Aloha, how’s it going? This is Taylor, CEO of Hedgehog, the snazziest crypto portfolio manager and soon-to-be robo-adviser on the block 👉😎👉
My dad jokes and action movie references are locked, loaded, and ready to go this week. If I repeat myself, consider it a catchphrase. If you haven’t read this newsletter before, yippee-ki-yay & welcome to the party, pal.
Regular readers already know: every week I give away a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet — just answer the question at the end of the email! I get amazing responses, such as your groovy tune recommendations. None of which quite lived up to "Blinding Lights" by the Weekend or the Armageddon soundtrack by Trent Reznor… but I didn’t tell you that I’d be judging by such a high bar. Oops.
I keep saying this, but every week is a wild week in crypto, and yet somehow this was still an especially wild week? This is the world’s most entertaining industry, as long as someone else is currently losing money.
Bitfinex hackers who controlled $3.6 billion in bitcoin have been apprehended and uncovered… and they’re pretty zany folks! Here is just one incredible paragraph:
Her song “GILFALICIOUS” is about a “gilf,” which one assumes is an acronym for “grandma I’d like to have coffee with” or thereabouts. “I made the song, GILFALICIOUS, as a humorous attack on #ageism against women & #sexism in general. If I make it to 90, this is EXACTLY how I want to be…” she said on Instagram. Unfortunately for her, there is a chance she may reach that age on the wrong side of prison bars.
I think that I speak for all of us when I say: Gee whilikers! 🤷♀️
Tldr: Gilfalicious musician hacks Bitfinex between gigs, steals $3.6 billion dollars. "Even your grandma can use our product!" — Bitfinex, probably.
Meanwhile: “Jump Crypto Replaces Over $320M of Wormhole Wrapped ETH in DeFi Bailout” — interesting precedent! To catch you up real quick, the $320 million of “a version of wrapped Ethereum on Solana” was snagged by a hacker. It sounds like Jump Crypto is treating the restitution payment as continued investment in the multichain bridge, which the firm uses as interoperable trading infrastructure. One suspects an audit or two might be in the near future of that codebase!
Tldr: Next week on crypto, Van Halen releases "Jump! Crypto!" while hacking the DOJ in between gigs.
Investment (including but not limited to speculation) has risen as the current dominant use-case for cryptocurrency. Other aspects of the tech and its industry are still developing, such as NFT-based games, or user-owned social graphs…
The Lens Protocol is a Web3, smart contracts-based social graph on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain designed to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, user-owned social graph. The protocol is built from the ground up with modularity in mind, allowing new features to be added while ensuring immutable user-owned content and social relationships.
That’s a neat launch so I wanted to be sure to mention it.
Tldr: Feel the Rhythm! Feel the Rhyme! Get on up, it's Blockchain Time!
As I was saying, people mainly use crypto to invest and gamble, which is all well and good. However, bitcoin was originally meant to be a payments system. It can often feel like the crypto community forgot that storing value is awesome but not the only purpose of money. Tools like stablecoins are suited to being a medium of exchange… but how helpful is that when your contractors ask to be paid in ETH?!
This is a real problem faced by almost none of us, but the people already living their financial lives in the DeFi / web3 ecosystem are arguably doing R&D for everybody else. Builders especially should pay attention to their frustrations.
Sonya Mann
Hedgehog correspondent Ryan Gladwin interviewed crypto YouTuber and TikTokker Taylor Mitchell about the issues she has encountered with payments while participating in the crypto economy.
Tldr: It’s a bummer to be disappointed instead of pleased when the asset price goes up.
Two more links before I let you go:
- “Leveraged and alternative ETFs: Investing with higher risk tolerance and significantly greater potential upsides”
- “a lot of people seem to miss that the entire point of NFTs is to make content FREE while making ownership scarce”
Giveaway question of the week: Will you watch the crypto ads at the Super Bowl this Sunday? Any cool game-day plans? Reply to this email with your answer to be entered to win a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet.
I'm Batman,
— T
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