GM. This is Milk Road. We’re like those water-expanding dinosaurs you played with when you were a kid - we’re really f*cking fun & we teach you how the world works.
Here’s what we’re serving up today:
- Why everyone’s mad at Ledger 😡
- Be fearful when others are $GREEDy 🤑
- Web3 Wednesday! 📝
- Family offices are diving into crypto 🍪
Prices as of 8am EDT
Today’s edition is brought to you by CoW Swap - Protect yourself from MEV bots with the most innovative dex-aggregator.
PEOPLE ARE PISSED AT LEDGER 😡
Every week, crypto has a new villain. One week it’s Gary Gensler raining on the crypto parade with new regulations. The next, it’s a corrupt CEO up to no good.
This week? It’s Ledger - the leader of the hard wallet market.
Why? The Ledger team released a new feature called Ledger Recover. And it’s quickly turned “The Safest Hardware Wallet” → “The Trust me Bro? Wallet”
Here’s everything you need to know:
- It’s a new opt-in tool that lets users recover their private key if it gets lost.
- The tool encrypts the private key into 3 shards and sends it to 3 different companies. The companies are Ledger, Coincover, & EscrowTech.
- Users that opt-in will need to ID themselves via Know-Your-Customer (KYC.)
- The 3 companies will use that KYC data (i.e. passport/ID) to verify it’s you when you try to use the recovery tool. Once verified, the entities will reconstruct the private key.
- It’s subscription-based and will cost $9/mo
- The service isn’t supported on Ledger’s older Nano S wallets yet. OG holders are gonna be like those anti-iOS stans refusing to upgrade from their iPhone 7 models…
So what’s the big deal? Ledger is doing the one thing it said it would never do: access customers’ private keys, albeit encrypted parts of them.
Plus it’s also making opted-in users KYC themselves. And everyone still has trust issues from when Ledger had its customer’s names/addresses leaked in 2020…
The new feature kinda defeats the whole purpose of having a cold wallet. Which is why customers were PISSED yesterday.
Here’s how Crypto Twitter reacted:
If you have a ledger, your keys are not compromised (yet). But if you upgrade to the latest firmware, it’ll stick in a code path that can send your private key to third parties. Given ledger doxxed their own customers in the past, it’s unlikely that they’ll keep this info safe
— foobar (@0xfoobar)3:25 PM • May 16, 2023
„My keys, my #Bitcoin.“ - @Ledger
— Carl ₿ MENGER ⚡️🇸🇻 (@CarlBMenger)8:34 AM • May 16, 2023
I wonder if the motivation behind this feature is to make money from the subscription model or if it was forced onto them by regulators so the regulators can get their hands on KYC data and potentially seize assets.
— Mudit Gupta (@Mudit__Gupta)8:08 AM • May 16, 2023
Yes sir, I would like to have the keys to my Ledger please
— Joko ⚡️ (@jokoono)11:03 AM • May 16, 2023
Ledger could have avoided this pr disaster and loss of trust by selling their recovery service in an entirely separate hardware device called Ledger Hot Wallet twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Mike Three (@enjoyoor)5:13 PM • May 16, 2023
Ledger’s competitors pounced on the opp, too:
Not👏Your👏Keys👏Not👏Your👏Coins
— Trezor (@Trezor)2:35 PM • May 16, 2023
Milk Road Take: Even though you need to physically opt-in to the new Ledger Recover tool in order to share shards of your private key and KYC data, it shows that what we thought was once impossible, is possible.
It’s like when you’d tell your sibling your deep darkest secret, but then they ended up telling your mom anyway.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice — not happening today, Ledger.
PROTECT YOURSELF FROM MEV BOTS WITH THE MOST INNOVATIVE DEX-AGGREGATOR
Everybody hates gas fees. But did you know there’s something more-sinister milking your profits away without you even knowing it? I’m talking about MEV.
MEV is often called “Ethereum’s hidden tax” and happens when bots front-run your trades to steal your slippage. It cost traders over $4M in the first week of May alone.
But unlike gas fees, there is a solution to MEV! That’s why we’ve partnered up with CoW Swap to save our readers money.
CoW Swap is a decentralized exchange with built-in MEV protection, allowing you to get the most out of every trade. Here’s how it works:
- Batch Auctions: They match your trades peer-to-peer, avoiding MEV bots lurking in the public transaction pool (and saving you exchange fees, too!)
- Delegated Trade Execution: They delegate trades to professional parties known as “solvers” that find better trading routes and take on MEV risk for you
- Uniform Clearing Prices: They settle all trades in a batch at the same price, so MEV bots cannot exploit transactions by reordering them
EigenPhi even put together a full report showing how effectively CoW Swap protects users from MEV.
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THE ALARMING $GREED EXPERIMENT 🤑
There’s a huge debate going on in crypto right now…should meme coins be loved or feared?
One one hand - meme coins are making some people A LOT of money and bringing in new users into crypto. (Love)
On the other hand - meme coins are making some people lose A LOT of money and causing them to leave crypto for good. (Fear)
So, should memecoins be loved or feared? To answer, we’re gonna use the wise words of the great, Michael Scott.
And right now, people should be afraid of how much they love the meme coin mania. To show why, a crypto user decided to do a social experiment.
Meet Voshy - the man behind the $GREED experiment.
Here’s what went down:
- Voshy announced he was launching a new token: $GREED
- After he mentioned an airdrop, word spread like a wildfire across Twitter
- In order to be eligible, users needed to give Voshy full access to their Twitter accounts and connect their wallet to a sketchy website
Voshy’s social experiment had more red flags than the Nigerian prince that just landed in your inbox.
The result? ~43K people gave him access to Tweet from their accounts. And over 55K wallets signed the transaction.
Crazy, I know…
But here’s the real kicker: When users claimed the “airdrop” for $GREED tokens, they also got a side on humiliation.
Here's the automated tweet that was posted when a user claimed the tokens:
Greed consumed me. I connected my wallet to a random site, signed a blind tx, handed over write perms for my Twitter. This was The $GREED Experiment. Thank you @voshy for the wakeup call. I will keep this on my timeline and own it. My full statement: voshy.medium.com/the-greed-expe…
— •_xZ (@xsanyar)5:56 PM • May 16, 2023
Hilarious. It’s like getting caught on one of those hidden camera shows...
WEB3 WEDNESDAY 📝
It’s the middle of the week, which means…welcome back to another Web3 Wednesday.
Check out all the cool Web3 gigs we found for you Roadies today:
- Come work with us! We’re hiring a part-time writer that loves crypto more than Kanye loves Kanye. Apply here
- Partner Success Manager at Aptos - Palo Alto, CA
- Business Development Lead, Capital Markets, at Aptos - Remote
- Developer Relations Engineer at Parity - Remote
- Senior Application Security Engineer at OpenSea - Remote
- Graphic Designer, Otherlife, at MoonPay - Toronto, Canada
- Product Manager ll, Developer Experience, at Coinbase - Remote
- Head of Trading and Market Compliance at Kraken - Remote
- UX/UI Designer Internship at CertiK - Remote
P.S. - Are you trying to hire in Web3? Learn how to get your open jobs in front of 250K+ crypto enthusiasts here.
MILK & COOKIES 🍪
BlockFi creditors claim they used $30M of customer funds to buy insurance. Taking a page from FTX’s playbook.
Over 25% of family offices are now invested in crypto. According to a new survey from Goldman Sachs. This figure is up from 16% in 2021.
SEC denies Coinbase’s request for clarity on crypto regulation. The SEC said the rulemaking could take years and they are in no rush. After 3AC, Celsius and FTX, what else could go wrong?
OKX is gonna start offering Ordinals trading. They are also adding support for Bitcoin’s Lightning network.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
HIT THE INBOX OF 250K+ CRYPTO INVESTORS
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ROADER REVIEW OF THE DAY
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GM Roadies. let's get after it today
— Milk Road Images (@MilkRoadImages)2:12 PM • May 17, 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.
