Bitfinity Weekly: New Memetics

Welcome to Issue #98 of Bitfinity Weekly for our #BITFINIANS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.

What's in Today's Email?

• Global Crypto News
• This Week in our Blog
• NFT Market Bytes
• Tweet of the Week
• Meme Time
• A Matter of Opinion

Global Crypto News

🫠 An Honest Mistake: Slerf, a memecoin on Solana, suffered a significant snafu during its launch this week. After amassing over $10m worth of $SOL, the dev behind the Slerf token accidentally burned all of the funds as well as the entire reserve of 500 million Slerf earmarked for airdrops. Despite the costly mistake (or perhaps because of the memeability of the mistake), Slerf surpassed all Ethereum-based exchanges in trading volume in its first 24 hours.

🇪🇺 Europain: The European Union's lead committees approved a new Anti Money Laundering measure on Tuesday. Certain anonymous cash transactions will be limited, alongside a total ban on anonymous cryptocurrency transactions. Usage of any anonymous self custody wallets, regardless of provider, will be illegal under the new legislation. The procedural enforcement of these new AML laws are expected to go into place within three years.

🧑‍⚖️ Home Court Disadvantage: Disgraced Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon is being extradited to his home country of South Korea, where he will be prosecuted for financial fraud related to the $UST/$LUNA crash in 2022. Kwon has been in a Montenegro jail since last year, when he was arrested for attempting to travel on a fake passport. Kwon has been the subject of a jurisdictional battle between the U.S. and Korea, as he faces severe charges in both countries.

🚩 Flagged for Review: Rumors that the Ethereum Foundation faces an inquiry from an unnamed government agency were running wild earlier this week, following an article on CoinDesk regarding the Foundation's GitHub repository. On Wednesday, Fortune published an article confirming that several U.S. crypto-related companies had been issued subpoenas related to an investigation by the SEC, as part of a legal campaign to classify Ethereum as a security.

This Week in our Blog

Tokenization of real world assets holds tremendous potential to revolutionize traditional finance. However, the path to adoption is fraught with regulatory challenges, infrastructure concerns, and more:

Tokenization: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Be Transacted

Tokenization holds immense promise to revolutionize traditional finance by digitizing real-world assets. However, challenges remain around regulations, adoption and infrastructure. Find out how Bitfinity is tackling these hurdles to unleash tokenization’s true potential.

Bitfinity BlogFred

NFT Market Bytes

🐕 Dogwifmoney: Achi, the behatted Shiba Inu that inspired the animal-wif-hat memecoin trend, set a new record on Monday; the iconic 'dogwifhat' photo became the most expensive meme NFT ever sold, surpassing the sale price of the original doge meme. The NFT fetched $4.3m worth of $ETH for Achi's owners, following a furious bidding war between pseudonymous whale GCR (GiganticRebirth) and Memeland (an NFT venture collective linked to 9GAG).

🚢 Closing Time: Starbucks is shuttering Odyssey, its NFT rewards program, after two years. The program, which was in its live beta version, was initially open by invitation only and slowly expanded to include more users who had signed up on a waiting list. Despite Starbucks' attempts to incentivize loyalty with exclusive collectibles and interactive events ('journeys'), the world's largest coffee chain failed to attract much attention. The program will officially close on March 31st.

🎵 Enter the Ordinals: Legendary rap and hip-hop icon Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan is making his way into the Bitcoin Ordinals scene. Although launch details have not been revealed, Ghostface Killah confirmed that he will be releasing a music-centric collection. His Ordinals will be launched in collaboration with the teams behind Nakamotos on BTC, Rare Scrilla, and OrdinalsBot.

Tweet of the Week

Meme Time

A Matter of Opinion

It appears that memecoin season on Solana has truly begun. This month began with a seemingly endless barrage of memecoins that capitalized off of the misspelled-American-politicians trend that sparked off last month with $BODEN (jeo boden, an intentional misspelling of U.S. president Joe Biden) and $TREMP (doland tremp... I'll let you guess who this one is supposed to be).

Leading the memecoin charge was "Elizabeth Whoren" ($WHOREN) which lampooned Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, an avid anti-crypto advocate. $WHOREN received extra attention after Coinbase removed an informational page regarding the controversial token, causing traders to rally behind it. During meme season, it seems that all news is good news.

We certainly saw this 'there's-no-such-thing-as-bad-press' attitude in play earlier this week with the disastrous $SLERF token LP burn, an event which would have tanked any coin's launch under normal conditions. When news seeped through the crypto community about the dev's $10m mistake, the community's reaction was to buy. And buy they did--some even joking that the mistake was bullish because a burn is deflationary for the token.

Within 24 hours after the catastrophic $10m burn, $SLERF rocketed from its original launch price of $0.027 to $1.23 USD, reflecting a fully diluted value of more than half a billion dollars. Trading volumes for Slerf reached unprecedented levels, peaking at just shy of $8b on Raydium alone.

In a financial arena such as crypto, where memes are often wielded as powerful communication tools, it's understandable why communities rally around memes and memeable events like the $SLERF burn. However, we want to highlight the dangers of relying on meme analysis or trend reports as investment theses. For example, this X thread exposes the numerous scams that have rugged hundreds of thousands of dollars from hopeful investors looking to participate in the current Solana frenzy. Be safe out there.

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*Important Disclaimer: While every effort is made on this website to provide accurate information, any opinions expressed or information disseminated do not necessarily reflect the views of Bitfinity itself. The information provided here is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice.