📉 Did Tesla Aid the Crypto Collapse?

July 23, 2022

|In Weekend Recap

|By Osprey Team

Tesla reported earnings Wednesday after the close and revealed that it liquidated ~75% of its bitcoin holdings.

The EV company sold approximately 31,500 bitcoins with an average cost of ~$30,000, totaling nearly $1 billion.

Did the company cause the steep price declines? Probably not. Did the selling contribute to the slide?

It didn’t help.

Tesla still holds $218M in digital assets. See its official earnings update here.

🇧🇸 Bitcoin in the Bahamas

Chub Cay wants to introduce a bitcoin standard in the Bahamas.

The private island in the Berry Islands district of the Bahamas is looking to partner with a wallet provider to make the digital idea a reality.

Traditional finance channels can be inaccessible so bitcoin and the lightning network may offer a solution.

Here’s Bitcoin Magazine with more.

🚔 Insiders Indicted

Ishan Wahi, former product manager at Coinbase, and two others were charged with wire fraud in the first cryptocurrency insider trading case.

Prosecutors said Wahi shared confidential information about upcoming announcements of new crypto assets that Coinbase would list on its exchange.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams shared,

Today’s charges are a further reminder that Web3 is not a law-free zone. Just last month, I announced the first ever insider trading case involving NFTs, and today I announce the first ever insider trading case involving cryptocurrency markets. Our message with these charges is clear: fraud is fraud is fraud, whether it occurs on the blockchain or on Wall Street.

Given it’s the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrencies, we’ll likely see precedent set and we hope that ushers in some regulatory clarity.

Read the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York’s official statement here.

Following the indictment, the SEC listed 9 cryptocurrencies as securities. Here’s the Block with more.

💜 Layer-2 Scaling Unveiled

On Wednesday, Polygon introduced Polygon zkEVM, its layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum.

Polygon zkEVM is a zero-knowledge proof system that rolls up a batch of transactions into a single Ethereum transaction. As a result, users will experience reduced gas fees and greater speed.

Here’s a visual via Polygon:

And read the official press release here.

For more on Zero Knowledge Proofs, check out our previous post — Zero Knowledge Proofs and the Cusp of Applied Crypto

🏹 Three Arrows Breaks Silence

After five weeks of silence, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the founders of Three Arrows Capital have spoken out about the implosions of their crypto hedge fund.

Here’s a brief excerpt via Bloomberg,

Su Zhu —

It’s not a surprise that Celsius, ourselves, these kind of firms, all have problems at the same time. We have our own capital, we have our own balance sheet, but then we also take in deposits from these lenders and then we generate yield on them. So if we’re in the business of taking in deposits and then generating yield, then that, you know, means we end up doing similar trades.

It was very much like a LTCM moment for us, like a Long Term Capital moment. We had different types of trades that we all thought were good, and other people also had these trades. And then they kind of all got super marked down, super fast.

It’s cliche and hindsight is always 20-20, but the big lesson here is to manage risk when times are good.

Catch the full story here.

👎 Bah Humbug!

This week, Minecraft banned NFTs and blockchain technologies.

The sandbox video game shared,

To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset…

The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

Bah Humbug!

Meanwhile, Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, said it definitely won’t ban NFTs. Here’s Cointelegraph with more.

📺 LG’s Partial Screen

As digital goods move mainstream, we’ll highlight select hardware that feels like the future.

Here’s a prototype of LG’s Partial Screen,

Pretty sick. Here’s Designboom with details.

🎧 Listen To This

Here are two audio / video programs great for further learning.

For our developers — Hernando Castano of Parity Technologies reviewed how to write smart contracts with ink!

And Aubrey Strobel spoke with Natalie Brunell about bitcoin maximalism vs crypto, bitcoin for freedom, and Aubrey’s new podcast — The Aubservation. Tune in today.