Hello world.
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher enjoyed the spotlight not only for not bathing their kids but also for making 8 Million dollars in crypto by selling stoner cats NFTs.
Ethereum’s London Hard Fork is Coming to make transactions efficient. The much-anticipated upgrade crucial for the future of Ethereum is not making everyone happy.
12-year-old makes over 160,000 dollars overnight selling weird whale NFTs. In the latest addition to the NFT craze, 3350 pixel-art of whales’ trade volume exceeded 1 million dollars in crypto.
Binance Faces Intense Regulatory Scrutiny, prompting its CEO CZ to look for his replacement.
That’s in this episode of Bees of Bitcoin where we explore all things crypto.
Stoner Cats
The Internet loves cats. 4 years ago, Cryptokitties combined Crypto and Cats enabling users to breed digital cats. Now the latest Stoner cats infuse Crypto, Cats, and Cannabis.
You’ve gotta be kitten me!
Cryptokitties is known for choking the ethereum network, thus resulted in high gas fees. And Ethereum’s developers are dying to scale its network.
But before that, why does it have to be only Elon Musk capturing all of the crypto world’s attention? Why not Vitalik Buterin?
Of course, he’s not gotta smoke weed on a live podcast, but he can feature as a stoner cat. The JOINT effort from industry-leading crypto experts to top celebrities to creative animators is dope.
By the way, did you know that the first thing ever sold on the internet was weed? The Stanford students in 1971 used ARPANET to arrange a meeting place and did the exchange.
Back to the story, apart from Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, the animated short series also features Chris Rock, Seth MacFarlane, and Jane Fonda.
It’s a story of Ms.Stoner, a pot-loving granny who lives with her cats. Each episode is 5 to 7 minutes long and the total content length is around 45 minutes. 8 million dollars for barely an hour of content. Not bad.
The animated Series Can Only Be Watched by NFT Holders. The ones who bought at least one of the 10,420 stoner cats. All you do is, use your wallet that contains one of the stoner cats to log in and start watching the episodes.
Now you may wonder, why only 10,420 tokens?
I get why they end it with a 420. 10,000 numbers of it are aimed towards the crypto elite. Those with huge chunks of crypto and is ready to buy literally anything. These are the people that have bought Cryptopunks. The weird-looking pixel art.
Only 10,000 supposedly rare pieces of art are available to buy. Launched back in 2017, Cryptopunks have always been a hit. It was the first of its kind. They are gaining momentum these days, thanks to a couple of crypto influencers. The top bid of one of the 10,000 Cryptopunk NFT goes for 4200 Ethereum.
That’s approximately 7 and a half million dollars worth of crypto at current prices for a single JPEG image.
This is artificial scarcity. So far, 3300 wallet holders have bought all the minted tokens of stoner cats. The average price of every stoner cat comes at around 800 dollars.
It’s interesting what the stoner cats team is trying to do. This is an experiment that will eventually eliminate the costly middleman like Netflix. Here’s what their manifesto says.
“At Stoner Cats, we believe that storytellers deserve an outlet where they can be valued and supported without having to bow to the machine of big media. So we’re tilting the model on its head and testing a new architecture using NFTs that can connect storytellers directly with their audience and essentially decentralize content production.”
After researching this, I said to myself.
“Come on, now! How is a JPEG file valued at millions of dollars? This is insane!”
It doesn’t even exist in real life, like the Mona Lisa painting or Van Gogh's starry night. But, there’s something to take account of. The series starts with Ms.Stoner saying the weed delivery guy,
“Material Possessions are a Social Construct”.
Meaning, it doesn’t exist in objective reality. It exists because humans agree that it exists. Be it cash, gold, or even a digital picture of a cat. People believe it has value.
No wonder why Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin as,
“If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy”.
Now back to the stoner cats. Looking to buy one of these TOKEn?
I should warn ya. The price is HIGH.
Really really high!
So, maybe, just maybe, the average joe is gonna probably watch the pirated version on Youtube or on Torrents. But the crypto elite doesn’t care about the average Joe. In fact, quite the opposite. Vitalik Buterin’s “The Oracle” cats are currently being sold at 3 to 5 times the original price it was bought for.
How high will the NFT rally go?
I don’t know…
But probably the price of Ether is set to go high as the network is ready for an upgrade.
London Hard Fork
A phase of Ethereum 2.0 dubbed as the London Hard fork that has nothing to do with the Brits, is going live.
But why London?
They just ran out of names for their planned network upgrades. It was suggested to use Devcon city names for upgrades, and they did! London is where Devcon 1 took place.
But why the upgrade?
What is the problem?
As stated by the Ethereum Foundation itself, There are 3 major problems.
Clogged Network.
Ethereum needs to reduce network congestion and improve speeds to better service a global user base.
Disk Space
Running a node is getting harder as the network grows. This will only get harder with efforts to scale the network.
Uses Too much energy
Ethereum uses too much electricity. The technology that keeps the network secure, needs to be more sustainable.
So Ethereum’s vision is to make the network more scalable to support thousands of transactions per second. It needs to be more secure against all forms of attacks. And it needs to be more sustainable by eliminating compute power and energy required to mine the blocks.
One of the major changes coming to the network is set to make the transaction efficient.
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a Blockchain. The blocks contain transaction data. Since the block can only hold so many of the transactions, if too many people are using the network, it becomes congested and increases the gas fees.
Currently, ethereum wallets provide suggestions to set a gas fee. If paid too low, the transaction might get stuck forever. This is a UI nightmare for a crypto newbie. That’s the majority of the users.
Ethereum network has something called Ethereum Improvement Proposal or EIP to improve the functionality of the network.
One such proposal called EIP 1559 is set to reduce gas fees by increasing the block size. It also introduces a base fee which gets adjusted automatically depending on how busy the network gets.
We know Bitcoin has a fixed supply cap of 21 million. When it comes to ethereum, there’s no hard supply cap.
Currently, there is around 117 million ETH in circulation, and the block issues 2 ETH as a reward every couple of seconds. This makes some people question the future of Ethereum.
So, in this same proposal, the base fee is set to be burned by sending it to an address nobody owns or controls. This means that the supply of ether will be deflationary as the years pass. Note that this change is controversial because it affects miners.
EIP-1559 burns transaction fees instead of giving them to miners. Since Ethereum 2.0 is migrating from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, it means less profit for the miners and more power to the stakers.
It’s no secret that ethereum spawned a series of decentralized apps that works without the need of a central entity. From decentralized exchanges and stablecoins to lending and borrowing to betting and insurance markets, decentralized finance is revolutionizing the way we transact online. One notable industry is NFTs. Non Fungible Tokens.
Weird Whales
A 12-year-old named Benyamin with the help of his dad made around $160,000 dollars overnight, thanks to the NFT craze. Boring bananas, an NFT project, helped Benyamin by giving him their template as he generated 3350 weird whales with a variety of traits and variables.
It is a Pixel art, a famous kind in the NFT space. Given how easy it is to learn, he only did it as a test and posted it on discord. It got picked up by crypto influencers and instantly became viral. Benyamin woke up to see that the entire collection of weird whales were sold out in just nine hours.
He says that his dad’s friend bought Rare Pepes NFT and he found them interesting.
He got into NFT space by creating 40 Minecraft Yee-haws. His dad told him he can’t scale the production if done this way. He then suggested the kid to use a framework called Python Pillow to automate the image generation process.
But how did it go viral?
The project blended few desirable things. You might’ve seen people on Twitter setting Cryptopunk NFT as their profile pic. People wanna show off. When it comes to the crypto world, a whale is someone with a large number of crypto holdings. Weird Whale images are intended as a profile pic. Thus the project attained 'hockey stick growth'.
Binance CEO CZ is looking for his replacement.
Do you know why?
The world’s biggest crypto exchange is facing scrutiny from regulators around the world.
Here are some news bits about Binance within the last month.
Malaysian regulator ordered Binance to Completely disable the website and app.
The exchange closed derivatives and futures trading offerings in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.
HSBC Bank is reportedly blocking its UK customers from making credit card payments to Binance.
Binance Stops Selling ‘Stock Tokens’ Following Regulatory Scrutiny
Japan’s Financial Services Agency warned that Binance offered crypto services without registration.
India probes Binance in betting app laundering case
Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission filed a criminal complaint against Binance for operating a digital-asset business without a license.
It has to be noted that Binance originally was headquartered in China but later moved to the Cayman Islands due to China’s increasing regulation on Cryptocurrencies.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is willing to step down as CEO and is looking for his replacement who could handle regulatory issues.
But, it’s not all bad news for Binance.
The company is partnering with Shopify to bring crypto payments to its merchants.
Over 1.7 million businesses in 175 countries use Shopify to deliver their products.
Finally,
Spicy rumor time!
It was reported that Saudi Aramco was planning to mine Bitcoin. Sorry to break it to you fellas. They denied the rumors.
That’s it for this episode of Bees of Bitcoin.
Thanks for reading.
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