Where’s your soul, SOL?

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. Elon Musk’s Twitter saga is far from over. He’s agreed to buy the company but his PE friends aren’t interested anymore. One option is to sell a lot of Tesla stock to fund the overvalued Twitter deal. He may end up losing control of Tesla in a bid to troll a few people on Twitter. What a day.

The markets recovered slightly. Bitcoin stayed above $20,000 while Ethereum was at $1,360 levels. Nasdaq fell in early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty gained on a rise in IT and metal stocks.

Solana Needs Redemption

It’s soul-sapping to be a Solana investor. The token fell ~11% in the past three months. Its TVL has dipped and users are keen to liquidate their holdings. And the network faced the 12th outage of the year.

FYI TVL or Total value locked is the number of crypto funds deposited in a DeFi protocol.

What’s wrong with SOL?The blockchain has been hit with too many glitches. That means projects built on Solana face a lot of downtimes. Helium recently moved to Solana and has stayed mum on how it’ll handle these issues.

Solana also has new troubles. A crypto researcher claims that the Solana TVL is incorrect. Developers allegedly faked numbers, and the blockchain did nothing to prevent it. Solana hasn’t yet responded to these reports.

All of this has nudged whales to look elsewhere.

So, is it going all down?To be fair, some things are looking up. NFT volumes on Solana have picked up. Solana’s individual NFT sales doubled in September because of catchy projects such as y00ts mint t00b.

The mainnet is still in the beta stage, meaning that a series of upgrades are expected on the Solana blockchain. This could plug network gaps. But:

1. How soon will Solana manage outages?

2. How will it handle these developers?

3. When will the network upgrade be complete?

The blockchain has a lot of questions to answer.

The Excitement Around Ripple

Ripple is seeing a surge in price. The token rose ~5% on Thursday. And over the past week, there has been a definite surge and excitement. What caused this change in fortune?

SEC vs RippleIt’s an ongoing saga. The two have been at it for a while now. But it seems things may have swung in the favour of Ripple. Despite the SEC not complying with court orders. But the enthusiasm amongst investors that XRP will not be considered unregulated security has boosted prices.

Use casesRipple is picking a few more customers after its UK partner expanded into the UAE. The UK company uses Ripple’s blockchain technology to help facilitate cross-border remittances.

It’s not done yetExperts believe this is not the start of a bull cycle for XRP yet. They suggest that if the token loses momentum, it could wipe away all the gains it has made over a long time.

There Is SAND Everywhere

The token has outgrown its shoes. The Sandbox’s SAND will trade alongside crypto seniors on Binance. More trades could push the token towards $1.

What’s so special?For all transactions on The Sandbox, you need SAND tokens. LAND is the real estate on the platform. The Sandbox upgraded to Polygon Layer-2. This allows users to transfer SAND tokens from Ethereum to Polygon, which makes transactions faster and cheaper.

Large companies have also joined the metaverse bandwagon by property purchases on The Sandbox. Singapore’s DBS Bank recently bought LAND in The Sandbox to hold client meetings. PwC Hong Kong holds LAND and Gucci owns a store on the Sandbox metaverse. This is good news for the token.

What’s next?The Sandbox isn’t happy just being a virtual game. It wants to become the metaverse destination to build homes, offices, shopping, and entertainment hubs. When there’s real money (aka sales), SAND’s value will zoom.

Everything Must Go For 3AC

Bankruptcy was just the beginning of the end for Three Arrow Capital. Now, everything must go to repay the debt.

An NFT collection that belonged to the founders of 3AC will be liquidated. The value of the collection is supposed to be around $35 million. A tiny blip in the $2.8 billion ocean of debt, but we are in the something-better-than-nothing scenario.

What is being sold?The collection is related to an NFT-focused fund, Starry Night Capital, started by 3AC founders in 2021. Teneo, the liquidation firm looking at the 3AC bankruptcy, has custody of the NFTs. It’s going to be under the hammer soon. Line up, if you would like some.

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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.