Who will save crypto now?

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. It’s a brand new week. The fallout over FTX continued over the weekend. The top leadership quit/were fired (pick as you see fit) and the celebrities that were hired to promote FTX are being sued. Including one Larry David. Cue Curb Your Enthusiasm music.

Moving on, today we talk about Justin Sun’s saviour complex, and Australia’s metaverse moves.

The markets recovered slightly. Bitcoin was at ~$16,700 while Ethereum was at $1,220 levels. Nasdaq ended flat. Back home, Sensex and Nifty fell amidst fears of another rate hike in the US.

An Alt White Knight?

Human beings want to look towards a singular figure that will save us. A person that will ride up on a horse in the horizon, in the depth of darkness, and save us. Our white knight. We thought Elon Musk was our saviour. Then Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, Justin Sun.

Who is this new guy? He is the founder of Tron. He enjoys the headlines. A lot. Be it a $4.5 million bid for a lunch with Warren Buffett or a $28 million bid for a seat next to Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin (which Sun skipped btw).

Now, Sun wants to “transform” the crypto world. Not just FTX. He’s also decided to buy 1 BTC a day to control Bitcoin’s price.

Story behind Sun’s rise?In 2014, the 32-year-old Chinese man set up an audio version of Tinder called Peiwo, which was later shut down by the Chinese government. The next big opportunity was crypto and blockchain. There came the idea of Tron.

Tron’s ICO happened in a hurry, probably because Sun knew something. Just days after the Tron launch closed, China banned all ICOs. Fearing action, he’s said to have left China and moved to the US. He shifted to the island country Grenada sometime later.

Thereon, Sun went big on allied acquisitions. For instance, Sun and his company Tron bought a decentralised file-sharing platform, BitTorrent, for $140 million in 2018. He also invested capital into the NFT platform Animoca Brands.

Fun fact: Sun’s called H.E. Justin Sun, i.e. His Excellency. He has been a full-time diplomat since December 2021 as the Ambassador of Grenada to the WTO.

Tron to PoloniexSun scaled Tron after the 2018 mainnet launch. The network claims to have ~122 million users with over 4.2 billion transactions.

A year later, he bought a stake in the Circle-owned crypto exchange Poloniex. Sun maintains that Poloniex is independent, but he seems to be the decision-maker. OMG. For example, Sun decided Poloniex will list all ETH proof of work versions post the Merge.

It’s not been a smooth road, though. There were allegations of security lapses under Sun’s watch, all of which he denied.

Then HuobiThe “Sun sentiment” has worked well for some tokens. When Sun said that he owns “ten of millions of Huobi”, the Huobi token jumped ~79%. He’s also become an advisor at the token’s parent exchange, Huobi Global.

USDD and beyondSun wants more. His blockchain Tron made its entry into stablecoins with the launch of USDD. Call it fate or whatever else, but USDD hit the exchanges right when Terra de-pegged. Tron has disclosed USDD is “overcollateralised”, meaning that the blockchain holds more reserves than the actual supply.

He is not satisfied yet. Sun wants to scale USDD by pitching it as a legit currency in the Caribbean.

The Verge called him “the hype man of the century”. The last we heard, he’s taken over daily operations at Huobi.

Australia Leads the Metaverse Way

We’ve told you before how Australia does cool things. Now the Australian arm of one of the Big Four accounting firms is going all in on the metaverse.

Why Australia?Because instead of being sceptical of new and emerging technology, Australia is diving into them headfirst. It has proposed progressive crypto regulation. Legal experts there have been discussing intellectual property and copyright laws in the metaverse. The country’s telecom watchdog has included the metaverse in its 2022-23 research program. There’s also a $100 million R&D Centre for the metaverse it announced in July this year.

Metaverse officeUnlike the gimmicky ways some large folks are building metaverses, some companies in Australia are focusing on the B2B side of things. The idea is to “create new business models and new assets” with new technology. Essentially, they’re looking to explore newer ways of bringing in the “emotional quotient” into Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings. (As if)

So even as the rest of the world figures out how to contain fires caused by emerging tech, it seems Australia has decided to host the party, not be the one cleaning up the mess.

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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.