Opinion

Your weekly dose of crypto news & opinion.

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Offchain: East v West

As regulators around the world scramble to work crypto out, some familiar divides are re-emerging. CoinJar UK customers this week received an email informing them that something called the Travel Rule now applied to all crypto transactions in the UK. In a nutshell, this means that all crypto transactions must

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Onchain: Pepe members go rogue, Farcaster goes Optimism, and Balancer finds vulnerability

Story One Pepe members go rogue Pepecoin, a memecoin that surged to fame earlier this year when everything was trading flat, now faces allegations of being a rug. Or at least of founders enriching themselves, which, at this stage, is as common in crypto as drunk people in the trains

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Offchain: With Friends Like These

Crypto’s latest hype train lets you buy and sell shares in, well, people. Here’s a few ways of thinking about Friend.tech. So, it’s come to this. Some enterprising crypto enthusiasts have designed a platform that lets you render yourself as a tradeable commodity. Welcome to Friend.

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Onchain: PayPal enters the stablecoin game, Base goes live and buy your friends

Story One PayPal enters the stablecoin game On August 6th, the payments giant PayPal announced the launch of its own stablecoin with the creative name PUSD. It's the first major US financial company to launch a US-backed stablecoin. PUSD will be backed 100% by US dollar deposits, short-term

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Offchain: Show Me The Money

Crypto is doing its best to bore the true believers into bailing out. The equation is simple: we need more cash. Nothing like taking a month away from newsletter duties to realise that absolutely zero is happening in crypto-land right now. Have you seen the Bitcoin chart for the last

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Onchain: The new Samcoin, $50 million for real stuff, and yet another exploit

Story One The new Samcoin On July 24th, Worldcoin, the iris-scanning startup, launched its token with the ticker $WLD. Sam Altman's side project has already faced a lot of criticism for operating their Orbs like an MLM scheme and privacy implications of scanning eyes. But with their launch,

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Offchain: RWAs, or how crypto is coming full circle

Real-World-Assets are the latest and greatest in crypto, as they promise to usher in the age of financial institutions adopting crypto for real. It's ironic to think back to the beginning of this entire industry when Satoshi wanted to create an alternative to the traditional financial system without

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Onchain: XRP not a security, Rolex as collateral and Snitch-to-Earn

Story One XRP, not a security For a while, the most consistent thing in crypto wasn't the value of stablecoins nor the laser eyes on Bitcoin Maxis profile pics (both didn't perform well). It was Ripple's ongoing lawsuit with the SEC, which ran since

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Offchain: NFTs All The Way Down

The much-derided NFT market has taken yet another nosedive. Is the end of the suffering in sight? It’s been almost two years since someone paid US$1.3 million (400 ETH at the time) for this picture of a rock. Looking back now, it’s a true sign of

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Onchain July: Still no Bitcoin ETF, Azuki enraging its holders, and Poly Network hacked again

Story One Still no Bitcoin ETF Even though major banks now offer digital asset solutions, what's missing so far in the US is a Bitcoin Spot ETF. Exchange Traded Funds are a vehicle that allows institutional investors, such as pension funds, to gain exposure to an asset'

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Offchain: Attack of the Titans

While crypto smoulders, some of the world’s biggest asset managers make their move. You have to hand it to the bear market: it has a perverse sense of humour. Here we are, deep in crypto’s most existential of winters, a time of bankruptcies, protocol collapse and 99% drawdowns,

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Onchain: 3AC's NFT collection sold, Tether de-peg, and Polygon 2.0

Three Arrows Capital, who previously managed an estimated $10 billion collapsed, triggered by the Luna crash, and left behind $3.5 billion in unpaid claims and a collection of NFTs.

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Offchain: The Tower Trembles

The SEC has launched definitive action against Binance and Coinbase. Welcome to the endgame of Crypto 1.0. You’d be hard-pressed to find a crypto watcher who was necessarily surprised by the decision of Gary Gensler’s SEC to sue both Binance and Coinbase last week. If anything, the

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Onchain: Nike & EA bringing NFTs to games, Asia rising, and an eye-watering Series C

Story One Nike and EA bringing NFTs to games While things are rather dire in NFT land, companies outside of the space seem to lead the way regarding retail adoption. EA, the gaming company behind FIFA and other sports titles, has partnered with Nike's .Swoosh platform to bring

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A Laughing Matter

Memecoins reign and in-jokes are the currency of the realm. Is crypto fundamentally dumb? Is that the whole point? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the past 12 months have been a Bad Time for crypto. It’s as if the Book of Revelation turned out to

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Onchain: Ledger Drama, Tethers' Bitcoin purchase, and Ben's coins

Story One Ledger Drama The hardware wallet producer has never been one to shy away from funny ideas. After producing a wallet with a necklace so you can keep your crypto close, their latest announcement triggered a significant outrage. Last week Ledger announced a new service to make seed phrase

Opinion

Offchain: Trading your magic Internet money: Brokers & Exchanges

Learn about the key differences in these trading venues and which one might suit your needs. Chances are that you didn't get into crypto because someone magically appeared in front of you and sold you Bitcoin - even though the magic internet money meme would suggest so. Instead

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Onchain: Bitcoin's luxury problems, Sui taking an L, and memecoin mania meets reality

Story One Bitcoin's luxury problems Recently, Bitcoin has run into a luxury problem: too much use. The Bitcoin network has seen its transactions and fees hit near all-time highs. And it wasn’t because Michael Saylor suddenly found a reason to move his Bitcoin. Up until this year,

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Offchain: Into the Cosmos of appchains

Is the future full of appchains, or is this just a phase? As for another week, a frog meme coin called Pepe continues outperforming all the real builders in crypto; one can't help but feel like Logan Roy in Succession when looking at the crypto space. Fortunately, unlike

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Onchain: 5000 ETH hack, Memecoins slaying, and error 404 on clarity

Story One Mysterious 5000 ETH hack As so often in crypto, alpha isn't televised but comes straight to your timeline - delivered by e-girl accounts on Twitter. This time around, it was Taylor Monahan, CEO and Founder of MyCrypto, who found that over 5000 ETH had been drained

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Offchain: Stop being a Degen; become a Regen

What ReFi is all about, and how regens want to make the world a better place. Maybe you spent the Easter holidays talking to your non-web3 friends about crypto. Chances are they: * told you to stop talking about it * asked why it was that their acquaintance lost a lot of

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Onchain: Arbitrum Governance on fire, the Euler hacker returns nearly $200 million, and NFTs ready for take-off

Story One Arbitrum Governance on fire 🔥 But when we say fire, it's not the good kind. Arbitrum, an Ethereum Layer-2, recently airdropped over 1 billion of its native token to nearly 300,000 wallets to kickstart the Arbitrum DAO. In addition to the DAO, they set up the

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Offchain: Move-to-Earn is so 2022, how to earn in 2023

Move-to-Earn is so 2022, how to earn in 2023. Not all earn programs are created equally - here's what you need to know. For a while, all crypto founders had to do to attract an audience looking for quick money was to create (any activity)-to earn projects.

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Onchain: Crypto punk burns, Banking rugs, and Euler hacker returns some funds

Story One Crypto punk burns Losing money – NFT investors are great at it. One of them has set a new record for self-goxxing by accidentally destroying an asset worth $153,000. Self-goxxing is the term the Japanese use to describe someone losing crypto assets because they acted stupidly or recklessly.

Opinion

Offchain: Drop it like it's hot

What crypto airdrops are all about, and why it's not just free money While Crypto Twitter is still waiting for a MetaMask airdrop, this month brought us an Arbitrum airdrop. Good enough reason to talk about airdrops, because what else should we do when there is a looming