Coins rebounded this week, even though the regulatory news didn’t improve. Gary Gensler’s SEC continues its crypto offensive (is there anything the agency is more associated with in the past few years than crypto enforcement?): it brought new lawsuits this week against Terraform Labs and… former NBA player Paul Pierce. Even so, a different Peirce (different spelling) is speaking out: SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce took to Twitter to voice her opposition to what the SEC is up to. This story will only get louder. Enjoy your weekend!
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The NFT marketplace wars took new twists and turns this week as upstart Blur airdropped its new token to more than 100,000 traders—and forced market leader OpenSea to make changes that pissed off creators.
Blur has seen surging trading volume and active user counts of late, thanks to its zero-fee trades, optional creator royalties, and token reward incentives. After its Tuesday token drop handed out some $400 million in value to traders, Blur told NFT project creators that it would only fully enforce certain royalty fees if they blocked OpenSea from handling trades, forcing them to choose.
On Friday, OpenSea responded by killing its 2.5% marketplace fee and making some royalty fees optional for traders above an 0.5% minimum. Creators are understandably upset at OpenSea for flip-flopping on royalties just months after pledging to enforce them. Only flippers appear to be benefitting from the NFT market’s continued race to the bottom.
Musk apparently owns a Shiba Inu named Floki, which the token was named after, and FLOKI is up nearly 150% this week as a result of the post-tweet bump (DOGE only rose 8% this week). Meme coins are famously volatile, so don’t be surprised if the fall is nearly as quick as the rise. Even after the pump, FLOKI is still down 85% from its all-time peak in 2021.
Polygon Labs President Ryan Wyatt, the former YouTube Gaming CEO, helped turn Polygon into one of the crypto industry’s rare winners in 2022. He tells Dan Roberts and Andrew Hayward why the promise of digital ownership pushed him from the gaming world into crypto, and how Polygon has pulled giants like Starbucks, Reddit, and Instagram into Web3.
