The dark horse of crypto

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Hold on to your Hot Wheels. Mattel’s launched an NFT marketplace on its D2C platform. The toy-as-art versions of Hot Wheels and Barbie will go live in the next few weeks. Apparently, the Hot Wheels NFTs can be redeemed for real cars. 

The markets were still shaky. Bitcoin was at $16,120 levels and Ethereum edged closer to $1,100. Nasdaq rose in early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty gained on a surge in bank stocks.   

LTC Is A Silent Winner

A month ago, Litecoin was in the 21st spot, stuck between Cosmos and Chainlink. A lot has changed since then. FTX’s bankruptcy has moved it to the 15th spot and beat Solana. 

Tbf, it’s not just SolanaLitecoin has been building up slowly over the past few months. 

1. It became an alt-home for old ETH miners who left Ethereum after the Merge. 

2. It has greatly increased the number of wallet additions. LTC has 162 million wallets, ETH has 166 million. 

3. LTC increased its mining difficulty to new highs. 

But we cannot deny that the financial crisis caused by SBF has also played a tiny part. Bitcoin and Ethereum suffered. Solana’s links to SBF caused its fall. There is investor interest here. LTC is among the top three proof-of-work cryptos (we’re ignoring DOGE here) that have been trending upwards. LTC rose ~7.5% over the past week, contrary to the rest of the PoW market. 

The silver statusThe altcoin, often called “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”, may see another rally. This coincides with the halving event scheduled for July 2023. There’s a bull rally every time rewards are slashed. 

Meanwhile, in SBF land…Karma hit hard. Last year, SBF poked a pseudonymous crypto trader CoinMamba to sell all his SOLs for $3. Last we heard, SBF’s net worth has dropped to $3. 

Investors Still Believe

You’ve seen folks on Twitter celebrating the chaos in crypto. But here’s the thing. They’re in the minority. Even amidst the SBF-led mayhem, investors are bullish.

Why?There is some subdued optimism, so investors are not in a hurry to sell. That’s despite the fact that Bitcoin fell below $16,000 on reports of a fund crunch at Genesis. There are more “buy” calls in Bitcoin’s options market, meaning crypto traders expect current prices to hold. 

FYI Options market is where investors bet on the future price of BTC. 

When will it stop?The chaos is far from over. The latest to be affected is digital bank SoFi. Its stock fell 6.5% after the Senate questioned the legitimacy of SoFi’s crypto services. 

Scamming The Scammed

“Give me money, and I’ll double it”. That’s literally the promise “SBF” is seen making in a video that circulated on Twitter over the weekend. Just two issues—it wasn’t actually SBF, but the tweet came from a verified account. So, it was easy to think it was real. You see, it was a deep fake video. 

ICYMI Deepfakes are synthetic media. They could be pictures, videos, or entire events that never actually happened. 

Giveaway scamThe SBF video in question looks and sounds exactly like him. He asks people who lost money on FTX to enter their details on a website. 

It’s a textbook giveaway scam. The victim sends tokens to the scammer but receives nothing in return. Vice did some digging and found the website was registered to someone in Nevis, an island near Puerto Rico. 

HashFlare fraudAnd then there are the straightforward scams. Bitcoin cloud miner HashFlare founders were arrested in Estonia, allegedly for a $575 million crypto fraud conspiracy. 

Metaverse Needs To Change

The gender divide is expanding. Beyond real life, to the metaverse. And just like IRL, women are doing more work in the metaverse but aren’t rewarded for it. This study by McKinsey found some interesting trends:

1. In organisations shaping metaverse standards, 90% of leadership roles are held by men. 

2. Male-led metaverse startups received more funding than female-led metaverse companies in the past five years.

3. Among 450 women executives, 60% said they implemented over two metaverse-related initiatives in their organisations. 

4. Women are also more likely to engage in hybrid metaverse use cases than men.

Clearly, we haven’t learnt much, or anything, from the current state of the technology industry. Where only 40% of managers are women. Web2 or Web3, things need to change.

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Who are we? This newsletter’s ambition is to educate (and to entertain). The world of money is changing everyday and we want to help you decode what’s happening in the world of crypto, public markets in the US and India.