😲 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!

February 22, 2023

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New Show Today!…

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’?

The team behind Ethereum scaling solution Polygon let go of nearly 100 employees on Tuesday, abruptly cutting their access to company systems.

Coinbase’s net revenue was up 5% over the quarter, despite transaction revenue declining 12% over the same period.

Ankr’s native token rose to a three-month high of $0.053 on Tuesday after news that it had partnered with Microsoft.

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

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