GM. This is the Milk Road. We’re like your favorite pair of jeans - comfortable, reliable, and always there when you need us.
Let’s get into the good stuff:
- The Winners & Losers of NFT NYC
- Crypto bailouts for Celsius & BlockFi?
- Bite-sized treats
- Meme of the day
WINNERS & LOSERS OF NFT NYC
Time for everybody’s favorite segment: Winners & Losers!
This time it's about the “NFT NYC” Conference that's officially over.
Let’s start with the winners:
Solana
- Dropped news about their crypto-native phone, the Saga
- Magic Eden threw a pretty cool “Yacht party.” Tbh, it’s hard to throw a lame yacht party.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
- Threw a 4-day festival for the community with performers like Eminem, Lil Wayne, and Snoop Dogg (junior high Ben would have been HYPED)
- Snoop and Eminem dropped a new song & music video using their Bored Apes. The YouTube video already has ~9M views
- ApeCoin went up ~25% over the last week
GoblinTown
Out of all the NFT projects at NFT NYC… GoblinTown had the highest growth in floor price (aka the cheapest one you can buy):
- They also tattoo stations at their parties where people were getting Goblin tats. Talk about die-hard fans.
- The project started as a free mint - the cheapest is now worth ~$4k.
Blue Chip NFTs
- The top 10 collections went up by ~25% over the last week during NFT NYC
Losers:
People that fell for the fake Snoop Dogg
NFT-NYC meet Doop Snogg...
— Fair.xyz (@fairxyz)12:14 PM • Jun 22, 2022
This is hilarious. A company hired a Snoop Dogg impersonator (“Doop Snogg”) and paid him to walk around taking pictures with fans.
Other losers…
Most of the attendees. It looks like everyone that went got airdropped COVID afterward.
The Milk Road’s Take: Lots of people are hating on NFT NYC because it was mostly parties and not a conference.
Hang on... Isn’t that what everyone wants? Who prefers a conference to a party?
Plus, NFTs are digital culture. It makes sense that this was weird and focused on fun.
BAILOUTS INCOMING? BLOCKFI & CELSIUS RUMORS
BlockFi and Celsius are two big crypto banks that are on the brink of collapse. (Like the Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns during the 2008 crash on Wall Street).
And just like Wall Street, they may need a bailout (or further damage will be done to the whole market). But it’s not the government stepping in. It’s the free market stepping in to cut deals on these distressed assets.
Celsius had raised $850m+, had 3m+ customers, and held over $17b of assets.
They stopped customer withdrawals weeks ago.
But have no fear, Goldman Sachs is here. Over the weekend, rumors broke that Goldman is trying to raise $2b with the help of other investors to buy out the assets from Celsius' balance sheet.
If Celsius were to file for bankruptcy, this would allow Goldman & company to swoop in and buy the crypto assets at a big discount.
The Milk Road’s Take: This could actually be huge for two reasons…
1/ Goldman buying out the assets could resume withdrawals for customers waiting to take out their funds
2/ Bringing a blue-chip name like Goldman into crypto is big for crypto’s brand.
BlockFi had raised $1.3b, had 225,000+ customers, and held over $3b of assets.
They started delaying withdrawals last week causing customers to freak out.
Then they received an offer from FTX to help out - a $250m line of credit.
But apparently, it came with fine print… if accepted, the deal would basically wipe out early equity investors' stakes in the company.
And now some of those early investors (Morgan Creek, the fund co-founded by friend of the Milk Road, Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano) are trying to raise $250m to put together a better deal than FTX’s.
The bottom line:
1/ BlockFi could take FTX’s offer. This would immediately give BlockFi funds to pay back their depositors. This puts customers over shareholders.
2/ Or wait to see if investors can give a better offer. This would help shareholders maintain their stake, but it’s currently unclear what that means for customer deposits.
The Milk Road’s Take: It’s not an easy decision, but whatever path they take - we believe the customer deposits should come before shareholder equity. (and we’re not alone)
My two cents -- I'm a Blockfi equity holder, and wiping out equity holders is exactly what SHOULD happen if a bank/lender goes insolvent. Customer deposits must be protected at all costs.
— Hasu⚡️🤖 (is hiring! jobs.flashbots.net) (@hasufl)10:17 PM • Jun 25, 2022
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BITE-SIZED TREATS
Rumor Mill: There’s talk that Grand Theft Auto, one of the world’s most popular video games series, will have in-game cryptocurrencies and NFTs in their next game.
Salvatore Ferragamo, a luxury fashion brand, opens an NFT Booth in NYC. Customers can shop for IRL clothes and mint matching NFTs. Pretty cool way to onboard people.
There are officially 20,000 different cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin still remains on top, accounting for ~43% of the total market cap for crypto.
Coinbase customers in the Netherlands will be required to submit KYC information when sending crypto. Info needed includes the full name, the purpose of transfer, and the full residential address of the recipient. And to no surprise - people aren’t happy about it.
NHL partners with Sweet, an NFT marketplace, to launch NFTs.
Binance launches "Binance Institutional" - a platform for VIP users & institutional investors to get into the crypto game.
Anonymous, a hacking group, posted a YouTube video pledging to bring Do Kwon “to justice as soon as possible”.
TIME Magazine has partnered with Sandbox to create a virtual Times Square in their metaverse.
REMINDER OF THE DAY
$21,000 $21,000 in 2020 in 2022
— Documenting Bitcoin 📄 (@DocumentingBTC)12:33 PM • Jun 26, 2022
GRAPH OF THE DAY
The number of Bitcoins held on centralized exchanges has dropped to the lowest level since 2018, according to Glassnode. (Yellow line)
After seeing Terra, Celsius, and BlockFi all fail at letting customers easily withdraw their assets… people are moving coins off of centralized exchanges in fear of it happening again.
MEME OF THE DAY
That's all for today folks, see ya tomorrow!
Ben "2% Milk" Levy & Diego "All-Organic Milk" Salinas
A Review from the Road...
What'd you think of today's email?
Young Vitalik reading the Milk Road with his dad.
He then went on to create Ethereum. You can too!
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.
