💎 The Red Carpet Goes Crypto

May 6, 2022

|In Weekend Recap

|By Osprey Team

The luxury market has its eyes on crypto.

Last week, Gunna sported a diamond encrusted hardware wallet necklace at the Met Gala.

Gucci Stores in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, and Las Vegas will now accept bitcoin, dogecoin, ethereum, and a plethora of other cryptos.

Gucci president and CEO, Marco Bizzarri shares,

Now that we are able to integrate cryptocurrencies within our payment system, it is a natural evolution for those customers who would like to have this option available to them.

Here’s Vogue with more.

The luxury fitness club, Equinox, announced that its New York City locations will also accept crypto payments.

Here’s a sweet shot of the deck at its Hudson Yards location.

🙌 Bitcoin’s Hash Rate Sets A New All-Time High

This week, bitcoin ticked its lowest price since February 24, but its hash rate reached an all-time high.

The hash rate refers to the computing power required to process blockchain transactions.

More specifically, hash rate measures mathematical calculations per second and reflects the health of the network.

Quite the divergence.

For more on the hash rate read our previous post here, What Is The Hash Rate?

And here’s the 1-year chart via Blockchain.com

🐦 Binance Joins Musk’s Bid for Twitter

Early Thursday, an amended 13D was filed with the SEC that contained a list of committed equity investors as part of Elon Musk’s accepted bid for Twitter. Names on the list include a16z, Fidelity Management, Sequoia Capital, and Binance among others.

Binance will pony up $500M, which strikes us as a potentially savvy move.

Despite its position as the premier one-to-many real-time social communications platform,Twitter has been chronically underdeveloped on the product side.

As an investor, Binance may be thinking that product development could ramp up fast post acquisition and that it might be first in line to integrate its crypto exchange (and other) services directly onto the platform.

This could include trading cashtagged tickers, payments, ecommerce… who knows? We’re just spitballin’.

Here’s the Block with more.

⛓ Polkadot Parachains

On Wednesday, Polkadot released a cross-chain messaging system dubbed, XCM.

XCM allows all Polkadot blockchains to easily communicate with each other.

Dan Reecer, Chief Growth Officer at Acala Network, a defi protocol built on Polkadot, writes,

Cross-chain functionality is now live on Polkadot! Parachains will now begin setting up connections (called HRMP channels) with each other to allow transfers of assets and messages across chains.

And here’s a blog post by Polkadot founder, Gavin Wood, breaking down XCM.

👉 Dive Into Polkadot

Speaking of Polkadot…. Join us next Wednesday, May 11th at 1:30PM ET as Osprey Funds Chief Investment Officer, Bill Birmingham, discusses this breakthrough technology and our recent research work on it.

🏦 PTJ on The Fed

Paul Tudor Jones joined CNBC this week as the Fed raised rates 0.50%.

He shared,

Clearly you don’t want to own bonds and stocks.

And…

It’s hard to not want to be long on crypto because of the intellectual capital that’s going into that space.

Watch the 6-minute clip here and here’s a clip of Tudor talking inflation last June.

🌴 California’s Crypto Executive Order

On Wednesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a Blockchain Executive Order to “Spur Responsible Web3 Innovation, Grow Jobs, and Protect Consumers.”

The Executive Order lays out 7 priorities:

Create a transparent and consistent business environment for companies operating in blockchain
Collect feedback from a broad range of stakeholders, create a regulatory approach
Collect feedback from a broad range of stakeholders for potential blockchain applications and ventures
Engage in a public process and exercise statutory authority to develop a comprehensive regulatory approach
Engage in and encourage regulatory clarity
Explore opportunities to deploy blockchain technologies to address public-serving and emerging needs
Identify opportunities to create a research and workforce environment

Read the official EO here and here’s CNBC with more color.