Eigenlayer airdrop is a disaster, Moonbirds are no longer cc0, Hong Kong ETF underwhelms | TS-014
Eigenlayer airdrop is a disaster, Moonbirds are no longer cc0, Hong Kong ETF underwhelms | TS-014
Plus: more insider trading at Yuga Labs, crypto markets continues sideways slide
eigenlayer you were the chosen one!! wtf!!!! this is top six stories in crypto
TOP SIX STORIES IN CRYPTO
Eigenlayer announces airdrop… (and the terms are not great)
Moonbirds attempts to reverse their cc0
Insider trading with Moonbirds this week
BAYC drops their 3D avatars
Hong Kong BTC and ETH ETF opens trading, underwhelming volume
Crypto markets continue sideways slide
1. Eigenlayer announces airdrop… (and the terms are not great)
One of the most hyped airdrops on ETH since forever announced their launch date: May 10. You can check your allocation here.
Great news, right? Wrong. With the date came the details of the airdrop… and they are not great.
Here’s the gist:
15% is allocated to the community, and 5% will be available in season 1
The token will be “non-transferrable” for an unspecified amount of time
aka you can claim, but can’t trade it until it’s unlocked
The claim is heavily geoblocked (US, Canada, Most of Africa, Most of Asia) - see full countries here
VPN detection will be used on the claim website + circumventing the geoblock may blacklist your wallet and forfeit your airdrop
54.5% is set aside for early contributors (25%), and VCs (29.5%) with a 1 year cliff
So a few issues here:
Depositing ETH into eigen was open worldwide (no geoblocking), and the only incentive was to farm the airdrop, but now they’re heavily geoblocking the airdrop claim
Creating a “non-transferrable” airdrop in the name of helping decentralize the protocol is a bit of a misnomer - the act of locking the transferability of tokens is centralization.
Not allowing coin holders from trading on Day 1 to a later unspecified date effectively shortens the 1 year cliff for VCs and Team.
These are the core issues with the EIGEN airdrop summarized. Twitter was aflame and the memes were hot. Two of my faves (click images to watch on Twitter)
2. Moonbirds attempts to reverse their cc0
Kevin Rose’s beleaguered project that was acquired by Yuga Labs made its first move under new ownership: a new story metaverse something-something (i’ve lost track of how many projects and teams are doing this)
Bit of a hurdle though: Kevin Rose infamously made Moonbirds cc0 (Creative Commons zero license). Meaning, Moonbirds has become a public good - anyone can use the art, remix it, use it commercially - whatever. So, the second tweet in their thread was interesting:
“Starting today, Moonbirds will join Mythics as a collection with commercial rights. If you’ve made stuff during the CC0 era - cool. But from now on, you’ll need to own a Moonbird to keep doing so.”
Ummm… technically, no. That’s not true. cc0 is irrevocable. You can’t just “undo” it if you feel like it. This is why Kevin Rose’s decision to cc0 the the project without community feedback was so controversial in 2022.
After various back and forths-on Twitter, the consensus is this:
Yuga Labs is updating the art, and that new art will have commercial rights
The old art will continue to exist (it’s onchain), but the NFTs will likely be burned for new ones
Although, when you think about it, the new Moonbirds collection is just a derivative of the original cc0 collection. Is this the first time an official collection has become a derivative of itself? Garga compares it to DeGods art updates, but DeGods have never had commercial rights, nor were they cc0 - those were art refreshes for the sake of it. This move is motivated by undoing the cc0 license on the original project.
Not quite the same thing, but an interesting move nonetheless.
3. Insider trading with Moonbirds this week
April 22 is when Yuga Labs announced a Moonbirds town hall (left of the graph).
April 28 is when they announced the Moonbirds universe (story above).
Between the 22nd and the 28th, there was a flurry of activity in advance of the announcement. Clearly, people found out about the plans and a flurry of trading activity took place.
Another “amazing coincidence” says Nate Alex, referencing the likely insider trading that’s happened in yet another Yuga Labs announcement - like what happened when Yuga announced the purchase of Moonbirds earlier this year.
They’ve got to tighten the ship, because at this point… all of this trading activity in advance of a big announcement is a terrible look.
4. BAYC drops their 3D avatars
It’s been a long time coming, but BAYC finally dropped their 3D avatars for Bored Apes. I thought it was going to be a “meh so what” move, but it’s been a nice surprise to see Bored Apes utilize the models to create memes, videos and more.
Some of my favourites:
The other part that i’m excited for: the meme wars between Remilios, Miladys and the Bored Apes - the latter are finally armed with a tool that lets them start to fire back against “all the haters”.
Expect to see lots more apes on the timeline.
5. Hong Kong BTC and ETH ETF opens trading, underwhelming volume
Hong Kong’s sport ETF opens this week - which was signalled as a big bull catalyst. HK is a very crypto-friendly jurisdiction, with a lot of innovation happening down there. As you may know, last year’s ApeFest was in HK, and I helped host the livestream.
But, the demand (at least on day 1) has been mid. BTC’s ETF had $8.5M while ETH had $2.5M.
In the US, Day 1 had $655M. Some analysts predicted ~$300M trading volume… but actual volume is nowhere close to the predictions.
Could the cause of this be the cooling of the crypto market we’ve had in recent weeks? Will trading volume pick up in the coming weeks and months? Let’s see…
6. Crypto markets continue sideways slide
Crypto has been sideways (slightly downward) for a few weeks now. Take a look at the last 7 days chart for the top coins below.
This lull in the market has been a long time coming, with the market being in up only season since February - and memecoins going bananas for the last 8 weeks. The slowdowns and sideways slides are very healthy and the perfect time to accumulate positions in advance of the next break out.
If you’ve been sidelined for the past few months, now is a great time to buy the coins you have conviction in - the halving just happened last week and the madness of the bull market is still coming.
It’s time to accumulate.
As always, if you found value please share with a friend or tweet this out. Thank you for your attention.
- atareh
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