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April 22, 2023

🥛 BTC whales woke up. Why? 🐳

GM. This is Milk Road, your crypto tour guide. We keep you organized and educated, and we know all the tips and tricks.

It’s Saturday, let’s do this:

  • Why are BTC whales waking up? 🐳

  • NFT market is down bad 📉

  • Metamask is turning heads 👀

  • Calling all Roadies! Want $100? 🥛

  • Gemini’s expanding overseas too 🍪

Prices as of 9 AM ET.

DECADE-OLD BTC WHALES WOKE UP 🐳

There’s one creature you should always be watching in crypto.

One whose moves should be eyed like a hawk.

We’re talkin’ bout whales, or investors holding more than 1,000 BTC (~$27.3M.) Specifically OG whales that bought early back in ~2013.

And now, they’re waking up.

That’s right folks, grab your Dramamine – we’re goin’ whale watching.

Whale 1 holds $176M worth of BTC and sent $60M for the first time in 9 years on Thursday.

And Whale 2 sent $7.8M (279 BTC) of its $31.6M for the first time in 10 years on Friday.

Both came into their holdings around 2013 & both sent the funds to brand new addresses.

So what’s going on? Well, there’s a wallet drainer on the loose attacking OG holders, apparently. Whales could be relocating parts of their holdings as a precaution.

A Twitter user posted about it on Monday.

Here are the Milknotes:

  • Holders with private keys between ~2014 & 2022 are being targeted. People who work in the space, have multiple addresses, etc.

  • At least ~5K+ ETH (~$10M) has been stolen since December.

  • This isn’t a phishing attack. The attacker likely came into a bunch of old data, including private keys, that they’re using to extract people’s funds.

There’s of course… another theory behind the whale activity. The internet’s always gonna internet

It could be Satoshi AKA Bitcoin’s creator. Whenever sleeping whales wake up and do something, people think it’s them (they’ve been inactive since 2010.)

Why? Cause Satoshi could own a sh*tton of BTC (like 1M, or ~$27.9B.) 

Whatever the reason, do like the whales do and don’t put all your crypto eggs in one basket (wallet.)

NFT ACTIVITY IS TRENDING DOWN 📉

2022 was a rough year for NFTs. And so far, 2023 hasn’t been much better.

NFT market metrics are down bad. One tracks the number of active wallets engaging with NFTs each day. And it just fell off a cliff.

When you narrow it down to the most popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea, things look even worse. OpenSea hasn’t seen so few daily users on its platform since July 2021.

No one is safe. The top collection on OpenSea is way off its all-time highs: The cheapest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT has gone from $422K → $76K.

And to add to the pain, a lot of past NFT volume was due to wash trading, where the same user trades an asset back and forth. It's estimated that more than half of all NFT volume was wash-traded in 2022. 😬

Why does this matter? It shows things are a-changin’ in NFT land.

When NFTs got popular, it was all about momentum. People were always chasing the next shiny object and throwing money everywhere they could.

Remember when Pixelmon (NFT project) was able to raise $70M off just an idea?

But now, times have changed. Starbucks, Reddit, and Nike are all taking different approaches to their new projects, ones that customers are actually digging.

They’re putting their focus on low costs, wide access, and deeper relationships with consumers.

Your move, cartoon jpegs.

WEN $MASK TOKEN 👀

Few words get a crypto bro more excited than “airdrop."

After Blur (NFT marketplace) and Arbitrum (L2 blockchain) delivered their stimmy checks to users, all eyes have been on Metamask.

There was even a viral rumor spreading recently around their airdrop, which Metamask later denied.

But it’s not all speculation. The founder of Metamask’s parent company (Consensys) confirmed there will be a token at some point.

And things just heated up… A blank page for the $MASK token just appeared on Coinmarketcap.

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What’s all the hype about? Metamask is one of the most well known companies in Web3.

They had over 21M active users last month… during a bear market.

And it’s not just crypto investors who think they have potential. Check out some of the investors from their latest funding round:

If they do decide to do an airdrop, this could be one of the biggest ones ever. But be careful out there and make sure to only trust their official links.

With opportunity free money comes responsibility.

WE WANNA HEAR FROM YOU🥛

All right Roadies, we need your help.

We’re writing a whopper of a deep dive on all things ETH wallets.

The best hot ones, cold ones, your biggest fears when you’re using one (or biggest fears in general if you want – this is a safe space.)

So where do you come in? Well, we wanna hear from you!

We put together a handy dandy survey for you to fill out. It’ll be fun, I promise – no boring questions.

And the best part? We’re giving away $100 to a random person that responds to the survey.

How can you say no to $100? That’s like, 37 Cheesy Gordita Crunches.

Plus, you get to help out your fav crypto newsletter. Who doesn’t want that? 🥛

MILK & COOKIES 🍪

Gemini (crypto exchange) is moving its engineering hub & devs to India with so much regulatory confusion in the U.S. *DJ Khaled voice* another one…

Telegram users can now buy, withdraw, and trade BTC. A step toward mass adoption a day keeps Big Banking away.

Binance exec Patrick Hillman tweeted that SBF was constantly spreading rumors about CZ (the company’s CEO.) Get your saucers out – it’s tea time

Bankrupt lender Voyager can officially sell its assets to Binance’s U.S. arm in a $1B deal. Finally…

MILKY MEMES 🤣

That's a wrap for today. Meet us on Twitter to talk all about it. It’s kinda like a family BBQ but better – no screaming kids, awkward photos, or drunk uncles telling weird stories (@MilkRoadDaily)

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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.