5 Minute Crypto - Bittrex blues; Pixel, mon!; Nike NFT Force 1s; What is metabasu; etc

Howdy all — this is the 5 minute crypto daily update for Tuesday April 18th. Today we’ve got Bittrex, crypto critics, Pixelmon and Nike NFTs, and some great reads and tweets. Let’s gooo
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As of this recording
Bitcoin has fallen slightly to $29400
ETH is flattish, sitting at $2071
In last 24 hours, some big winners include Decentraland’s Mana, Axie Infinity, and Dogecoin!
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What’s going on in crypto land...
Phoenix on why BTC is entering a bull market
https://twitter.com/Phoenix_Ash3s/status/1645654858106634242?s=20
A few takeaways
-bottom was hit in Nov 22 after the FTX fallout
-long term holders are accumulating and aren’t selling
-active addresses are growing again
Pixelmon, if you remember, was the NFT project that raised over $50M, selling out 10K Pixelmon NFTs, to create a Pokemon style universe inside Minecraft
It looks like they’re mounting a comeback now - according to Overpriced JPEGs:
-they hired a new Singapore-based CEO
-there are 70+ people working on the project
-they’re working on 2 games: one is open world, collecting creatures, and the other is stadium combat
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/131730774/the-pixelmon-story-what-20yo-reported-to-have-made-103m-from-nft-game-did-next
Nike Err Force Ones
https://www.theblock.co/post/226760/nike-crypto-digital-sneakers
-starting today, April 18th, Nike’s selling digital sneakers on its own blockchain platform called Swoosh
-the sneakers are different versions of its original Air Force 1s, will cost $19.82, and every Swoosh member - all 330K of them - will have a chance to purchase
Why Bittrex, an OG crypto exchange, decided to end their US presence at the end of this month
-Specific tokens were named in the suit, including Dash and Algorand
-had announced similar charges against crypto exchange Beaxy, which was forced to shut down, and may foreshadow SEC’s plan against Coinbase
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/04/17/crypto-exchange-bittrex-violated-federal-laws-sec-charges-in-lawsuit/
Vocal crypto critics Amy Castor and David Gerard have a valuable newsletter, always good to understand your critics. Some bits
https://amycastor.com/2023/04/16/crypto-collapse-treasury-comes-after-defi-sec-comes-after-crypto-exchanges-stablecoin-bill-ftx-first-interim-report/
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Recommended reads...
Investor Li Jin has a great essay on the importance of psychological ownership in a product
https://variant.fund/articles/building-psychological-attachment-not-just-ownership-into-web3/
To quote
In the digital realm, people put effort into a product in many ways: customizing one’s avatar or profile picture, creating content on a social media platform, giving feedback to the company. For example, on TikTok, users deliberately interact with videos in the hopes of tailoring their feed (e.g. “commenting to stay on this side of TikTok”). When users spend years building up a corpus of content on an app, like tweets and blog posts, their sense of personal ownership increases.
https://andrewsteinwold.substack.com/p/metaverse-what-it-is-how-it-will
The key differences between the internet and the metaverse are...
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That’s it for today! That was 6 minutes long. All the links are in the show notes. You can follow @twodegenspod on Twitter and please subscribe for more daily updates! I’ll try to do ‘em every day except when it’s rainy and I’m feeling extra sad
Outro clip from legendary investor Howard Marks on asset quality and optimism