🐻 The Barbenheimer of Crypto

GM builders 🙈. I know, I know, it’s been a while since you’ve heard from us. We’ve been going through some changes, but nonetheless, we’re still here and more bullish than ever on the future of Web3.

A lot has happened in the past month that has made me believe that significant changes in the world are coming. Our economy is experiencing a prolonged bear market, but our freedom and rights are also slipping right under our noses. This makes it more important than ever for builders to keep building, creators to keep creating and visionaries to keep inspiring.

Last time we polled, 75% of you guys said you were still building in the bear market. Let’s do another quick pulse check before we dive into this issue.

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The TL;DR

📣The big story. X, Worldcoin and Fednow - are we getting Barbenheimered?
🐻Other news to bear in mind. The SEC could appeal the Ripple ruling, the Republicans push for regulatory clarity on crypto and Putin signs a bill to issue a central bank digital ruble.

📣The big story
X, Worldcoin and Fednow - Are We Getting Barbenheimered?

In the past week, two major events broke crypto Twitter, or shall I say crypto X? Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the two hottest CEOs of the moment went head-to-head to launch their latest initiatives on the same day.

If this were another Barbenheimer situation, would it be called WorldcoinX? Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe not. We’ll save the conspiracy theories, but one thing is true…both projects have a similar vision to create a global financial network.

Let’s talk about Musk’s launch of X first. As most of you have picked up on, the rebrand of Twitter is more than just a shabby job at a logo change. The switch to X marks another significant step towards Musk’s vision of building an everything app. One where you can chat, bank, shop, game, you name it. The possibilities of X are endless.

His vision for X isn’t new though. In fact, Musk often refers to Asia's WeChat as his inspiration for X. This is important because WeChat Pay is the second biggest payment platform in China with over 900 million active users. And it’s pretty clear that this is what Musk is aiming to do in the Western side of the world.

This makes many crypto folks bullish. Not only is Musk the King of shilling Dogecoin, but several hints point toward crypto being incorporated into this super social-banking app:

• Twitter obtained a Money Transmitter License in several states

• Musk added the $doge symbol to his X profile

• Leaked text messages showed Musk’s idea of reducing spam by requiring a tiny amount of crypto to make posts

If Musk follows through with building a blockchain-based social app, this would be a huge opportunity for mass crypto adoption. BUT until then, X is still a centralized app. What if X lands in the wrong hands? What if the government intervenes? What if Musk falls to the elitist pressure?

Then, there’s Worldcoin 👁️ 

Speaking of centralized control, Musk isn’t the only CEO branching out of his usual domain expertise to gain more market share. Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT and DALL-E is also giving a shot at building a global financial system.

While everyone was freaking out about how AI could replace their jobs, Altman was busy building another financial AI company, one that may be even more disruptive and intrusive than ChatGPT.

For the past 3 years, Altman has been working on Worldcoin and raised $115 million in funding. The project’s big altruistic vision is to provide every individual on the planet with a universal basic income (UBI) to cover basic needs and provide the opportunity for freedom.

On the day of Musk’s X launch, Worldcoin’s native token for equitable distribution, $WLD, also launched and became publicly listed on several crypto exchanges.

Free money sounds nice. But there’s a catch, there’s always a catch. To get your hands on some $WLD, you first have to download their World App Wallet (available on the iOS and Android store). You then have to obtain a World ID by locating one of their biometric scanning machines in person called the Orb.

The device will scan your iris and generate your unique identifier before issuing $WLD to your digital wallet.

They call this identification process “proof-of-personhood”. It’s meant to be:

• More secure (can’t just steal or hack someone’s eyeballs)

• More private (no KYC required, but your eyeballs will do 🤷‍♀️)

• Less prone to fraud and inequality (harder to manipulate the system)

There are already 150 orbs available in 35 cities around the world and 1.7 million people signed up to get their eyeballs scanned. Most are from developing countries.

So what’s the deal? Is Worldcoin the solution to create a fair and equitable society or is it a scheme to obtain biometric data and control developing nations?

Folks like Jack Dorsey, Edward Snowden and Vitalk have already made their lack of support clear citing their concerns over privacy and surveillance. Even MIT wrote a hit piece on its exploitation.

The good news is, Worldcoin isn’t available in the US yet. BUT, something else even bigger is.

A few weeks ago the Federal Reserve announced the official launch of Fednow. Here is a description found on their official website.

Real-time payments isn’t new. In fact, it’s convenient and makes sense. Countries like India, China and South Korea have already been leading the way for instant payments - the US is just finally catching up.

Today, FedNow is live in 35 early adopter banks. However, speculators are saying that this federally owned payment system is actually the early infrastructure to usher in the central digital banking currency (CBDC).

Eventually, when all banks have FedNow implemented, launching a national digital currency will be so easy for the government. If and when this happens, you can say goodbye to privacy and hello to transaction surveillance and account blocking 👋.

But it’s all just a coincidence, right? 😕 

Sure, let’s just say that the coinciding launches of X, Worldcoin and FedNow were just coincidental. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that there is clearly a widespread desire to create a singular, global financial system. All of these may be individual projects, but they can easily come together at any point to become a centralized powerhouse.

Worldcoin could start to issue CBDC and partner with X to block your access to the everything app. Maybe your social credit is low or you said something unfavorable about Musk, Altman or the political party in control. The reason doesn’t matter, it’s the fact that they can and they will.

Let’s also not forget that the US dollar is losing its dominance to the BRICs and the national US debt hit a historical high of $32 trillion. There’s no better time than now to push major institutional changes and new intrusive policies.

So what can we do about it? We can sit still and hope for the best that folks like Musk or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can carry us through…or we can take this time to build and prepare ourselves for any potential war. Stack up on hard assets like precious metals and Bitcoin. Buy land. Build or join a community of other like-minded folks.

Change is coming. Time to start building anon!

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🐻 Other news to bear in mind

🙅 The SEC could appeal the Ripple ruling. After the Judge rules the XRP token as “not necessarily a security on its face", except for institutions, new documents filed show that the SEC may appeal the ruling.

📜 The House of Republicans push to bring clarity to crypto regulation. A new bill has been unveiled to provide guidance on how crypto firms should register with the SEC and CTFC. If the bill passes in the House, it will then need Democrat support in the Senate to move forward.

✍️ Putin signs a digital ruble bill into law. Amidst the heavy Western sanctions against Russia, Putin has now approved the issuance of CBDC at their central bank. In the near future, they could be looking to integrate into other CBDC systems and enable cross-border settlements in digital ruble.