GM citronauts. Our crypto news cocktail is shaken, stirred, and served with a twist of market mischief.
😎 A CryptoPunk NFT, originally worth around $1.5 million, was bought for $23K.
🍊 News drops: ex-Alameda CEO allegedly dedicated her life to work due to fears of AI, SEC Chair Gary Gensler is accused of hiring people based on their political views, the team behind Friend.tech might've done the good ol' rug pull + more
🍍 Market flavour today
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| Crypto Market Cap $2.12 Trillion 0.2% (24H) | |||
| Name | Price | 24H % | 7D % |
|---|---|---|---|
 Bitcoin BTC |
$57,481.51 | 2.62% | 1.32% |
 Ethereum ETH |
$2,337.69 | 1.81% | -2.21% |
 BNB BNB |
$542.15 | 6.13% | 7.12% |
 Solana SOL |
$134.38 | 3.19% | 0.59% |
| Prices as of 10:05 AM EST. Click here to see live data. |
Crypto sentiment remains uneasy, with the Fear and Greed Index dropping to 31. Yet the market tells a different story - top coins are in the green over the last 24 hours, with BNB leading the pack.
Yesterday saw sell-offs dominating BTC and ETH ETFs, adding to market jitters. However, some analysts remain bullish, projecting Bitcoin to hit $100k by 2025. They argue this trajectory will hold regardless of the US election outcome, as neither candidate is expected to dramatically shift current economic policies.
As usual, keep an eye on those macro trends and policy shifts - they're always stirring the pot in our crypto world 🍯
😎 The name's Brain. Big Brain.
Picture this: you walk into an abandoned art gallery and notice a painting you'd like to buy.
"But how? There’s no one here," you think.
Then, you get an eureka moment: you're still gonna place your bid. Like 1% of the painting's original value, 'cause why not? You stay in the gallery for two weeks. No other potential buyer shows up (well, duh), and no more bids are placed, meaning the painting is yours, right?
You go home, all excited, envisioning how the painting is about to look in your living room.
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Sounds like an insane fantasy, but that's basically what happened to one investor, 0x282, who managed to buy a CryptoPunk NFT for $23K. FYI, this wasn't some random CryptoPunk—this was #2386, one of only 24 ape Punks in the whole 10K-piece collection. Originally, it was worth *pause for dramatic effect* a staggering $1.5 million.
I know. I've got the same question: how TF did they pull that off?
Let's start from the beginning: when it was peak NFT craze, and everybody was getting FOMO for not taking part, it became popular to split ownership of expensive NFTs. #2386 was no exception—its owner decided to fractionalize it into 10K ERC-20 tokens using a platform called Niftex. So, 257 investors held shares in the ape while it was locked in escrow on Ethereum.
But here's the catch—Niftex shut down, making it hard for the investors to sell their shares. Still, the smart contract governing the Punk remained functional.
The main character of the day was one of the shareholders of the Punk, but obviously, they wanted to be the sole king of the jungle. To achieve this status, they decided to use the contract's buyout feature and made an offer of 0.001 ETH per share (10 ETH total) to buy out all other shareholders.
The rules were simple: once the bid is made, everyone has 14 days to outbid it. If no one does, the deal is sealed, and the bidder gets the NFT.
The clock started ticking, and almost no one was aware of the bid. Well, almost. An NFT investor known as Gmoney tried to counter the bid, except he failed due to a miscalculation.
If Gmoney had proposed two ten trillionths of a cent more, he would've blocked the bid. And if my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike.
With nobody successfully countering, 0x282 walked away with an investment that could now bring them a 60x return. As Gmoney himself put it, "GG to the new owner."
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📰 News drops
😰 A former colleague of Caroline Ellison, the convicted ex-CEO of Alameda, spilled some interesting details about her in a letter to the judge. The letter suggests Ellison was motivated by a fear that AI could one day threaten human existence, pushing her to accumulate wealth to combat these potential dangers.
🇬🇧 The UK government is pushing a new bill that will recognize crypto as personal property. It aims to create a separate personal property category specifically for digital assets like Bitcoin and NFTs.
🔍 Republican lawmakers have started investigating SEC Chair Gary Gensler over accusations of political bias in the agency’s hiring decisions. They pointed out that the SEC has been filling top positions with left-leaning individuals.
🇮🇪 Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) is investigating Google to see if its AI model development complies with EU privacy rules. The probe will focus on whether Google followed the GDPR while creating its Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2).
🚀 Coinbase has launched cbBTC, a wrapped Bitcoin token on Ethereum and Base. It’s backed 1:1 with Bitcoin, meaning every cbBTC is supported by an equal amount of Bitcoin held by Coinbase.
🏚️ SocialFi app Friend.tech faces rug pull allegations. Reports claim the team ditched the project after pocketing $52M.
🤖 OpenAI's fundraising might boost its valuation to $150 billion. Big names like Apple and Nvidia are said to be supporting the investment round.
🗣️ Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that he'd only recognize scaling solutions that reach "stage 1" of the Layer-2 decentralization process. "It doesn't matter if I invested or if you're my friend; stage 1 or bust," he said.
⚠️ The CFTC has issued a warning about "pig butchering" crypto scams. In this scheme, scammers use social media to build fake relationships with victims, gain their trust, and trick them into fraudulent crypto investments.
🍌 Juicy memes
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