May 2, 2022

🥛 We just gave away ETH to people building cool stuff…see who got it

https://delta.onelink.me/a1Ot/milkroad

GM. This is the Milk Road, where we help you figure out the X’s and O’s of crypto.

Estimated read time: 3 minutes and 46 seconds

It was a busy weekend. Here’s what we got for you:

  • 🤑 $320M of Metaverse Land was sold

  • 👴 Warren Buffett reminds us why he isn't a fan of Bitcoin

  • 🥛 The Milk Money Experiment

  • 🔌 Down goes Solana

  • 😂 Chart of the Day

$300M OF METAVERSE LAND WAS SOLD OVER THE WEEKEND

On Saturday, Yuga Labs and the Bored Ape Yacht Club had a metaverse land sale.

They sold $300M+ worth of land during their drop and here’s what you got if you bought a piece of land:

The craziest part was 55.6k ETH (~$150M) of ETH was burned because of transaction fees.

At its peak, ETH gas costs hit 2ETH ($6,000), which is what the french call le ridiculous.

Every single time a transaction happens on the Ethereum network there is a fee, some of it gets “burned” and taken out of the total supply of ETH. On a normal day, we burn ~$30M of supply. But for this drop, 5x that got burned.

What did Yuga Labs have to say?

Wow. They are trying to quadruple dip:

Dip 1: Sell an NFT (Bored Apes)

Dip 2: Create a coin (Apecoin)

Dip 3: Sell virtual land for a metaverse that doesn’t exist yet

Dip 4: Okay, you’ve run out of tokens to launch. So now launch your own blockchain

They have raised the stakes. Now, this can only go 2 ways:

  1. This becomes a generational company…they end up creating some mix between Pokemon and Fortnite

  2. Or (more likely) the whole Bored Apes craze comes crashing down in a few years and we look back at this moment as the peak of NFT project greed

WARREN BUFFETT SAYS HE WOULDN'T BUY ALL THE BITCOIN IN THE WORLD FOR $25

The annual Berkshire Hathaway summit is going on right now, and the “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha” is back at it again.

During the Q&A section, he said he would not buy all the bitcoin in the world for $25.

LOLz.

He said he’d pay $25B for a 1% interest in all the farmland in the U.S. He’d also put up $25B for 1% of all the apartments in the country.

But if someone came to him with an offer to buy all the Bitcoin in the world for $25, he wouldn’t do it.

Ironically, Buffet is making a mistake he always warns against. He preaches having a “circle of competence”. He says you should only judge investments inside it and know the boundaries of your circle of competence.

WINNERS OF THE MILK MONEY EXPERIMENT

2 weeks ago, we launched an experiment to give $25k+ money away to builders in web3.

What happened?

  • Companies like Thirdweb and Calm jumped in to double the grant money (!)

  • Nearly~ 1,000 people applied

  • 12 winners were selected for the Milk Money grant (~1% acceptance rate 🤯).

They each get 1 ETH (~$3,000) to build their project for 1 month.

Here’s who won:

JPEG DOOD – The easiest way to query and airdrop to any wallet, across blockchains. (tweet)

Morgante Pell – Bringing social deduction games like Diplomacy to the blockchain

David Hurley – Play to earn Wordle (site)

Max Georgopoulos – A more user-friendly way to interact with smart contracts (instead of using Etherscan)

Emma Lawler – Mint NFTs as subscription memberships to consumers on your platform (site)

Kevin Xu – Mint lifetime subscriptions as NFTs (Think: AppSumo for crypto)

Yash Bhardwaj – The no-code way to bulk-send coins and NFTs (site)

Lawrence Wu – A multiplayer crypto wallet where you can trade tokens and NFTs with friends (site)

Jamie Rawsthorne – Cohort-based courses for crypto

Karmacoma  A small EVM from scratch (tweet)

Nima Pourjafar – A visual way to learn Solidity. (Think: Scratch for Solidity)

John Percival Hackworth – Analytics dashboards for the Milk Road (previous dashboards)

If you wanna follow along with their progress, follow The Milk Road on Twitter where we'll be posting updates.

DOWN GOES SOLANA

Solana crashed over the weekend and was down for ~7 hours, which means nobody could use the network at all.

It was as frozen as a cherry Icee from 7-eleven. Except, less sweet.

What happened? Bots attacked and caused too much traffic – 4 million transactions per second..shutting the network down.

So now what? The entire network needed an upgrade and had to be restarted. Sounds just like what I do with my computer when it starts acting up – the good ol’ restart.

FOUR QUICK NUGGETS

Wikipedia stops accepting cryptocurrency donations after 8 years. Community members voted to have crypto removed after they highlighted the “issues of environmental sustainability” that come with it.

PGA Tour, the pro golf league, is looking to create highlight NFTs to help golfers get more money. 

Wouldn’t be a weekend in crypto without some hacks. This time? Fei Protocol got got for $80M. Now Fei is offering $10M to return the $80M they took, with “no questions asked”. Hmmm.

A crypto domain was sold for $435,000. The crazy part? It was originally bought for $16. That’s a 27,187x flip 🤯

TODAY'S MILK ROAD IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY COMPOSER

This App Will Make You Question 67% of Your Investment Decisions

Two-thirds of investors regret impulsive investment decisions. That’s why over $1 trillion is managed by “quantitative” hedge funds that build algorithms to remove human emotion from investing.

But unless you have a PhD, quant investing has been out of reach. Until now…Composer lets you invest in quantitative strategies (or "symphonies"), no Python or Excel required. Check out some of their most popular symphonies:

  • Buy the Dips: Bitcoin and Nasdaq-100

  • Paired Trading: 3x Leveraged S&P & Bonds

  • New Reality: Inflation Spiral Protection Hedge

80% of new traders lose money. That's why I'm a huge fan of Composer and algo-investing. It is proven to reduce emotional investing, manage risk, and increase the investable universe for every-day investors.

The best part is that you can modify their existing symphonies with their sleek drag and drop editor. Swap out Bitcoin with Coinbase or QQQ with ARK. Rebalance daily or every two weeks. The power is in your hands and the possibilities are endless.

So stop day trading and put the power of quant in your portfolio today with Composer.*

*See important disclaimer

CHART OF THE DAY

A lot changes in a year…

MEME OF THE DAY

At Milk Road, we serve as your crypto analyst, researcher, and entertainment – so you can still work out and sleep 🤣

See ya tomorrow!

Shaan "Chocolate Milk" Puri and Ben "2% Milk" Levy

A Review from the Road…

What'd you think of today's email?

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.