Bitfinity Weekly:

Welcome to Issue #55 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

👮 Ground Control: Do Kwon and fellow Terraform Labs executive Han Chang-joon have been denied bail by the higher courts of Montenegro. This decision nullifies a lower court's decision to allow Kwon and Han's release on bail, made 12 days ago. The two will remain jailed in Montenegro. Meanwhile, the extradition battle between the U.S. and Korea continues on.

🌪️ An Unexpected Wind: Tornado Cash, a decentralized, DAO-run cryptocurrency tumbler (which offers a "mixing" service, obscuring the trail of transactions between wallets), was hacked recently by an unknown person who seized majority governance control. The attacker submitted an unexpected proposal to the DAO, which would hand back governance control to the original governance holders. It passed on Friday with 100% approval and will be fully executed by Sunday. This move wasn't completely benevolent, as over $1 million was extracted from the Tornado governance system during this period.

🧟 Return of the Trading Dead: John Ray III, the current CEO of failed crypto exchange FTX, and the FTX bankruptcy team have been working behind the scenes to potentially revive the company. Although a resurrection of FTX could mean compensation for customers who lost their funds during the company collapse, it's unclear if the FTX name is worth salvaging.

🥴 Is It Still Barry's Turn?: Gemini, a prominent U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, released a statement on Monday that DCG has missed their payment of $630 million. The Digital Currency Group (DCG) is a crypto-focused venture capital company with prominent companies like CoinDesk, Genesis, and Grayscale directly under their umbrella). This follows months of Gemini founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, trying to garner public awareness about the situation. DCG's CEO Barry Silbert has stayed mostly silent, fanning rumors about the financial state of one of the largest institutions in crypto.

😲 FUD or Fact?: Binance has been dealing with a number of negative headlines lately, even as the world's largest CEX continues to expand in new territories such as Thailand. The latest to rock the crypto world is a Reuter's exclusive, released this Tuesday, in which the venerated news agency alleges that reputable insiders have reported "billions of dollars" of customer funds being commingled with company revenue. Binance has denied mixing customer and company funds.

💻 Two Billion & Counting: Congratulations to the Internet Computer community as ICP reached a milestone of two billion blocks! From a BUIDL Bitcoin Hackathon recap to a list of new, exciting projects being built in the ecosystem, make sure to check out the latest official DFINITY newsletter:

This Week In Our Blog

Catch up on an in-depth view of what's happening in the world of decentralized finance with our latest issue of the State of DeFi!

NFT Market Bytes

🤑 Making Money by Making Money: Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace that has expanded across several chains (including Bitcoin), is putting focus back on Solana, the blockchain they initially launched on. The "Chapter II" initiative, announced on Wednesday, puts focus on making NFT trading more seamless and incentivizes volume by offering a limited-time promotion where traders can earn $SOL for buying and selling their NFTs.

👟 Pumped Up Kicks: Nike, which has been quietly (but deeply) foraying into web3 with their acquisition of NFT company RTFKT and collaborative launches, launched their first solo digital sneakers NFT collection with the OF1. The OurForce1's are completely digital, unlike RTFKT's "phygital" drops--which tie in redeemable physical items. While sales surpassed $1 million this week, the launch has been beset with technical issues which have likely dampened the numbers.

🚗 Off to the Races: Formula 1 tickets now come in NFT form! Platinum Group, the premier ticket issuer for prestigious racing events, will be issuing NFT race tickets starting this weekend with the Monaco Grand Prix. The NFTs will provide event admittance as future benefits such as race discounts and hospitality rewards. The tickets will be issued via Polygon for the foreseeable future.

🖼️ Culture Boom: The Ordinals boom has turned Bitcoin into the second largest ecosystem for NFT trading, behind Ethereum, in the handful of months that have passed since the first Ordinal was inscribed on the blockchain. Bitcoin has done $173m this month in NFT transactions, which is roughly half of Ethereum's ($390m) and triple that of former Number 2, Solana ($49m).

Tweet of the Week

https://twitter.com/bitfinitynet/status/1661709291986755586

Meme Time

A Matter of Opinion:

Laying down the Lore - what Bitcoin Ordinals have is a compelling narrative, a cult-like mythology surrounds it, with developers like Rodamor, advancing a narrative on how Ordinals are not merely NFTs but digital Artefacts. Reading the blog by Rodamor (https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/), which can be taken as a definitive guide on Ordinal theory, one gets a sense of a coming to being: a new technology that is couched in an older one. We get a feeling of depth - that perhaps more will emerge from the crucible. We have the templar-knights of this new Bitcoin church, the creators, in developers like Rodamor and Casey; we have evangelist influencers who abound in the space; there's even a site of pilgrimage in Bitcoin Miami. In short, we obtain all the necessary ingredients for a new crypto-religion.

One positive in this nascent ecosystem: less venture capital and more fair-launches. OXBT is a recent example and now the second largest BRC20 by market-cap. Bitcoin's ecosystem currently lacks the tooling to offer pre-sales through smart-contracts, which some consider beneficial - although this may change in the future with advances in protocol design. Having recently become the second largest ecosystem for NFTs in blockchain, we can see that the developments, both technical and otherwise, show no signs of abating.