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HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS |
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| "Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service."
- Henry Ford |
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| New Workshop! How to Earn Interest on ETH. Learn about the upcoming upgrade to Ethereum (a.k.a. "The Merge"), and how to stake your ETH to earn money, using services like Lido and Rocket Pool.
This is a members-only event: mark your calendar for this Wed May 4 at 6:30 pm EST, and click here to RSVP.
Not a member yet? Click here to become a Blockchain Believer and get access to this workshop -- and our on-demand library of past workshops! |
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| The best crypto credit cards, suggested by users(Reddit): What started as a complaint about Crypto.com slashing rewards on its crypto credit card turned into something useful: Reddit users suggesting their favorite alternatives.
The Coinbase Debit Card was the top pick, offering 4% crypto rewards on every purchase.
Honorable mention was the FTX Card, which lets you spend crypto with no fees (unfortunately, not available in U.S.).
Investor Takeaway: For those serious about crypto investing, the Coinbase Card can let you earn with every purchase. Just be sure to pay off your balance in full, every month. |
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To date, most of the crypto card integrations have been through Visa (NYSE:V), whose stock price has doubled over the last five years: |
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| Courtesy Google Finance
Visa licenses its card technology, allowing crypto-native companies to co-brand the card and add their own crypto back end, as long as they abide by Visa's "core rules."
Investor takeaway: Because Visa is so crypto-friendly, another way to get indirect exposure to the crypto market -- with the security of a global payments leader -- is to simply buy VISA stock.
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| Hi Everyone,
It isn't the first time that a popular animal-related project crashed the Ethereum network and it probably won't be the last, but the specifics of Yuga Lab's launch yesterday have some blockchain pundits yelling, "you did that on purpose!"
Just to put things into perspective, here's a graph of Ethereum's average transaction fees over the last three years.
As you can see, yesterday's spike caused the average fee to reach nearly three times the previous all-time high of $69, which happened during the institutional adoption wave last year. |
| In total, the geniuses that brought us the Bored Ape Yacht Club and recently purchased the rights to CryptoPunks raised about $320 million for 55,000 parcels of land in their future metaverse Otherside. Not bad for a bear market.
The ape enthusiasts who purchased the under-construction virtual land paid a total of $123 million in transaction costs alone. |
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Was it intentional?
As far as evidence is concerned, absent some sort of smoking gun interoffice memo, it will be quite impossible to prove intent.
What we can say, however, is that Yuga Labs didn't try very hard not to crash Ethereum. As reported by Bloomberg, the initial plan was to sell the Otherdeeds using a Dutch Auction format, which would likely have reduced the congestion on the network.
In the end, Yuga opted for a different plan to limit the number of NFTs to two per wallet, meaning that anyone who wanted more than two needed to make more than one transaction.
In addition, to those who code, it's fairly apparent that the developers weren't really trying to avoid high gas fees. In this tweet thread the co-founder of Syndicate DAO, Will Papper, outlines no less than three measures that could have been taken to optimize gas but weren't.
If we really want to get into the motives, however, we don't need to look any further than the words posted by the Yuga Labs Twitter account. The tweet below kind of says it all, as the account's attempt at an apology to the Ethereum community came with a promulgation of Yuga Labs' intention to leave it. |
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Bottom line
Unlike the CryptoKitties phenomenon that lasted months, ape land NFT sales are over for now and won't be coming back.
Usage of the Ethereum network is a paid-for privilege and not some innate human right. When a user initiates a transaction, they're confronted with a pop-up that estimates the transaction fee to be paid.
I myself have more than once avoided making a transaction due to high gas costs, sometimes to come back when the network was less busy.
Case in point, the number of addresses sending Ether fell sharply yesterday. No doubt fewer people were using the network due to the outrageous fees. The system works.
Well, at least it works better than Solana, which didn't slow down or get more expensive but actually shut off yesterday for the seventh time this year.
The downtime, which lasted seven hours, was caused by bots swarming the network. With four million transaction requests per second, perhaps larger fees to prevent a shut-down might not have been a bad idea. Until next time, have a wonderful week ahead! |
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| Mati Greenspan Analysis, Advisory, Money Management |
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It's great to see one more nation providing clarity on the regulations surrounding digital currencies! The regulatory landscape for these innovative assets is growing clearer by the day. |
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We're here to help, not hype. |
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| Bitcoin Market Journal is a daily newsletter that makes you a better crypto investor. It is created by Evamarie Augustine, Charles Bovaird, Mati Greenspan, John Hargrave, and Alexandre Lores.
Paid subscribers get full access to our top crypto picks; both free and paid subscribers get content to build you into a better investor.
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