5 Minute Crypto - First Republic tumbles; BRC-20s, really; Nate faces the Opensea music; and more

Two Degens (resources, interviews, on all things crypto and some AI)

Howdy all — this is the 5 minute crypto daily update for Thursday April 28th.
Lots to cover in today’s update including First Republic Bank, OpenSea, Bitcoin’s BRC-20s, rebooting FTX, and more.
Let’s get it on!
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As of this recording, bitcoin and ETH prices have spiked, seemingly due to concerns about another US bank failure - which we’ll talk about below
BTC was up almost 10% and has since settled around $28,900
ETH is sitting at $1900
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What’s going on in crypto land…
First Republic Bank had its stock trading halted 5 times by the NYSE
It currently trades at $5.69, down 30% for the day, down almost 60% for the month
Depositors took out more than $100B after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/04/26/bittrex-global-ceo-says-firm-will-fight-sec-charges-did-not-serve-us-customers/
-Bermuda based Bittrex Global - an OG exchange
-Bittrex served the US and Bittrex Global was the international arm, much like Binance US and Binance, or FTX US and FTX

Nate Chastain worked for Opensea
The US justice department has now charged him with one count of *wire fraud* and one count of *money laundering*
The feds said Chastain flipped “approximately 45 NFTs on approximately 11 separate occasions,” selling them for 200-500 percent in profit each time
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-employee-nft-marketplace-charged-first-ever-digital-asset-insider-trading-scheme
https://milkroad.com/brc-20-tokens
The Ordinals protocol launched January of this year, led to an explosion of NFTs on the bitcoin blockchain
BRC-20s, modeled after Ethereum’s ERC-20s, are a new kind of token standard on Bitcoin blockchain which lets developers use the Ordinals protocol to issue tokens
Came into use last month
3400 different tokens have been minted - mostly memecoins
Current market cap is just around $18M
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/ftx-revival-effort-draws-possible-bid-vc-firm-tribe-capital-bloomberg-news-2023-04-18/
-a bit late to this news, but Silicon Valley based Tribe Capital has been in talks with FTX custodians to possibly reboot the exchange
-Tribe was an initial investor
-wants to raise $250M, including $100M from itself
-Tribe has also invested in Kraken, MoonPay, and Binance US
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/04/24/ethereum-shanghai-upgrade-brings-record-inflow-of-572k-eth-staked-in-a-week/
-it’s been 2 weeks since the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade which enabled stakers to withdraw their ETH
-last week saw the largest ever inflow of staked ETH since PoS launched 2.5 years ago
-more than 570K ETH were staked, driven by institutional staking services like Figment, Bitcoin Suisse, and Stakefish
Dune dashboard: https://dune.com/21shares_research/ethereum-staking-and-withdrawals
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Recommended reads…
Detailed notes on core devs call from Christine Kim, vice president of research for Galaxy
https://www.galaxy.com/research/insights/ethereum-all-core-developers-consensus-call-107/
crypto critics David Gerard and Amy Castor’s blog
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/04/23/crypto-collapse-reggie-fowler-sentencing-delayed-sec-charges-bittrex-coinbase-looks-to-leave-the-us-scaramucci-and-ftx-bitfinex-ripple/
During meetings with officials in Dubai, Sam badmouthed CZ from Binance. Word got back to CZ, who decided to dump FTX’s in-house FTT token — leading to FTX’s rapid implosion in November.

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That’s it for today! That was 6 minutes long. All the links are in the show notes. You can follow @twodegenspod on Twitter and subscribe for more!
Outro clip is the Acquired cohosts on MFM talking about what's in common with most successful