🇷🇺 The Fog of War

February 11, 2022

|In Weekend Recap

|By Osprey Team

🇷🇺 The Fog of War

On Friday afternoon, the White House warned that Russia might invade Ukraine as soon as next week and encouraged US citizens to leave the country.

An hour later, the Kremlin responded with a statement accusing Western Countries of disseminating misinformation in an attempt to divert attention away from their own aggressive actions.

We hate to say it, but this is exactly what the Fog of War looks like. Everybody’s bending the truth and it feels like a big game, only it’s not a game at all.

How will this affect crypto markets? Well, the first move was down, coinciding with US stocks going risk off in the final hours of trading for the week.

Where from here? We have no idea. We would expect more volatility than usual so please obey your fasten seatbelts signs.

The two presidents are scheduled to speak on Saturday.

Possibly related, but who knows, the Russian government and central bank agreed to recognize bitcoin and crypto assets as “analogue of currencies, and not digital financial assets.”

Is that even real? Game theory? Fog of war? Tough to divine Putin’s motives.

A draft of the official law is expected by next Friday (Feb. 18) — we’ll wait for an update.

😅 About That Crypto Laundering Psychopath

The story of the week has got to be this couple who got nabbed trying to launder the $4B+ in crypto stolen from Bitfinex in 2016.

We’re sure you’ve heard about it already and will spare you the detail rehash. Plus we got a ton of good stuff below.

We’ve only this to add. There’s no shortage of insanity out there. Sometimes the crazy people are criminals too. Sure seems like that’s the case here.

If you’re not up on the details, here’s a couple handpicked reads…

Inside the wild life of bitcoin bandits Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein, accused of laundering $4.5B

Wife of couple accused of $4.5 billion Bitcoin swindle gave advice on cybersecurity, social engineering

🚨 Binance Makes a Media Play

Binance invested $200M in Forbes.

The 104 year old finance media company is slated to go public via SPAC later this year, but the crypto exchange wants in early.

It’s a strategic move for Binance, moving traditional media into web3 and giving itself an instant pulpit. The confluence of web2 + web3.

Maybe this is the start of a barrage of acquisitions but take note – news media is a tough biz.

Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao shared,

Media is not the only…traditional industry we will look at. We will look at almost every sector of traditional industries, and we will try to make a few acquisitions, a few investments, and try to bring them into Web3 and the blockchain world.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal with more.

✅ It’s About Status

First Twitter, now OnlyFans will allow users to feature verified NFTs as profile pictures.

The social media platform will only support ethereum NFTs and an ethereum icon will mark proof of authenticity for users that display an NFT profile picture.

OnlyFans CEO Ami Gan shared,

Our mission is to empower creators to own their full potential. This feature is the first step in exploring the role that NFTs can play on our platform.

Who knows, this could be an early signpost in the shift towards verifiable identity independent of centralized documentation like passports or IDs.

Gary Vaynerchuk touched on this topic smartly during a tense talk with CNBC. Check it out.

🍪 Intel Goes In

Intel is positioning itself for web3.

The semiconductor manufacturer announced that its bitcoin miner accelerator will ship in 2022. The company formed a Custom Compute Group to accelerate supercomputing opportunities including blockchain technologies.

Intel SVP, Raja Koduri shared the Company’s big plans,

We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining. You will be able to learn more about our circuit innovations at the International Solid State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) this month.

Here’s a post about it from HotHardware Dot Com which sounds like they actually understand this stuff.

🥕 More Institutions Getting Orange Pilled

The institutions keep coming to crypto and this week was a doozy.

BlackRock (BLK) plans to offer crypto trading services to its clients. We can not overstate the potential significance of this. BLK is the world’s largest asset manager.

South Korea’s $200B sovereign wealth fund wants to increase exposure in alternative assets, AI, and the metaverse.

KPMG Canada bought bitcoin and ethereum.

The State of Idaho introduced a bill to define bitcoin and digital assets as personal property.

And Tesla says it held ~$2B bitcoin as of the end of 2021.

Incredible.