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November 20, 2022

🥛Is a big domino about to fall?

GM. This is the Milk Road. The daily newsletter that makes you want to “Read Mor Crypto” like Chick-fil-A makes you want to “Eat Mor Chicken”.

Except sometimes we are open Sunday.

Here's what we got for you today:

  • The Latest on FTX: Samuel stole $300m, a big domino, and more…

  • Milky Memes

THE LATEST WITH FTX

At this point, I feel like I’ve thought more about FTX than anything else in the past two weeks.

More FTX than phone time with my mom.

More FTX than Netflix binges.

And definitely more FTX than Tinder matches.

Just when I think I can enjoy my weekend, the Milk Man hits me with the “did you see what just happened?” text.

And just like that, it's time to fire up the Macbook, get on Twitter, and pen a letter to my Roadies.

Here’s the updates since Friday:

1/ FTX top executives Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, and Caroline Ellison have been fired

Samuel and his posse are now fully gone from FTX.

The era of effective altruism, yield farming food with billions of customer funds, and tricky back-doors are officially over for FTX.

RIP to the Fraudulent Four.

2/ Samuel personally took $300m of the $420.69m raised in FTX's 2021 funding round

$420m was supposed to go to the company, $300m went straight into his pockets. Wow, talk about fraud.

The $300m alone would make him the 6th highest paid CEO in the world.

3/ FTX "hacker" converted 25,000 ETH (~$30m) into wrapped Bitcoin

The FTX hacker is getting rid of the stolen ETH as fast as they can. Oh and by the way, it turns out the Bahamian government wasn't the hacker (they seized a different set of FTX funds.)

Which means the $370m hacker is still out there and things could still get worse.

Today's ETH dump caused a 4% drop and the hacker has 200k+ ETH left in their wallet.

4/ Genesis needs $1b by tomorrow

If the reports are true, time is ticking on the gargantuan crypto lender.

They haven’t been able to raise capital and some investors are telling Genesis to not even bother sending the deck over.

According to Ram Ahluwalia, the self proclaimed “crypto CFA”, “Genesis has lost (due to 3AC and FTX counter-party blow-ups) more earnings than Genesis has generated since inception.”

That’s not exactly a great sales pitch to investors.

It's still unclear what impact this will have on Grayscale (the next big domino that could fall), but we'll be watching.

5/ FTX owes its 50 biggest creditors more than $3 billion

The top 50 FTX customers lost over $3b.

One unlucky customer lost $226m. Good luck explaining that loss to the family.

But there could be hope. If you deposited money from 1 of the 5 largest banks to FTX in the last 60 days you can reverse that deposit.

Who knows if it will work, but it's worth the try.

6/ The worst news of all….you can now bet what your grandma is gonna bring up at Thanksgiving.

Last year, the topic of the table was trying to buy the Constitution and this year it's all FTX.

Don't worry there's a way out. Just tell your grandma that she can read the FTX dictionary the Ringer released.

What's more trustworthy you or a dictionary? Problem solved.

Oof.

TODAY'S EDITION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THIRDWEB

Web3 is in its early days. We’re in the 'beer-drinking iPhone app' stage.

The main problem is it’s difficult for devs to build in web3 – workflow is fragmented, complex, and slow. We need products to make it easier.

Stripe made it easy to add payments to your app.

AWS made it easy to add storage & compute for your app.

Now it’s thirdweb's turn – thirdweb makes it easy to add web3 tools like tokens and NFTs to your app.

Some of the world's biggest brands (Afterpay, Coinbase, etc) are using it to launch and power their apps.

Since launching:

  • 55,000+ developers have joined

  • 200,000+ smart contracts deployed

  • just raised a $24m Series A from Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and more. The Milk Road boys even got in on the fun.

Companies like thirdweb are crucial to the growth of web3, as developer tools help builders create real-world applications of the technology.

Interested in learning more? Check it out here!

MILKY MEMES TO MAKE IT ALL BETTER

That's a wrap for this week. Stay thirsty & see ya next week!

If you want more, be sure to follow our Twitter (@MilkRoadDaily)

A ROADERS REVIEW

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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 researchBut