll talk more about it in our company deep dive in part 2 of this Probably Nothing issue stay tuned! If you're not subscribed, it takes 5 seconds.

Probably Nothing?

  • Co-founder Gabriel Leydon previously founded Machine Zone which sold to mobile advertising giant AppLovin for $500m

  • Limit Break plans to use the $200m exclusively for marketing and advertising purposes when they release their P2E game

  • Machine Zone is the creator of Game of War which at its peak generated $95m in monthly revenue

🏔 Animoca raises $110m to fund its metaverse land grab

The $110m was led by Temasek, Boyu and GGV capital interesting for a round of this size it was completed as a convertible note at a price of $4.50.

Animoca has been on the rise as a leader in the crypto investing space after infamously being booted from the ASX in March 2020. Something that made penny traders millions in the delisting.

Probably Nothing?

  • Animoca is a leader in web3 gaming investments betting big on virtual land sales

  • Animoca actively advocates for an open metaverse standard and invests accordingly

  • Animoca isn't shy to pay expensive prices for popular projects, heavily investing in YGG and Axie Infinity

🛠 of the Week: WAGMI React hooks for Eth

The awesome tool of this week goes to WAGMI which provides you with react hooks for Ethereum which makes building frontends a breeze.

  • Connect Wallet

  • Sign Messages

  • Interact with contracts

It's all with caching, request deduplication and persistence and it works with ENS out of the box and supports all the popular wallet and RPC providers, no need to struggle with window.ethereum any longer!The best part is the Docs are amazing and thorough so you don't get lost, even I could figure it out and start building quickly. It's completely open source so check out the github repo.

To get started:

npm i wagmi ethers 

or use yarn if you're that person

Probably Nothing?

  • MIT License

  • Used by ENS, Foundation, Sushiswap and more

  • The Docs!

The Merge

Wen Merge? Has probably been the most whispered phrase in telegram and CT over the last 12 months.

It went off relatively without any trouble after months of testing. After a couple of deflationary blocks, we are back to a slight inflationary period as defined by ultrasound.money 

Probably Nothing?

  • Gas remains fairly low, averaging 9 gwei the last couple of days, a great time to start building. Not a result of the merge, just reminding you anon

  • Eth since migrating to PoS uses 99.988% less energy 🌳

  • It's going to be a great period to buy new graphics cards going into the 4000 series cards by Nvidia as miners confirm their last block

DYOR

Summarising some great articles here if you want to dive into what the merge may mean for you

  • Investor guide to the merge

  • MEV and Proof-of-Stake guide

this newsletter is probably nothing, but subscribe and send it to a friend... in case it's something.Not financial advice.

This week's cover photo: luna king gets dethroned, red notice, painting, fantasy style