Coinbase Cloud Prints Cash

Coinbase’s (COIN) early commitment to provide staking as a service looks like it’s paid off tremendously...

Last Thursday, Coinbase stated that it holds over $30B in staked crypto assets across its 25 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) token offerings. The announcement comes nearly a year after Coinbase acquired staking infrastructure firm Bison Trails for $80M.

What's Staking, Again?
Staking is a way of earning passive income by locking up PoS coins. Rewards are provided because these coins are effectively used as collateral by validators or nodes when validating a block of transactions.

How Does Coinbase Make Money From This?
Coinbase takes a 25% commission on staking rewards. Prior to acquisition, Bison Trails was earning only 8%. Just goes to show how much pricing power Coinbase has in the market currently.

Using Ethereum 2.0 staking at 5% APR as an example, Coinbase could be passively earning around $375M per year in staking commission.

IPO Bound? Former Lyft CFO Joins OpenSea

This week, the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, announced the hiring of Brian Roberts as its CFO. Brian was previously the CFO of Lyft and helped them go public. And according to Bloomberg, Brian is already considering an OpenSea IPO, saying that with the NFT platform’s growth, “you’d be foolish not to think about it going public.”

Just like the public outcry when Coinbase (COIN) chose a traditional IPO route, users are already upset that OpenSea might not choose a crypto-native way to give the community ownership and governance like how SuperRare and Rarible did.

Color us as... not surprised. Despite the recent rebuttals from Brian himself, the company raised hundreds of millions of dollars through traditional vehicles up until this point... why would that change now?

The Tides Have Turned

Introducing eGirl Capital, a VC firm run by 12 anonymous cartoon characters and two "doxxed" individuals, that has so far invested up to $10M in crypto projects.

The fact that people are trusting faceless, completely anonymous fund managers just goes to show how far we have come. Will there be others just like it? Probably. Will some become scams? You betcha. Are these unusually structured VCs actually successful? Well, it's too early to tell.

For example, most of eGirl’s investments are still in their early stages, but they continue to invest in projects supported by other legendary investors. Simply put, people are taking eGirl Capital seriously.

And it's not only fund managers as people every day are buying tokens, NFTs, and other projects from anonymous teams.

Crypto and the emergence of Web 3.0 continues to slowly change the zeitgeist, forcing people to look past the individuals and focus on what they have to offer.

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DEEP DIVES

Incoming EOY Reports

As we approach the end of the year, it's time to reflect. Research teams across the industry have already started to compile all their core data, insights, and best-of posts to help consumers get a better grip on all the chaos. More often than not, the end result is a few monster Deep Dives for us to share at CoinSnacks.

Here's the first batch of reports, with many more to come:

Messari's Crypto Theses For 2022: Key trends, people, companies, and projects to watch across the crypto landscape, with predictions for 2022. If you have to choose one, make it this one
The Chainalysis 2021 NFT Market Report: Why NFT investors fare best when they’re either really early or really patient
Coin Metrics' Comparing Returns Across the Major ERC-20 Tokens: Daily returns in 2021 for ETH and a selection of major ERC-20 tokens broken out by category

MetaMask: The Hero Crypto Deserves

Three years ago, there were 31 million crypto wallet users; today, there are close to 80 million. And Metamask alone has 20 million, generating more than $200M in revenue.

In Mario's latest piece at The Generalist, he analyzes the company's place and importance in the crypto landscape, its obvious flaws, next moves, and potential future competitors.

Related: Podcast Conversation: Origins of Metamask's 20 million Web3 users, with co-founder Dan Finlay.

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REGULATORY FRONT

Crypto Executives Testify Before Lawmakers Mulling Greater Regulation of Market Today

The House Financial Services Committee, led by Rep. Maxine Waters has called a hearing in hopes of improving lawmakers’ understanding of crypto assets and how the sector fits into existing regulations.

Today, the CEOs of Circle, Coinbase, FTX, Bitfury, Stellar, and Paxos testified. You can read the company's prepared remarks here... watch the recording of the event here... and read a deep dive into the key members to watch here. We also had some pretty laughable moments such as this one.

Today, the government heard six sophisticated, serious executives discuss the industry's maturity. This is impossible to dismiss.

The Free Ross Movement Is Taking A Leaf Out Of ConstitutionDAO’s Book

Last month, more than $47M was pledged in order to buy an early, rare copy of the U.S. Constitution. And if it wasn’t for Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, the plan — which was brought together and executed in only a week — likely would have worked.

Now, the same strategy is being applied to raise funds to help free the imprisoned founder behind the Silk Road marketplace, a place where users could buy drugs online and one of the first major use-cases of cryptocurrencies. In 2015 Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to a double life sentence plus forty years, without any chance of parole.

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