GM. This is the Milk Road, where we exclusively eat s’mores pop tarts. If you’re a strawberry pop tart type of person, sorry, I’m not sorry.
Estimated read time: 2 minutes and 49 seconds
Crypto moves so fast it can be hard to keep up. But don’t worry, we got you covered with a quick recap of the week:
- Monday:Martin Shkreli is coming to crypto
- Tuesday:Are Nouns the next big thing?
- Wednesday:WeWork’s Founder is back...and his new thing is in crypto
- Thursday: A look inside the biggest crypto fund ever raised
Now let's boogie, this is how we're ending the week:
- 🤑 Funding Friday
- 🧑⚖️ A bizarre crypto court case
- 🌕 Luna 2.0 Update
- 😂 Meme of the day
FUNDING FRIDAY
While the public crypto markets haven’t been so hot lately, the private markets are still as hot as ever.
Let's just say in those private markets, it's still:
Why? Some think it’s because it takes longer for the private markets to catch up to public markets.
But I think that with past crypto returns, investors are still betting on the loooong game with crypto and aren't scared of what's happening in the public markets. It’s here to stay, folks.
And this week we saw ~$600M go into web3 companies and ~$5B get raised by crypto funds. Yeah, you read that right, $5 billion dollars. With a B.
Here’s a few funds that raised:
A16Z got $4.5B
Standard Crypto got $500M
NGC got $100M
Volt Capital got $50M
Old Fashion Research got $100M
And here’s some of the cooler companies:
Spritz Finance got $2.5M to lets users pay their bills using crypto.
StarkWare got $100M help secure and scaled Ethereum applications.
Babel Finance got $80M to build a crypto financial infrastructure for institutional investors.
Flowcarbon got $70M to tokenize carbon credits and help fund projects that are fighting climate change. If you missed our breakdown of how it works, check it out here.
Doppel got $5M to build a monitoring platform that detects frauds and scams in real-time.
Commonwealth got $20M to develop an all-in-one platform for crypto communities to discuss, vote, and fund projects together.
And if you’re new around these parts, we keep a fully loaded database of companies that have raised, you can get it right here.
A BIZARRE CRYPTO CASE
Gather round Milk Readers, it’s storytime. We’re gonna talk about one of the most bizarre legal cases we’ve seen regarding crypto.
It all starts with a guy named Joseph Kent. Joseph has been a software engineer most of his life, but recently served as a tech lead for Elizabeth Warren when she ran for president back in 2020.
There’s one thing you need to know about Joseph: he hates crypto. He believes it’s killing the planet and lets people avoid financial sanctions.
And now Joseph is sending a message and suing a crypto protocol for “substantial damages”. The protocol is called PoolTogether.
PoolTogether is a no-loss lottery, where you deposit your money with a chance to win a little bit more, but have virtually no risk to losing your money (we say virtually, because there's always some risk).
Ready for the kicker? The “damages” Joseph is talking about add up to ~$12. That’s how much Joseph actually invested in the PoolTogether protocol.
Now he’s claiming that what PoolTogether is offering is no different than selling lottery tickets. So he’s filed a suit against the founder and is looking for a massive payday.
What now? The PoolTogether founder needs to raise $1.3m and is selling NFTs to help them raise the money to fight this in court.
So far they’ve been able to raise $350k+ through these NFTs and still have 27 days left for people to join the cause.
The Milk Road’s Take: It’s wild that he’s able to sue them for damages and that the founder needs to raise $1.3m+ to cover legal fees.
Although this seems is shitty in the short term, more and more legal clarity on crypto use cases will help in the future.
TODAY'S NEWSLETTER IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY FRANSHARES
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They all invest in franchises.
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Some of the high points:
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The Franshares team only chooses franchises that have a long track record of success so you know you’re only investing in quality businesses.
As stocks are more wobbly than 57-year-old couples at Margaritaville, franchises are the new frontier.
Make passive money moves with FranShares.
LUNA 2.0 IS COMING
It feels like ages ago that we witnessed one of the largest collapses in crypto history - The Fall of Luna. It was less than 14 days ago.
Today we see the return. But to be completely honest, the whole thing just seems like Do Kwon is trying to hit the reset button to forget the crash even happened.
It feels like all he did was throw on a fake mustache on and add a "2.0" after Luna as “the revival plan”.
The first act of business is to airdrop the new Luna tokens to previous Luna holders.
The amount of new LUNA tokens people will get airdropped depends on the a few things: the type of tokens you held (Luna, UST, etc), the time period that you held these tokens (was it before the attack or after?), and the number of tokens held.
Here’s the TLDR on who is eligible for the airdrop:
- People that had less than 10k Luna prior to May 7, 2022
- People that had deposited UST in Anchor prior to May 7, 2022
- People that are currently holding Luna or UST as of today
Only 30% of the total LUNA 2.0 will be airdropped and the other 70% will be vested over the 2 years, where users will get more airdropped every 6 months.
The goal is to preserve the network security and not let everyone sell their tokens immediately when they get them.
The biggest change? Terra has now become a fully owned, community chain. The TerraForm Labs team and Do Kwon are no longer owners of it.
If you wanna go deeper on what Terra 2.0, the team put out a thread here.
MEME OF THE DAY
Shaan aka “Elon’s chocolate milk” & Ben "2% Milk" Levy
See ya next week!
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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.
