The Crypto Land Grab Is In Effect

December 3, 2021

|In Weekend Recap

|By Osprey Team

The Corporate Crypto Land Grab

Tuesday, Jack Dorsey announced he was stepping down as Twitter CEO.

Two days later, Jack’s other baby, Square, announced a name change to Block, you know, like Blockchain.

This comes weeks after Facebook announced the name change to Meta, you know, like Metaverse.

This new Block name was met with derision from the media and finance socialsphere, which is a bullish tell as the knee jerk reaction from the noise brigade is often wrong.

In the old world, big companies pivoted slowly. The operative metaphor was, like turning a giant tanker.

This is no longer the case. Big tech companies now turn on a satoshi and then leverage their large scale.

That’s what we’re seeing here. Meta and now Block are making a huge bet on a crypto future and literally staking their names on it.

We love to see it.

Keep a lookout for major crypto initiatives from other tech titans like Amazon, Apple and Google.

Seems like they have no choice…

Here’s The Washington Post with the full story.

Adidas Enters The Chat

Adidas teased its upcoming future with NFTs this week as the company commented,

It’s time to enter a world of limitless possibilities.

They’ve yet to release additional information, but Adidas Originals changed its Twitter profile pic.

We’ll update you as details develop.

Saylor Bought More Bitcoin

MicroStrategy bought more Bitcoin.

Michael Saylor’s software company bought an additional 7,002 Bitcoin for ~$410M during its fourth quarter.

$MSTR now holds 121,044 Bitcoin worth ~$3.6B. Saylor’s average cost per coin is under $30,000. What a savage.

Saylor recently spoke with Peter McCormack on the What Bitcoin Did Podcast about all things Bitcoin. You don’t want to miss it — Bitcoin is Digital Energy with Michael Saylor

Virtual Land In High Demand

Virtual land NFTs surpassed $100M in weekly sales for the first time ever following Decentraland and Axie Infinity’s >$2M deals.

5 of the top 10 most expensive NFT transactions of the week were virtual real estate.

It’s probably nothing.

Here’s a visual breakdown by DappRadar:

Chips for Charity

This afternoon, our friends at Stocktwits will host the second annual Chips for Charity Poker Tourney. Entry fees and donations go to Wall Street Bound, which focuses on recruiting and training underrepresented youth for careers in finance.

Osprey Funds has made a donation and committed to supporting the cause. If you would like to play or donate, GO HERE.

It will be a lot of fun for a good cause PLUS the winner gets $5K in crypto.

Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht to Launch NFT Collection

Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder who is serving life in prison, created an NFT collection covering his days as a young child to teen to prisoner.

Here’s his write-up on the NFT collection.

And here’s a preview of Perspective:

The highest bid is currently 420.69Ξ. The auction will close on Wednesday, December 8, 2021.

Decipher Miami 2021

Algorand held its Decipher event in Miami this week.

In case you missed it, catch up with a few video recordings —

Welcome to Decipher with Steve Kokinos

Off the Rails: Reinventing Payments Infrastructure for a Truly Global Economy

Building a Blockchain City with Mayor Francis Suarez

ArtBasel Run Over By JPEGs

It was Art Week in South Beach and the digital work stole the show.

Zaha Hadid unveiled “NFTism,” its rendering of a virtual gallery.

SuperRare showed off its Monolith — a 23-foot digital display that featured ~50 NFT artists.

Take a look:

Here’s Architectural Digest with additional info.

And… 15 Works That Sold at This Year’s Art Basel Miami Beach

Facebook Meta Flips on Crypto Ads

On Wednesday, Meta updated its crypto ad policy.

As the company moves into the metaverse, it flipped on its former crypto ad ban.

Meta mentioned,

We’re doing this because the cryptocurrency landscape has continued to mature and stabilize in recent years and has seen more government regulations that are setting clearer rules for their industry.

See the full announcement here.