Story One

Avi's highly profitable trading strategy might end him in jail

Avraham Eisenberg's "highly profitable trading strategy" might come with some unexpected losses, namely his freedom.

Avi had found a vulnerability in the DeFi lending protocol Mango market and exploited it to borrow $116 million in other currencies against overvalued collateral, eventually leaving the protocol bankrupt.

So far, just another exploit in DeFi. But it didn't stop there. Avi moved on to return $67 million, seeking salvation from the DAO running the protocol. The Mango community voted he could keep a big chunk of money ($47 million) and would not have to fear legal persecution.

The SEC didn't give a f*ck about a DAO vote, referring to MNGO as a "so-called governance token" and swiftly moved on to bring charges of commodities fraud and manipulation against the trader.

Next time, think twice before bragging about market manipulation on Crypto Twitter.

Story Two

California DMV putting car titles on Tezos

Normally the first thing that comes to mind when registering a car title is paperwork. Not anymore, when it's up to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Tired of all the hassle that comes with printouts, the institution has decided to digitize. To do so, they've chosen Tezos to replicate their existing database of car titles on a private chain.

Implementing a digital on-chain solution will create leaner processes while reducing transaction fraud. It's harder to forge blockchain signatures than real-life ones, after all.

You might wonder why Tezos and not something hyped like an L2, but according to them, it has to do with Tezos' "responsible consensus, on-chain governance and security." So are all the other consensus algorithms out there irresponsible?!

That aside, with Miami becoming Bitcoin city, it might just be appropriate for California to get into the sustainable Tezos chain. I'd love to see how Elon feels about the prospect of Tesla owners getting their car titles on Tezos and not on Dogechain. (Yes, it's a thing).

Overheard on Twitter

$COIN @ $12b market cap
Aptos @ $16b market cap

wtf

— DavidHoffman.bedrock 🏴🦇🔊🏴 (@TrustlessState) January 25, 2023

Story Three

Aptos' insane valuation

Remember Aptos, the brainchild of Mo Shaikh and Avery Chin, who both were involved in Meta's (Facebook at the time) crypto project? The Layer-1 blockchain positioned itself as a potential "Solana killer," launching with the promise of supporting a throughput of 160,000 transactions per second.

The launch in October last year didn't go so well; some even started lovingly calling it "craptos". Yet, in 2023, the price performance of Aptos has been phenomenal, jumping from $3 to $20.

Do fundamentals support that rally?

Aptos has 51 active developers, this might sound good at first but contrast that with 2500 monthly active devs on Polkadot, and the picture changes drastically. It's little surprise that less than 30k people use Aptos daily because there is still little to do on it. The biggest dApp on Aptos is PancakeSwap, a DEX (decentralised exchange) from the BNB chain ecosystem that has added support for Aptos. No wonder the network currently just processes ten transactions per second, far from the 160k target.

Things get even crazier when looking at the fully diluted validation. Fully diluted valuation describes the market cap of a project if the entire supply was in circulation. At the time of writing, Aptos is sitting near $18 billion. In contrast, Coinbase, with millions of active (paying) users, has an FDV of $12 billion, and Polygon, the go-to blockchain for big brands, has an FDV of $11 billion.

Is there still an upside left on that trade? Only time will tell. If we know one thing for sure, then that crypto markets never fail to prove the thesis of human rationality wrong.

Naomi from CoinJar

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