🐻 Is Twitter the next big fintech company?

GM hodlers. We made it. Bitcoin finally broke $30,000 after holding comfortably to the $28,000 spot for the past few weeks. It’s not quite $1 million, but we’ll take what we can get for now. Meanwhile, the March CPI numbers came in lower than expected at 5%, which is what gave the market a nice mini pump.

A round of applause to the Biden administration for fighting inflation! Great job team! So when’s the recession hitting?

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In this issue:

📣The big story of the week. Crypto trading is coming to Twitter. Elon is taking another step towards building an “everything app”.

🚀Bullish news. Reddit launches 1,000+ more NFTs from 100+ artists and LimeWire releases a nostalgic music downloading game with crypto rewards.

🐻Big, bad FUD. FTX 2.0 may be coming and two ex-tradfi bankers are charged for crypto fraud.

📣The big story of the week

Crypto trading is coming to Twitter

It’s our time to shine crypto gang! Major changes are coming to Twitter that are both good and bad.

Let’s start with the good.

Just announced, Twitter is partnering up with eToro to expand their $cashtag feature and allow users to trade stocks, crypto and other financial assets.

You’ll now be able to view more real-time prices and information by using the “cashtag” symbol (i.e. $BTC) in Twitter and have a link to directly purchase the asset on eToro.

So imagine if Elon tweeted something about dogecoin. You can seamlessly go from the tweet, to the cashtag $DOGE and purchase the coin on eToro.

As you know, a lot of crypto folks live on Twitter, so this new enhanced feature would give us much easier access to purchase our favorite coins right when we get the “signal”.

So what’s the bad? Well, earlier this week, it was revealed that Twitter submitted legal documents to merge into Elon’s shell firm, X Corp. This means that technically, Twitter no longer exists as an independent company. Twitter is now X.

This is important because back in October when Elon purchased Twitter, he alluded to his master plan of building an “everything app”. More specifically, he wants to build the WeChat of the Western world.

WeChat is the biggest social media app in the world with over 1.3 billion users, mostly in China. It’s a super app where you can quite literally do everything you need on it, including messaging, shopping and banking. Rather than having to download and log into several different apps, you can do everything on this one super app platform.

It sounds great and convenient, but in reality, it’s a major threat to our privacy and surveillance. In China, it’s already publicly known that the government monitors and censors all user activity on the app. For instance, in the past year of COVID, the Chinese government was using the WeChat health passports to track their people. If you were unvaccinated or tested positive for COVID, you would instantly lose access to other daily services you rely on within the app, like transportation or banking.

Elon’s move to merge Twitter to X and expand its finance features with eToro is just another step towards building a super app. We’re not sure if he’ll succeed, but the possibility of Elon running a WeChat equivalent in the US is not a future we’d like to see. What we need is decentralization, not a mega-centralized corporation.

🚀Bullish news

🙌 Reddit launches 1000+ NFTs from 100+ artists for their Gen 3 collection. This popular forum has been killing the NFT game! The launch of Gen 3 was so popular that it apparently crashed their avatar shop site. According to on-chain data, 7.4 million unique users hold a Reddit avatar.

🎵 LimeWire launches a nostalgic music downloading game with crypto rewards. Ahh, remember the good old days of downloading music and viruses on LimeWire? Well the OG early 2000s platform just released a limited-time game that will reward the top 1,000 players with a total of 150,00 LMWR tokens. You have until May 15 to play.

🐻Big, bad FUD

🤦‍♂️ Failed exchanged FTX may possibly be revived. The situation has apparently stabilized and they have recovered $7.3 billion in liquid cash and crypto. As they plan for its future forward, restarting the exchange may be in the books. Whose going to use it?

🚨 Two tradfi bankers face up to 20 years in prison for crypto fraud. Ex-JP Morgan and Deutsche bank employees are charged for allegedly scamming a number of investors into believing that they would generate huge profits from altcoin investments. The bankers would take the money and gamble it to make a risky profit. Sounds familiar…