February 27: Crypto Summary
Top level employee leaves Goldman Sachs to join Coinbase. Nelson Mandela artwork selling as NFT.
gm to everyone staking their coins to earn more yield.
Here is Bitcoin in its natural habitat
Markets
Here are today’s market moves:
Here's what you need to know:
From Goldman Sachs to Coinbase
After serving Goldman Sachs for 16 years, Roger Bartlett is leaving the global investment bank to join crypto exchange Coinbase.
“It’s time to embrace the crypto economy,” he said, adding that the change is a “once in a lifetime opportunity to be part of building the next stage of the digital evolution.”
At Goldman Sachs, he was a managing director and global co-head of operations Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he was vice president at Credit Suisse for six years.
Nelson Mandela's paintings from prison to be sold as NFTs
The Guardian reported that five water-colour paintings created by former South African president Nelson Mandela while he was in prison will be sold as NFTs next month, as well as a handwritten description of why he created the artwork.
Here’s some of them
Makaziwe Mandela, his daughter is leading the project, and she says that "My dad was all about creating an accessible society. This is a way of democratising his art."
She does not explain why there is a need to sell them as NFTs in order to accomplish this, or why this makes them more accessible than them already being available to view online.
She also doesn't explain how pricing them at $3,500 for a set including one of each, or $700 apiece, can be considered "accessible".
But NFTs are trending, right?? Right?
“50% of transactions were fraudulent”, says Gabe Newell
“The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers,” Newell, co-founder of Steam, said.
“We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn't want to have."
Steam wasn't on the Bitcoin train for long. Bitcoin was introduced as a payment method on Steam in April 2016 and removed in December 2017 due to the volatility of Bitcoin's price and "a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network," Valve wrote at the time.
I don't doubt it at all, especially when in 2016 it was far less mainstream than it is now. With few regular people using crypto the chances of a payment being fraudulent or from a fraudulent source was far more likely due to crypto's very nature. It was and still is a popular way for organised crime and scammers/fraudsters to move funds but so is regular fiat.
Check this out
Chris Dixon, lead crypto investor at investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, makes the argument that Web3 is inevitable. He has such high conviction that he is betting his career on it.
In a chat with D3 Networks, Chris makes the argument that Web3 will get built - and that’s he’s 100% certain.
Web3 is inevitable and hope people realise it sooner.
Did you hear?
UkraineDAO has been created by artists so that you can show your support to Ukraine.
Buy a Ukrainian flag NFT and the proceeds go to civilian efforts helping Ukrainians suffering from the war. The link is legit and was tweeted by Vitalik himself.
Crypto lingo of the day
Fork / Hard fork and Soft fork:
Fork is when a cryptocurrency platform's existing code is changed. A hard fork is when nodes of the newest version of a blockchain no longer accept the older version of the blockchain. With a soft fork, only one blockchain will remain valid as users adopt the update. Think of it as an upgrade of network.
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