🍂 First days of crypto-autumn

All markets down? Good time to buy!

There are two types of crypto investors: the first one buys BTC & ETH and gets despaired with a first short-term slump because they missed a chance to earn $$. The other one stays calm and leverages the bearish market to buy additional tokens at an affordable price. Stay calm and be the second type of person 😎

What’s buzzin’ in marketing?
Oops, Wintermute did it again! 🤐
Crypto “skeoptimism” in the USA
Unwelcome scrutiny over Ethereum’s PoS
Epic Games to conquer metaverse with Hadean

🛒 What’s buzzin’ in marketing?

TikTok rips off the unique value of BeReal by launching TikTok Now, a feature natively rooted in the French social media app. The unwritten rule says, “if there’s a new social media feature, Instagram will copy it”. It turns out that TikTok is even better at it 😏
Handwritten “thank you” notes after completed purchase increase e-commerce sales by 75%. Read this article to find out why it is crucial to enrich the customer experience with a human particle 🤝
Youtube considers monetizing Shorts - the platform’s TikTok-like short movies. The share for creators will be 45% of ad revenue which is a little less than for the standard format (55%). Still, this news should satisfy Youtube creators 💸
For the US Open activation, Grey Goose set up interactive games and challenges in virtual reality to give visitors a chance to win a variety of prizes. Tennis 🎾, vodka🍸, and metaverse 👾 - who would’ve thought, right?

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1️⃣ Oops, Wintermute did it again! 🤐

One could say, “new day, new crypto company hacked”, which would not be far from the truth. This time Wintermute was the target, a London-based leading liquidity provider across major crypto exchanges and trading platforms.

Only the decentralized part of Wintermute’s business was affected. The hack targeted a known vulnerability in Profanity, an Ethereum vanity address generating tool. So if one’s wallet address was generated with Profanity, one might have been robbed of assets.

Although the company claims to remain solvent, it is not the first time a vast amount of money has gone lost. Back in June, while collaborating with Optimism in preparation for the OP token launch, the market maker made a mistake worth $35M. Luckily for Wintermute, the attacker refunded most of the stolen assets to Optimism in exchange for employment.

This time, the hack could have been due to mistakes exclusive to Wintermute. Therefore, it is questionable if a similar trick would work again.

One thing is clear, though. You should not shrug off Wintermute’s hack because market makers are the backbone of every crypto exchange, ICO, or DApp. Until a detailed post-mortem is published, traders should keep a close eye on the markets.

2️⃣ Crypto “skeoptimism” in the USA

The White House is considering imposing a two-year ban on the creation or issuance of algorithmic stablecoins in the USA. The bill is a response to the long-awaited need to regulate the stablecoin market after the devastating Terra/Luna crash that wiped off over $40 billion within days.

A New York judge requested Tether, the biggest stablecoin issuer, to disclose “undoubtedly important” financial documents, including details about its accounts at crypto exchanges Bitfinex, Bittrex, and Poloniex.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claimed that since validator nodes “are clustered more densely in the United States than in any other country”, the entire network falls under the US government jurisdiction. According to Ethernodes, 44% of all operations happen in the USA, with Germany (12%) and France (4%) “right” behind.

The biggest percentage of #bitcoin miners globally are in the USA right now.
Does this mean that the USA now has jurisdiction over all BTC transactions?
Can Pierre in France be charged with a crime by USA for sending Ibrahim in Iran some $btc?
— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark)
Sep 19, 2022

On the brighter side of things, Colorado residents will be able to pay their taxes with crypto. The option allows them to settle personal income tax, business income tax, severance tax, and withholding tax through PayPal with an additional fee of $1 plus 1.83% of the payment amount.

3️⃣ Unwelcome scrutiny over Ethereum’s PoS

The Merge, one of the hottest topics in recent times, has caused a lot of excitement in the cryptocurrency market. Most recently, the topic gained less positive sentiment, though, because Lido and Coinbase together control the lion’s share of staking.

Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann finds it “pretty disappointing” that out of the last 1,000 blocks, 420 have been built by either Lido or Coinbase. The first one currently controls up to 27.5% of staking, while the latter 14.5%.

Results of the poll launched by Köppelmann indicate that only 25% of users are OK with the current look of things, while the remaining 75% believe the current situation needs to be changed.

And no, dear Bitcoin fans, it is not better in Bitcoin. In fact you need only 4 entities to come to >72% https://t.co/EdGDN3Mr6S
— Martin Köppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann)
Sep 15, 2022

The rumors, claiming that The Merge made the blockchain more centralized, are heard not only by Ethereum supporters. Things have got even worse at Bitcoin, where 72% of mining rewards are captured by only 4 entities.

Some experts stressed that more concerning is the fact that almost 90% of all nodes are running through only one cloud computing provider. Your guess was right - Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Web Services (AWS). It requires locking up 32 ETH (~$41,600) to run your own node, which is not affordable to everyone. Hence, staking through exchanges is becoming more and more popular.

Since The Merge, the price of Ethereum has plummeted from $1,600 to $1,288 (-21%), while Bitcoin has suffered bigger volatility and has gone down by 5.5%.

4️⃣ Epic Games to conquer metaverse with Hadean

We all know what metaverse is, right? A digital world consisting of virtual reality, augmented reality, and the internet. A market worth around $4 trillion in China alone. Metaverse is a great opportunity for the gaming industry to make the gaming experience more immersive.

This week, a new London-based player called Hadean raised $30M to develop their metaverse infrastructure. More importantly, Epic Games, the developer of the online video game Fortnite, was among other investors. The blockchain startup has already signed deals with industry giants such as Minecraft and Sony.

Suppose you recall the latest article on Epic Games’ move. In that case, it becomes more evident that the US-based company lays the foundation for the upcoming (and inevitable) evolution of video gaming. The vice-president of Epic’s 3D creation tool states, “Hadean’s computing power will provide the infrastructure that’s needed as we work to create a scalable metaverse.” Apart from the financial support, Epic Games agreed with Hadean to enhance Fortnite by adding metaverse capabilities to the hit game.

🔥 OTHER RELEVANT NEWS

Cardano improves performance with the upcoming hard fork. Here is everything you need to know about it!
Spotify launched audiobooks in the USA, giving customers access to +300k audiobook titles.
Twitch banned gambling in the USA in the epilogue of the drama triggered by Its Sliker’s live streams. Also, Twitch's president announced upcoming changes to the subscription revenue split shares.
GenZ replaces Google with TikTok as a primary search engine. What’s shocking is that almost 20% of TikTok videos contained misinformation.
Youtube has ended an experiment that involved showing up to 11 unskippable ads in a row on a single video. People called that “ad reel of death”.
Logium a crypto betting platform, recently released a new feature that lets users share their bets with others.
JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, called crypto tokens “decentralized Ponzi schemes”.
Patagonia founder gave away his $3B company partially because he had been put on the Forbes Billionaire list, which “pissed him off”.
Ripple signed the Climate Pledge and joined 375+ businesses that are prioritizing the planet 🌍
Coinbase gained regulatory approval in the Netherlands 🇳🇱
Russia, which invaded the free country of Ukraine in February, allows cross-border settlements in cryptocurrencies.
Polygon is doing really well in bringing web3 adoption to the mainstream level. Among the latest partnerships, there are such companies as Mercedes-Benz, Meta (ex-Facebook), and Disney.

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🏖 FUN FACTS & MEME SECTION

💡 Well, we seem to really need Jim Cramer’s prediction of market slumps. Just remember to do the opposite!

Since April 28th ETH has gone only down, down, down…

On April 28th, @jimcramer said Ethereum would pump 40% to $4100.
ETH is currently $1440, 65% below his price target. https://t.co/T80WKUsIfB
— Chairman (@WSBChairman)
Sep 16, 2022

🥇 Meme of The Week:

me after accepting we're in a bear market:
https://t.co/UzWhRh5EmS
— LilMoonLambo (@LilMoonLambo)
Sep 18, 2022