🥛 The seven most interesting things we saw yesterday

Gm. Gm. It's April Fools Day, but no jokes here. Because there ain’t no fools allowed on the Milk Road.

Today’s estimated read time: 2 minutes and 26 seconds

Light news day, so I won’t waste your time. Let’s do quick hitters!

1/ If you missed yesterday’s email, you missed out. We talked about the new crypto game, StepN. If you bought in like I did, you’re up 20% in a day (the token). I’ll be saying “yes” to the $2 extra charge for guacamole on my burrito today.

2/ Big NFT Discords Getting Hacked. Bored Apes & Doodles both got compromised last night. if you’re in there. Don’t click links. They’re stealing your expensive monkey’s and scribbles.

3/ Bloomberg senior analyst says demand for $ETH is rising. He calls $ETH “collateral for the internet” and points out the obvious. Demand going up. Supply going down.

4/ The EU Committee passed an important and bad ruling against crypto. They are forcing companies like Coinbase (and others) to collect and report data on every crypto transaction (including who received the funds, even if that person is not a customer). At first they said this was for amounts $1K or more…but scrapped that minimum, and now it’s for all transfers 😑

5/ Tomorrow, the 19 Millionth Bitcoin will be mined (out of 21 million total supply)

6/ Check out this cool little tool: Staking Rewards. It lets you type in what token you own, and it tells you how much yield you could earn staking it (and how to do it).

7/ Binance is sponsoring the Grammy's.

Crypto is following the “luxury” marketing playbook. The way Nike and Under Armour put their products on athletes. The way the diamond industry bribed directors to put diamonds in the key love scenes of Hollywood movies. Crypto companies are jumping on the chance to sponsor key cultural icons and events:

The new LA Lakers arena is Crypto.com
Tom Brady and Steph Curry working with FTX
5 Super Bowl commercials for crypto
Leo Messi just signed a $20M deal to promote the Socios token

Culture First Marketing.

INTERVIEW WITH THE UKRAINIAN GODFATHER OF CRYPTO

Remember when the war broke out in Ukraine, and people started donating crypto to support?

Here’s an update on how it’s going:

What: $130M has been donated

Is it helping?

The guy in charge of the government’s crypto fund is: Michael Chobanian. Checkout his backstory:

This guy is basically the Godfather of Crypto in Ukraine.

He was the first to… start a crypto company there, set up a crypto ATM, and build a crypto exchange. Hell, he was even the first person in Ukraine that got his apartment raided for having crypto (back in the early 2010 days).

Now he’s basically finding ways to spend crypto to buy weapons, defense shields, helmets, etc..

I listened to his interview, so that you don’t have to. Here are some key takeaways:

1/ Ukraine was already #1 crypto country in the world (by capita according to Chainanalysis).

But now, it’s even bigger there. Now everyone and their momma is using crypto in Ukraine.

Why?

Normal money transfers take 3 days there. Bitcoin takes ~10 minutes. 3 days vs 10 minutes? It’s a no-brainer

He also added, “time is money for my country right now. 10 minute transfers saves lives.”

2/ He says he knew crypto would always be big, but never could have imagined it would be because of a war.

It has caused the state of the crypto market to change a lot. Cash, U.S. dollars, in Ukraine are pretty much useless.

No one wants them.

Now the most valuable form of money in Ukraine is crypto. Everyone wants crypto because this is the fastest, the most flexible, easiest, and least bureaucratic way to store and spend your money. Crypto is the new king of money in Ukraine.

Obviously he’s biased, since he’s a crypto OG. But it's still good to hear that crypto can play a role in helping a country defend itself.

You can read the full interview here on Bloomberg.

I WROTE TODAY'S EDITION IN MY JAMBYS

Confession. I haven’t worn pants since 2019.

You see - the pandemic made me question many things.

The health of our country. The effectiveness of n95 masks. And most importantly, if I should ever wear pants again.

That’s why I wear Jamby’s. They are crazy soft boxers:

With pockets (for your phone)
With no hole (so you can wear it around people)

Their team worked at places like Lululemon and Nike, and now they make the best clothes for sitting at home on your computer. I wear them so much, I let them pay for this ad read in Jamby’s boxers instead of cash. Seriously. Go try it, you’l thank me later.

Get 20% off your order using code MILK20.

FUNDING FRIDAY

Over $810m was raised in Web3 companies and funds this week! Who got the bread?

Iris Energy got $71M they mine bitcoin mining using renewable energy.

LayerZero got $135M to unite decentralized applications across multiple blockchains. A bunch of big funds invested in this, which is rare to see (Sequioa, A16z, Paradigm, etc.)

Helium got $200M to scale. They are a network of internet hotspots anyone can join and earn money by putting a little router in your bedroom window. Buy one and earn tokens when another person connects to it!

Blur got $11M to build an NFT marketplace for pro traders. That’s right. Pro with an underline.

Nreal got $60M to develop augmented reality glasses for the metaverse. Going to be hard to compete with Snap, Facebook, Apple, etc… in the hardware game.

Wanna see every company that's raised money this year in one place? Then go check out our database!