Barack vs The Bull 🔐⚙️🚀

Barack vs The Bull 🔐⚙️🚀 Valko

Top News

• 🔐 Obama says BTC is a “Swiss bank account in your pocket”

• ⚙️ 25% of ETH supply is now staked on the network

• 🚀 “Pandora” NFT collection up 20× 1 week on ERC-404 hype

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Specs’ Insights

President Obama says #bitcoin 'is everyone walking around with a Swiss bank in their pocket'

⌐◪-◪ → 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.

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25% of ETH supply is now staked on the network

The rewards rate dropped from a post-Shapella peak of 8.6% to under 4%, coinciding with an increase in Ethereum staking participation.

⌐◪-◪ → 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?

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NFTs are back with a roar.

The 404 hype that was started by #PANDORA 4 days ago is exploding.

⌐◪-◪ → 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.

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Everything Else

⛓️ Crypto & DeFi

• Ex Consensys product lead Ben Edgington joins OP Labs

• Activist DAO investor to build swaps exchange, Stream Protocol

• Frax launches layer 2 network Fraxtal with partner apps

• Bakkt seeks to sell $150M of securities to save its business

• Jupiter announces which 3 tokens it may launch next

• Wormhole announces airdrop and 4-year tokenomics plan

• Coinbase says crypto could save Americans $74B in credit card fees

• Farcaster’s Dan Romero explains how frames do what X can’t

• Social app Friendzone to start operations on Polygon this month

• Pyth Network unveils second phase of token airdrop for 160 dapps

• Polymarket sees surge in volume ahead of Super Bowl weekend

🏦 Wallstreet & VC

• ARK Invest addresses cash creation/redemption in the ETH ETF filing

• BlackRock and Fidelity ETFs surpass GBTC in key liquidity metric

• CME trading volume highest in 3 years after BTC ETF approval

• Bitcoin miner Hut 8 appoints Asher Genoot as new CEO

• Prometheum crypto broker picks ETH as its first investment product

• DEX aggregator Flood raises $5.2M from Bain Capital and others
  Superform raises $6.5M from Polychain to build yield marketplace

🏛️ Legal & Regulatory

• TradeStation Crypto, Inc. settles with SEC, $3M in penalties

• US Treasury slams crypto in 2024 National Risks report

• Stablecoin regulations may be coming to the US soon

🌎 Rest of the World

• South Korea charges ex-Terra CFO in $40M marketing fraud

• Hong Kong launches regulatory consultation for OTC digital assets

• Thai SEC files charges against former Zipmex CEO

• OKX launches exchange services and wallet in Argentina

🖼️ NFTs & Metaverse

• 28 Pudgy Penguins swept for over 448 ETH, over $1M

• Animoca founder says NFTs are the pillars of digital capitalism

• Shardbound NFT game reveals details for next playtest

• Fight League games are coming to Ronin following Binance listing

• PIXEL airdrop set to launch on Binance

• French Montana offers backstage VIP pass to Quantum Cats holders

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