Bitfinity Weekly: Fair Value
Welcome to Issue #94 of Bitfinity Weekly for our #BITFINIANS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.
What's in Today's Email?
- Global Crypto News
- This Week in our Blog
- NFT Market Bytes
- Tweet of the Week
- Meme Time
- A Matter of Opinion
Global Crypto News
📧 Blockchain Mail: A total of 120 pages worth of email correspondence between pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and early collaborator Martti Malmi was uploaded to GitHub this Friday. The documents were part of the evidence presented for the ongoing lawsuit between COPA (Crypto Open Patent Alliance) and Craig Wright, a computer scientist who has long claimed to be the real Satoshi. The crypto community has been abuzz with this new insight into Satoshi's mind. You can read the emails for yourself here.
📎 See Attached: Even more Satoshi correspondence was made public on Friday as Bitcoin historian and journalist Pete Rizzo shared five emails (also presented as evidence in the COPA vs. Craig Wright lawsuit) between Nakamoto and cryptographer Adam Back, who invented Hashcash, a proof-of-work algorithm still used as an essential Bitcoin mining function.
🕳 Down the Drain: CryptoGrab, the team behind the Nova wallet drainer, registered their company as a legal business entity in the U.K., sparking concern and speculation. CertiK, a top blockchain auditing company, brought the registration to public attention on Thursday, noting that the company address on file is that of a virtual office often used by shell companies and questioning the legitimacy of at least one of the names of their supposed list of directors.
🥊 Hitboy: Crypto influencer Ben Armstrong (better known as Bitboy) fought More Light, the lead dev behind memecoin HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (or $BITCOIN, as is the ticker name) in a broadcast UFC-style match on Friday. Armstrong, who has been in numerous legal battles recently after being ousted from his crypto media company and getting divorced after conducting an affair with $ICP advocate Cassandra Wolfe, won the match. $BITCOIN fell in price shortly after the fight in reaction to the news of More Light's loss.
️👮 Grounded: The court of Montenegro has ruled that Do Kwon should be extradited to the U.S. instead of his native country of South Korea. Kwon, who was arrested in Montenegro last year for attempting to flee to Dubai using a fake passport, faces heavy charges in both countries involving his role in the collapse of Terraform Labs ($UST/$LUNA), which devastated investors and wiped out more than $40 billion. Kwon's lawyers have appealed the ruling.
This Week in our Blog
A nascent but rich ecosystem is brewing in Bitcoin. The most popular metaprotocol token type is BRC-20, created by pseudonymous Bitcoin dev @domodata. In this deep dive article we cover everything you wanted to know about BRC-20s, its past and its most likely trajectory in the future:
A hybrid NFT/fungible token standard concept, created by pseudonymous dev @SerecThunderson and popularized by the forked 'ERC-404' contract, has the potential to shake up the Bitcoin ecosystem, not just Ethereum:
NFT Market Bytes
🐒 Guess Who's Back: Yuga Labs has a new CEO, sort of. Greg Solano, one of Yuga's two co-founders, is returning to serve as the NFT giant's newest CEO. He replaces former Blizzard/Activision executive, Daniel Alegre, who served as CEO for less than a year.
🐧 Pudgy Pockets: Pudgy Penguins are having a great month; the NFT collection briefly flipped Bored Ape Yacht Club last Saturday and announced an extension of its retail deal with Walmart this week. The renewed deal expands the Pudgy Penguins merchandise line as well as its footprint to include a total of 3,100 stores across America.
📚 Print Form: Luxury literary publisher Taschen announced during NFT Paris this week that they will be publishing an art book that encompasses "the entire NFTs ecosystem" as the "first major art history survey" of the field. Four limited Art Editions of the book will come with an accompanying signed NFT print. The book, titled, 'On NFTs' will be available in March.
Tweet of the Week
Meme Time
A Matter of Opinion
At least two European Central Bank officials say the "fair value of Bitcoin is still zero", despite the recent surge in investor interest in the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin ETF activity in the United States has demonstrated that both institutional and retail investors are eager to include Bitcoin in their portfolios, evidenced by the $3B in net flows into Bitcoin spot ETFs since their approval by the SEC earlier this year.
Ulrich Bindseil (ECB Director General of Market Infrastructure and Payments) and Jürgen Schaaf (ECB Senior Management Advisor) have taken a hard stance on Bitcoin in the past. Back in November 2022, the duo declared that Bitcoin was on the "road to irrelevance" due to slow and expensive transactions making it an unsuitable investment asset, among other reasons such as environmental concerns.
The two's latest publication, released this Thursday on the European Central Bank website, is titled "ETF approval for bitcoin - the naked emperor's new clothes". As you can probably assume from the title of the piece, Bindseil and Schaaf see no positive developments in the path to cryptocurrency adoption, but rather dismiss the ETF approvals as "noise".
Furthermore, Bindseil and Schaaf attribute the bulk of Bitcoin's rise in popularity to ongoing price manipulation by whales and demand by criminals, explicitly detailing in their latest post why they consider Bitcoin to be "financing evil".
While we certainly are not making any claims about Bitcoin (or any digital asset) being a safe investment vehicle, this editor's humble opinion is that there's not much the ECB or anyone can do to stop the inflow of tradfi investment money to crypto. South Korea, one of the top countries by volume for crypto activity, is on the verge of approving spot Bitcoin ETFs. Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore also seem to be waiting in the wings. How long can the European Central Bank fight against a global tide?
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*Important Disclaimer: While every effort is made on this website to provide accurate information, any opinions expressed or information disseminated do not necessarily reflect the views of Bitfinity itself. The information provided here is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice.
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