Gm. This is Milk Road, the Nick Cage of crypto:
We hunt down news treasure so you don’t have to.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- Amazon’s NFT initiative spring launch
- Binance & Galaxy bid millions for Celsius assets
- Scaramucci bought Samuel a suit
- All the companies FTX owes money to
NFT PRIME
**Alexa, add toothpaste, melatonin, and a Mutant Ape to my shopping cart**
Amazon, the multi-headed hydra of retail, whose global tentacles reach hundreds of millions of people, is launching a digital assets operation.
Talk about an ideal crypto onboarding scenario.
Here’s what’s crackalackin, according to Blockworks:
- Amazon is rolling out an NFT initiative as part of its whole digital assets dealio
- That’s expected to launch in the spring, and Amazon will likely announce all of this in April
- It’s also looking into Layer 1 blockchains, developers, digital asset exchanges, and most heavily: blockchain gaming startups
- One example could be getting Amazon customers to play crypto games and snag free NFTs
- The enterprise would operate out of the broader Amazon unit; not AWS
It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this could be. Most Web3 players have built their user base from scratch, relying on crypto adoption to entice people to platforms.
Amazon has 310M existing customers around the world.
That will have established players like Opensea, with 2.5M users, more than a little worried.
Everyone be on the lookout for those Web3 Amazon job listings. 👀
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BINANCE & GALAXY DIGITAL BID MILLIONS ON CELSIUS
Celsius’s legal team might have some splainin’ to do.
Ya know how the lending firm wanted to reinvent itself as a publicly-traded company?
Cause it’d have a better chance of raising money since it couldn’t find enough “compelling” bids for its assets?
Well, new documents from crypto blogger Tiffany Fong beg to differ on that last part.
Five different companies bid on Celsius’s crypto assets around November 2022:
- Binance proposed $15M; $12M for the Celsius estate and $3M for “migrated users;” it wanted to transfer it all to Binance’s platform
- Galaxy Digital (Mike Novogratz’s crypto investment manager) wanted all illiquid and staked Ether assets for $67M (!!!!!)
- The CEO of Bank to the Future (another bidder) confirmed on Twitter that his company’s bid that Fong shared is accurate
- NovaWulf (digital asset investment firm’s) plan curiously looked a lot like what Celsius is trying to do right now O.o (i.e. go public, dole out crypto tokens to repay customers)
- Crypto trader Cumberland DRW also bid
Call us crazy, but $67M doesn’t exactly seem uncompelling (the Milk Man can’t wrap his little head around that many zeroes.)
Fong said these bids are from November, four months after Celsius filed for bankruptcy. She held off on making them public to avoid disrupting the bidding and bankruptcy processes.
But when Celsius’s lawyer told a court this week that the offers weren’t good enough for its assets…
She told Cointelegraph that she even spoke to Celsius employees who said they were totally in the dark about the bids.
Even some higher-ups didn’t know about it.
Not a great look for Celsius if it really did pass up options that could have returned people’s money to them.
MOOCH TO SAMUEL: LOSE THE T-SHIRT
Places where it’s ok for a tech dood to wear jeans & a T-shirt: the grocery store, Sun Valley, Davos, major crypto conferences w/ lots of important peeps.
Places where it’s not okay: trips to the Middle East to woo investors into giving you money.
So goes the wardrobe guidelines for CEOs, a la Anthony Scaramucci.
The SkyBridge Capital founder and FTX investor/Samuel Bankman-Fried friend-turned enemy told Insider that he bought him a suit before a fundraising tour to the Middle East in October.
"I didn't certainly like elements of the way he was dressed," Scaramucci said.
It’s got big Mom-takes-you-shopping-for-profesh-clothes energy.
Anywho, it doesn’t matter what he was wearing; that trip is credited with leading to the downfall of his crypto exchange.
Part of that may have been because Samuel was in a gossipy mood; he spewed some “nasty things” about Binance chief CZ in private meetings in Saudi Arabia, Scaramucci said.
Need we remind you that Binance soon after sold all of its FTT tokens, which brought FTX to its knees.
Just sayin.’
MILK AND COOKIES
Rejected!The SEC turned down Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest and 21 Shares’ proposal for a Bitcoin spot ETF yet again, claiming that it doesn’t effectively show how it will protect investors. The SEC vs. crypto space battle rages on…
That’s a loooong list.FTX lawyers posted names of the creditors that the exchange owes money to. Among them are Netflix, Apple, Coachella Music Festival, Stanford University, Binance, and Coinbase.
MILKY MEME
🤣🤣
That's a wrap for today. Stay thirsty & see ya tomorrow! If you want more, be sure to follow our Twitter (@MilkRoadDaily)
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VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY
Saturday
— Milk Road (@MilkRoadDaily)2:18 PM • Jan 28, 2023
DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
