gm! It’s Saturday and all the coins are very much in the green—but for how long? And is this rally “here for the right reasons,” as they say on The Bachelor? Crypto started rallying last Sunday after the Feds announced they’d protect all depositors in failed Signature and Silicon Valley Bank. What happened to crypto being a safe haven from the goings-on in the rest of the economy? Meanwhile, in the metaverse, our intrepid Sander Lutz attended a St. Patrick’s Day party at a virtual pub so that you don’t have to. Scroll down, read, and enjoy.
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Meta is pulling the plug on NFTs after less than one year. Meta said on Monday that it’s “winding down” its NFT efforts, which included the ability to display owned artwork and collectibles on Instagram and Facebook, and minting NFTs via Instagram.
It may have been a victim of cost cutting, as Meta then announced a layoff of 10,000 more employees on Tuesday, along with plans to trim “lower-priority projects.” Meta says it’s still building towards the metaverse, but described it as a longer-term ambition while artificial intelligence has taken shorter-term prominence in its plans.
💰 Coin of the Moment
There are coins that popped harder over the past week, but everybody’s watching Bitcoin’s surge. The leading cryptocurrency rose 36% over the past week to a current price of nearly $27,500, per CoinGecko, and set a nine-month high above $27,800 on Friday.
Just a week ago, Bitcoin dipped below the $20,000 mark following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. But after the U.S. government said it would fully protect depositors, investors apparently breathed a collective sigh of relief and plunged funds back into crypto. Ethereum, meanwhile, has surged 27% over the past week.
Paul Grewal is the Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase and a former U.S. magistrate judge in Northern California. He gave Dan Roberts and Stacy Elliott his candid takes on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, the SEC’s crackdown on staking, the sanctioning of Tornado Cash, and more alpha on how Coinbase is approaching the current unfriendly US regulatory environment.
Voltz Labs Co-founder and CEO Simon Jones talks to Decrypt’s Jason Nelson at ETH Denver about using DeFi for interest rate swaps, the unfriendly regulatory environment in the US right now, emerging economies becoming crypto hubs, and the “cartoonishly large” market opportunity for DeFi.
