🇨🇫 Central African Republic Adopts Bitcoin As Legal Tender

April 29, 2022

|In Weekend Recap

|By Osprey Team

If you haven’t heard, the Central African Republic (CAR) adopted bitcoin as an official currency alongside the West African CFA franc.

But let’s be real.

The GDP of this nation of fewer than 5 million people is minuscule (approximately $4B) – just 12% of El Salvador’s, which is also tiny, and less than 0.01% of the US’.

Elon Musk just sold a few shares of Tesla (see more below) that are worth more than CAR’s GDP.

This will not move the needle.

Yet the case can be made that CAR’s adoption signifies a small foothold on a continent where a common decentralized currency might eventually buffer inflation, spur commerce, and foster wealth.

This is the hope and even the best scenario would take years, but we are patient.

The Central African Republic is landlocked in Central Africa.

🗺 More Crypto Global

On Thursday, Panama passed a bill to regulate the use of crypto assets.

Reuters reports,

The bill opens the door to private and public use of crypto assets, and will make it possible for people to pay their taxes with cryptocurrencies.

Brazil’s Senate passed a bill to regulate crypto. The legislation is likely to become law before the end of the year.

Here’s Cointelegraph with more.

Fort Worth, Texas is now the first municipality in the United States that will mine bitcoin.

The city will hold the mined digital asset on its balance sheet.

Here’s CNBC with the full scoop.

Oklahoma advanced its bitcoin mining bill that looks to provide tax incentives to bitcoin miners within the state’s borders.

The Oklahoma State Senate is scheduled to read the legislation next Wednesday.

Here’s additional coverage via The Block.

🐦 Elon To Acquire Twitter

On Monday, Twitter announced that it entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by Elon Musk for ~$44B.

The deal is not signed, sealed, and delivered, but Twitter shared that it will not provide forward looking guidance and withdrew its outlook given the pending acquisition on Thursday’s earnings call.

On Friday, it was reported that Elon sold ~$8.5B of Tesla stock to fund the sale. Here’s EDGAR with the official filings.

And here’s Time with additional coverage, What Elon Musk Really Believes.

📚 Osprey Institutional Research & More!

On Wednesday, Osprey Funds began research coverage on six Layer One Tokens, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, Cardano, Solana and Avalanche.

We are providing institutional grade comprehensive data-driven analysis. No big deal.

You can access the full report HERE.

On Thursday, alternative investment platform, Yieldstreet, announced the launch of The Enhanced Crypto Fund, “which offers crypto investors an easier way to modernize their portfolio to include crypto and blockchain assets.”

Yieldstreet partnered with Osprey Funds in this endeavor and we are excited to serve as sub-advisor.

You can check out The Enhanced Crypto Fund on the Yieldstreet Website and read the full press release HERE.

🤝 Sports + Crypto

Ice Cube’s BIG3 Basketball League offered fractionalized ownership of its teams through the sale of NFTs.

DeGods, a Solana NFT project, announced that it acquired controlling interest in the BIG3’s Killer 3s franchise.

As of 4.29.2022, DeGods is the largest Solana NFT project by market cap.

It’s the first fractionalized sports franchise acquisition through NFTs.

FTX and Mercedes-AMG Petronas will release NFTs for next week’s Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix.

The drop will feature a freemium model offering free-to-claim and premium NFTs.

Two of the premium NFTs will be paired with the physical rear wing from the Mercedes race car.

The auction will open at 10AM ET on Friday, May 6th.

Here’s Mercedes with more.

🖼 What’s New In NFTs?

NFT monthly volume on OpenSea was up ~30% month-over-month and ~3300% year-over-year.

Here’s a great chart via @rchen8 —

Solana’s Okay Bears topped all NFT projects with $18M trading volume in 1 day.

Decrypt shares that it’s the first time a Solana NFT project exceeded Ethereum NFT projects in 24-hour sales volume.

Meanwhile, Moonbirds mooned too. Moonbird #2642 sold for ~$1M within a week of the collection’s launch.

👣 The Tiptoe Continues

Traditional finance continues to tiptoe into crypto.

This week, Goldman Sachs shared that it offered its first loan backed by bitcoin.

And Fidelity will allow clients to invest in bitcoin through their 401(k) accounts. Here’s the Wall Street Journal with more.

The Labor Department is wary of Fidelity’s bitcoin ambitions. The federal agency said it has “grave concerns with what Fidelity has done.”

👓 Meet Meta IRL

Meta (formerly Facebook) opened a physical retail store to tout its products to access the metaverse.

The company shared,

In the Meta Store, you’ll be able to get hands-on experience with all our hardware products. We want you to interact with everything… We want you to feel it.

The store will open on May 9th at Meta’s Burlingame, CA campus.

Here’s Dezeen with details.