🦧 The Bored Apes are coming for your social security number

Shaan Puri & Ben Levy
March 11, 2022

GM, this is the Milk Road. Its Friday, so let's boogie.

Markets are down slightly in the past 24 hours.

By the way, have you ever heard of the Fear vs. Greed Index? It’s one of my favorite things to look at to understand the market.

It looks like this:

Here’s how it works:

The score is ONE number (today score is 28, fear)
What do scores mean? 1 = extreme fear, 100 = extreme greed
How is it calculated?
- 30% Volatility (30 & 90 day average drawdowns)
- 15% social media mentions vs. historical averages
- 15% surveys (~2000 participants)
- 10% Market Dominance (bitcoin vs. alt coins)
- 10% Google trends search volume
- 20% Concentrated Power Of Will™️

The Fear / Greed Index is pretty well correlated with price. Check this out:

^You can see we go into greedy greens near the tops, and fear reds at bottoms.

We are currently in FEAR with a 28 score.

Alright, what else is in today's email?

🦍 Bored Ape Yacht Club Gets Nosy
👃 Why Facebook’s Diem failed
🤑 Funding Friday
✅ Vote on our next big feature

THE BORED APES ARE GETTING NOSY

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is launching something new…but there’s a catch..

If you read this email. You probably already know what Bored Ape Yacht Club is.

Today, they dropped a new site, somethingisbrewing.xyz/, with no other details.

Buuuut……they asked for you to KYC to be eligible.

KYC stands for “Know Your Customer” and is a banking compliance requirement to help combat money laundering, terrorism financing, and buying Nickleback albums.

Crypto culture has a big privacy angle. People don’t want to give up their identity, social security number etc.. for their NFTs.

So Twitter was pissed that they were asking for all your info, but a few people pointed out this is a necessary evil to NFTs becoming more mainstream.

Just because you're in the metaverse, doesn't mean you can get away from the rules everyone else plays by.

STRIPE ENTERS CRYPTO

Stripe is the darling of Silicon Valley.

Two brothers took on the payments industry, and won BIG.

How big? Let’s just say…I told my daughter she has two options to get rich in life:

Work hard
Marry a junior developer at Stripe

The company is worth over $100B+, but hasn’t gone public yet.

Anyways. Back to the story. Stripe announced today they are adding crypto to their payment tools. They’ve already partnered with FTX and Nifty Gateway to power their payments & I'm sure there are many more to come.

This means two things:

1/ Adding crypto to your app just got WAY easier (since so many companies already use Stripe)

2/ A bunch of startups just died. Turns out “Stripe for crypto” is just going to be Stripe.

P.S. fun fact…I had a chance to join Stripe when it had less than 30 employees, but screwed up the “sell me this pen” question during the Stripe job interview.

That entry level job would have made me $10M+. Now I’m 33 years old and I write a free newsletter. BRB while I go bang my shin against the nearest table.

NEW SOUTH KOREA PRESIDENT TALKS A BIG CRYPTO GAME

The crypto community is a juicy one to get to come live in your country and politicans have realized this.

Senators like Ted Cruz joined team Bitcoin to win over voters.

Zug in Switzerland is home to like 8 of the biggest crypto protocols by having crypto friendly laws.

Portugal is offering a 0% tax rate on crypto gains.

El Salvador’s president is pumping Bitcoin all day on Twitter.

And now… The new President of South Korea is promising to:

Deregulate the crypto industry
Make South Korea friendly to crypto unicorns
Reduce crypto cap gains a ton

The race to attract the crypto rich is on like Donkey Kong!

WHY FACEBOOK'S CRYPTO PROJECT "LIBRA" FAILED

Remember Facebook’s “Libra” Project?

Cryptocurrencies were hot, and Facebook wanted to dance too. The head of Messenger moved over to lead it (David Marcus, former CEO of Paypal). They built a big team, poured in millions of dollars, and created a giant committee of brands like Uber, Shopify, and Mastercard/Visa to shape it (they actually all quit before it started).

So what happened?

Pretty much nothing happened. It never got off the ground, and then Facebook sold “Diem” to a bank for ~$180M a few weeks ago.

We never knew what caused the breakup, just like we can never really be sure what really happens in the Bachelor fantasy suites (though we can guess 😂).

Fortunately for us, the Financial Times did some great reporting and got us the answer.

The answer is simpler than you might think: Politicians didn’t trust Facebook.

You see, Facebook wanted regulatory approval, from the same regulators that they were constantly battling.

The full story has a bunch of details about how the political power game played out: check it out here.

20,000 People are volunteering to be cops in the Metaverse

Check this out. There’s 20,000 volunteers who spend their time arresting people in VR.

Imagine how big it would be if it was play-to-earn 🤣

Vote on our next deep dive

It’s that time again for a Milk Road "Dunk and Dip" aka a deep dive.

Our first one was about the Bull and Bear Case of LUNA (since we wrote it and explained why we’re betting on Luna, it’s up ~2x, you're welcome).

We’ve got a couple ideas for the next one, but it’s up to you to pick:

Is DeFi yield actually safe? How does it work? Where should I go get it for my ETH?
The origin story of Ethereum
The best NFT use cases, now and in the future
The best DAOs today and the use cases we're watching

Vote in our Twitter poll now!

P.S. Comment with your ideas and we'll take the best ones and use 'em next time around

Funding Friday

Over $750m poured into crypto startups and $1.5b went into funds this week. Let’s see who got it:

Companies:

Espresso - Got $32M to help with scaling and privacy for Web3 applications

WalletConnect - Got $11M to continue scaling their crypto wallet

Immutable - Got $200M to build a Layer 2 for NFTs on Ethereum

Upstream - Got $12.5M to easily launch DAO’s with their new no-code platform. “DAO-in-a-box”.

Get our full database here!

Funds:

Bessemer - Raised $250M in a new fund to invest in consumer crypto, DeFi infrastructure and crypto infrastructure.

Bain Crypto - Raised $500m for their crypto fund and got absolutely roasted on Twitter

This week's Funding Friday is presented by Free Agency

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