What's "The Scoop" on Sam?

November 16, 2022

Welcome to another edition of The Scoop. The Scoop is like a non-stop flight to Argentina, which although may not be on a private jet, is a perfectly legal way to stay connected to crypto, even when it seems like the industry is collapsing.

The Big Scoop

This week’s Big Scoop is one you’ve heard before, but a certain Scoop writer is VERY passionate about YOU owning YOUR CRYPTO and YOUR DATA.

As soon as you put CZ, Sam Bankman-Fried, Do Kwon, or any other CEO on a pedestal expecting them to enrich your life, you’re giving them YOUR POWER. That’s true even if they (and people like them) end up serving your best interests.

SBF certainly isn’t doing that right now. In an interview with Reuters over the weekend, the former billionaire wonder boy confirmed that he isn’t in Argentina and is still at home in the Bahamas.

Due to what’s been going on over the past week, several major partners and dropping ties with FTX including Visa, the NBA’s Miami Heat, and virtually every crypto and YouTuber pushing affiliate links that you can possibly name.

More on FTX in a moment…

In other news, the NFT community is pushing back against the growing trend of canceling out, eliminating, or making creator royalties optional.

OpenSea, the granddaddy of all NFT platforms, posted a tweet on Saturday confirming that the marketplace is going to continue to listen to both creators and collectors who believe that royalties should still be paid out.

It will be interesting to see whether other marketplaces will follow suit and whether or not in the long run, innovators will come up with a way to enforce royalties on-chain.

The News

The Fallout from the FTX Collapse Continues

The FTX story has taken a lot of twists and turns since last week.

To catch everyone up, FTX is now bankrupt, Alameda and FTX CEO SBF had a backdoor, providing secret access to billions in FTX customer deposits, and execs from both companies knew.

Samuel and FTX executives are reportedly under police supervision in the Bahamas. They are trying to get to Dubai, as it doesn’t have extradition treaties with the U.S.

Over the weekend, FTX was hacked for all its funds, with users reporting their wallet balances dropping to $0. Also, both the FTX site and apps were hacked.

On Saturday, an anonymous entity moved the remaining supply of locked FTT tokens from the FTX deployer to a random wallet. The 195 million FTT, equating to about $380 million, was scheduled to be unlocked in batches over a few years.

Many naturally suspect SBF to be responsible for both the removal of the remaining supply and the “hack.”

In the interview, Ellison admitted that the trading firm used customer funds from the FTX exchange to repay loans.

Loans were taken out to make venture capital investments and for other expenses. However, lenders recalled the loans to Alameda following LUNA’s downfall in May. After the crash, Ellison stated that Alameda didn’t have the funds to pay for the loans, so they used FTX customer deposits to make the payments.

Bankruptcy filings released stated that there are more than 1 million creditors.

This news has caused another massive crash as many withdraw money from exchanges. Currently, Bitcoin is sitting below the $17,000 mark after touching just above $21,000 only weeks ago.

The story is unlikely to end here, but we will be back next week to ensure you are caught up!

Solana and Coinbase Fall Victim to Power Outages Over The Weekend

The conversation around royalty fees for NFTs continues.

Over the last couple of weeks, many marketplaces have announced that they would no longer require royalty fees. However, many creators have made it clear that they are unhappy with these decisions.

In response to this, OpenSea stated that it will continue enforcing royalties across all collections.

Also, last week, OpenSea announced a new on-chain tool that allows creators to enforce royalties for any new collections on the platform–though they did not mention whether this would apply to existing collections.

The marketplace also said that they would provide a few options for those looking to apply royalty fees, including:

  • Enforcing off-chain fees for some subsets of collections,

  • Allowing optional creator fees,

  • And collaborating with other on-chain enforcement options for creators.

There were some who weren’t as pleased with OpenSea’s choice as they were unsure where the marketplace stood, while some took issue with its “optional creator fee” suggestion.

OpenSea replied to this criticism and made things more transparent when they tweeted last week that the marketplace will “continue to enforce creator fees on all existing collections” as well.

OpenSea said it was “awed by the passion we’ve seen from creators and collectors alike this week. We were looking for your feedback, and we heard it, loud and clear.”

Also, OpenSea has stated that it “will start open-sourcing our data on creator fees in the upcoming weeks for everyone to use.”

With the largest NFT marketplace continuing to enforce royalty fees, will many others follow suit?

Chart.

This week we present to you not one, not two, but three charts related to the ongoing FTX fiasco. If you can understand them both and remember all the moving parts, you’re an actual genius (unlike Sam Bankman-Fried)😆

The first chart is an infographic featuring all of the investments SBF and FTX have made in some of the cryptocurrency’s most notable projects, which is why many industry insiders are worried about the contagion spreading throughout the entire industry (even the greatest quarterback of all time Tom Brady lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of FTX)🏈

Chart two is probably the most complicated chart we will ever feature on The Scoop. It shows you all of the business entities that make up the FTX ecosystem, intricately tied together in the most convoluted way possible.

Chart three is an interesting flowchart that shows just how closely connected the founder of FTX (and his GF) are to some key constituents that might have something to do with everything going on.

Fundraising In Web3.

Two BIG TIME projects in crypto raised an incredible $140 million total this week! Here’s a breakdown of the 💲💸💰🧀:

Education.

Implosions like FTX is the perfect opportunity to learn. That’s why today’s Study Space post is all about exchange tokens.

Why do exchanges use them? Why do traders and investors use them? Are they the reason that crypto projects are imploding? Do they facilitate the use of too much leverage?

It’s time to find out the answers:

Scoop Meme

Why do traders You know we had to stay on the FTX train with the Scoop Meme this week! Choo Choo!🚉

The Final Scoop

We understand that confidence in the broader crypto market is low right now. The industry is taking a step backward and it’s being dragged down by the actions of the very few.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened and it’s probably not the last.

Let’s get stronger together and keep moving forward!

Web3 exists to empower and protect the average person. The recent events surrounding FTX prove exactly why we need to do that now more than ever before.

Remember why we’re all here....?

We’re here to advocate for your sovereignty, your empowerment, and your control.

We don’t believe that bad actors in this industry represent you, and they don’t represent the philosophy behind Web3.

When all of this dust settles, remember that Web3 is built for YOU, and you are a sovereign individual. Your data, your ownership, and your control are things that come first - no matter what. Be your own ship and weather the storm.

We’ll be glad to help you do that.

#Web34ever #Cirus

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Sharing this newsletter is the best way to spread the good word about Web3 during a time when the swamp is being drained out of the industry.

As always, keep your money off of centralized exchanges.

See you next week.