🐻 3 crypto narratives to follow this month

GM friends. Can you believe it’s already March? Every month always brings us a new series of narratives to mull over. Despite the constant change, however, one global storyline always remains the same: centralization solves everything 🤦‍♀️.

But that depends on which side of the fence you sit on. In this issue, we’re taking you through the top narratives to follow in the month of March.

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In this issue:

📣The big story of the week. Major stories to follow in March.

🚀The good. Amazon is launching an NFT marketplace, Shopify and ThirdWeb partner on a web3 toolkit for e-commerce and Binance US makes progress in Voyager acquisition deal.

🐻The big, bad FUD. Silvergate Bank is officially shutting down, Vitalik dumps his shitcoins and the SEC shuts down BKCoin for a $100 million crypto fraud.

📣The big story of the week

🔥 Major stories to follow in March

February was a month filled with regulatory FUD as the SEC gets more serious about cracking down on crypto. Let’s recap a bit. Last month, the SEC shut down Kraken’s crypto staking services, proposed a new rule about qualified crypto custodians and went after stablecoins, specifically BUSD. They sure had their hands full.

So what can we look forward to in March? Here are some of the hottest stories that you’ll want to keep an eye on this month 👀.

1/ The Bitcoin NFT trend continues

It looks like the hot new thing hasn’t faded yet. When Ordinals launched last month on the Bitcoin network, the maxis freaked out over the NFT project touching their precious digital currency. But lo and behold, Bitcoin NFTs are continuing to gain traction. It’s just a fad though, right?

Last week, Yuga Labs, creator of Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) dropped their first Bitcoin NFT collection, Twelvefold. The collection of 300 generative art pieces was auctioned off for a total of 735.7 BTC (about $16.5 million) 🤯.

We also saw​​ a copycat collection of the popular CryptoPunks NFTs on Ethereum launch on the Bitcoin network. The collection dubbed Bitcoin Punks traded over 1,000 ETH on the first day and quickly climbed to the top as the largest Ordinals project by volume.

And it looks like the trend is continuing with DeGods also jumping onboard the Bitcoin hype train to launch their own collection of DeGod Ordinals 🚀.

As these major NFT projects experiment with Bitcoin NFTs, this will only pave the way for smaller projects to also start following suit.

2/ Knock, knock, who’s there? It’s the FEDs again

Yesterday, Jerome Powell or JPow, spoke before the Senate Banking Committee and dropped some hints on their evil masterplan and what we should expect.

First of all, what is the Senate Banking Committee? It’s basically a semi-annual meeting where regulators and banks come together to talk about the economy and discuss monetary policies. So what were the key takeaways 👇?

Tl;dr the pain continues 😪. We can expect everything to go up 📈 - interest rates, debt and unemployment. What’s not going up is the money in our pockets, the market and our morale 📉.

3/ LSDs are about to pop off

LSD sounds like some kind of drug, doesn’t it? It actually stands for liquid staking derivatives and it has been growing in popularity, particularly within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Let’s explain what this is first. For those who have crypto staked on networks like Ethereum, LSDs are a way to unlock the liquidity of their staked asset so they can generate more yield opportunities, while continuing to earn staking rewards 💸.

This is important because Ethereum’s next big update, Shanghai, is set to go live in April. When this happens, all the ETH locked up for staking will finally be released back to the market.

Right now only 15% of ETH is staked, but people are expecting this number to rise significantly in the coming month, giving LSDs a huge boost 🚀.

Here’s some more LSD alpha for you degens👇.

🚀The good

🔥 This is not a drill - Amazon is launching their own NFT marketplace to over 300 million active customers worldwide! The platform is set to launch on April 24th. Get ready for this next wave of web3 users.

✅ Despite SEC’s objections, Binance US won court approval to acquire over $1 billion of bankrupt Voyager’s assets. Way to stick it to the SEC! Though they’ve been given the green light, there are still plenty of due diligence to do before the sale is final.

🛍️Shopify teams up with ThirdWeb to launch a web3 toolkit for e-commerce. CommerceKit will make it easy to integrate web3 features to online storefronts, like token-gated commerce, NFT collections, crypto loyalty programs.

🐻The big, bad FUD

💣 It’s official, Silvergate Bank is shutting down and entering into voluntary liquidation. What does this mean for the industry? Well, all these major crypto firms will have to find another onshore banking partner, but will it just follow the same fate?

💩 Vitalk takes a dump on the market and sells his free shitcoins for over $700,000. Yes, you heard that right, the free coins that were sent to him for free. What did he swap them for? None other than his baby ETH of course.

🚨 The SEC filed an emergency action against BKcoin for an alleged $100 million fraud scheme. The crypto investment adviser firm apparently spent investor money on luxury holidays, apartments and items.

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