July 8, 2020 | Issue #125

MUST READS

🐕 Dogecoin Volume Spikes After Viral TikTok Challenge

As if the headline doesn't say enough, there's a trend going around on TikTok – we know, just bare with us – where people are pumping and dumping DOGE coins on Robinhood.

Can't make this stuff up.

TikTok user James Galante began urging followers (viral video here) to buy Dogecoin in late June, claiming they could "all get rich" by pushing its value to $1 per coin. The challenge has since garnered hundreds of thousands of views on the app and began trending on Twitter.

DOGE prices have surged ~94% since last week.

H1 2020: Bitcoin vs. Gold, Silver and Platinum

While the world goes mad and the U.S. economy skates on thin ice, perhaps there's no better time to rethink stores of value.

During the first half of 2020, gold underperformed Bitcoin by nearly 11 percentage points despite gaining 16%. Silver and platinum, on the other hand, both finished the first half of 2020 with negative gains.

Update: Yesterday gold jumped to a nine-year high of $1,801 per ounce. While we can debate gold vs. BTC all day long... We don't see one fundamental reason to be short either right now.

New Type of SEC-Regulated Crypto Fund Just Launched

This week Arca began selling shares in the “Arca U.S. Treasury Fund,” an SEC-registered closed-end fund whose digital shares – ArCoins – are issued and tradable on the Ethereum blockchain.

How it works:

The fund welcomes anyone with $1,000 or more
Each ArCoin represents a single share in the fund, which pays interest each quarter
Arca will produce these interest payments by investing into “interest-bearing, short-duration, U.S. Treasury securities"

Why it matters: SEC-registered crypto investment products are nothing new. Grayscale, for instance, runs one of the largest Bitcoin investment funds around. It regularly checks in with the SEC. The difference here is that Arca is investing its own cryptocurrency, rather than Bitcoin.

According to Forbes, the fund is the first-ever product regulated under the Investment Company Act of 1940 to offer digital securities. While heavily regulated, ArCoins have enabled US Treasury securities to become the latest real-world assets to be ported onto a public blockchain.

Binance Acquires Swipe; SXP Pumps 50%+

Binance doesn't seem to be taking any sort of rest after its recent acquisition of CoinMarketCap. The exchange on Monday announced it has completed an acquisition of Swipe, a London-based provider of Visa crypto debit cards.

As part of the deal, Binance and Swipe will list each other's tokens on their respective platforms, making BNB spendable with fiat through the Swipe Visa debit card.

With Wirecard's recent blowup, this acquisition seems to be perfectly timed.

The World’s No. 1 Timed Stock Expert, Jeff Brown, Is Back Again…

Jeff Brown… who blew the lid off Timed Stocks back in January, has returned with his most urgent message yet.

In short: Thanks to two seemingly unrelated forces, his Timed Stocks are accelerating… in every way possible.

Learn more here.

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DEEP DIVE

Long Take: The Soviet Pyramid Scheme Eating 10% of Ethereum and 50% of Paxos Stablecoin

In the early 90's, a man named Sergei Mavrodi started a Ponzi scheme in the Soviet Union called MMM that caused over a billion dollars in losses. (If this story sounds familiar, you may have seen our coverage of it after a Quartz article in 2018.)

Well, fast forward to 2020, Sergei is dead and MMM is eating 10% of Ethereum transactions and is responsible for over 50% of Paxful transfers.

But MMM is not alone... another pyramid called Forsage is eating up 25% of Ethereum's bandwidth and is the leading DeFi app, beating MMM at its own game.

As the author states, "There is hard work ahead. Instead of yield farming arbitrage, the crypto community must root out these weeds."

Here Are the Fastest Growing DeFi Apps Right Now

DeFi is all the hype these days as thousands of new users jump in on the action.

Don't believe us? Just take a look at the user-base growth metrics (since June 1st):

Balancer: 580%
Curve: 170%
Aave: 62%
Uniswap: 37%

All in all, popular DeFi protocols have collectively grown more than 23% in less than 6 weeks... and total value locked in DeFi just breached the $2 billion milestone this week.

If you're one of these new users, here's some advice.

The #1 Gold Pick for this New Gold Bull Market

You’ve heard the news. Gold prices are pumping, but you shouldn’t rush out and buy ANY gold bars, stocks, or coins.

While the best miners can return hundreds of percent in a gold bull market – most of them are still extremely risky.

Priced around $7 today, there's a gold play that's much, much better.