gm everyone - welcome to our newsletter where we've curated the best crypto content from the last couple of weeks.
TLDR:
- Argent announces $40m Series B! 🎉
- Ridley Scott will produce the Infinite Machine - the first major feature film about crypto 🎬
- North Korea is behind the largest crypto hack 🤯
Now let’s get into it all! 🚀
📣 Is free speech possible on a web2 platform?
Elon Musk purchased Twitter this week and has spoken about how he wants to make the platform more open to free speech - being against censoring and banning accounts when they’ve not broken the law.
But as irony would have it, Twitter would censor one of crypto Twitter’s favorite people over a joke about being Twitter’s interim CEO.
BREAKING: Joining Twitter as interim CEO— stani.eth (🌿,👻) (@StaniKulechov) April 26, 2022
This sparked an uproar on Twitter, asking for Stani to be reinstated on Twitter as it was clear that it was a joke. But what became clear was how easy it is to censor people on web2 platforms. You don’t own your profile, and the platform can remove you for whatever reason they like.
Stani is working on a web3 alternative to Twitter, where you can be the “CEO of your own Social Media account”. Your profile, the content you create, and the community you build is yours to own. And you can take it with you if you want to leave - giving you true ownership.
🚨 North Korea behind crypto hacks
In issue #11 we wrote about the largest DeFi hack to hit crypto - $600M being drained from the Ronin Bridge. The group behind the attack was revealed by the CIA to be the infamous North Korean Lazarus group. In the past, this group almost managed to steal $1bn from Bangladesh's national bank; attacked the NHS, and is now targeting crypto individuals and organizations.
Unrelated to the Lazarus group, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) Instagram was hacked earlier this week, with the hacker posting a fake link to a similar website promising an airdrop. Some BAYC holders went to the copycat website and sent their NFTs to the hacker’s wallet, resulting in over $10M in losses.
Having a smart contract wallet is one thing you can do to stay safe, but to avoid social engineering attacks, be skeptical, change passwords, don’t click on unsolicited links and that surprise airdrop/ giveaway from a project is most likely a scam.
🎬 Ridley Scott will produce the Infinite Machine
Ridley Scott, the producer of award-winning films like Gladiator, Alien and House of Gucci will be producing the Infinite Machine - the first major feature film about crypto, based on the bestselling book by Camila Russo that documents Ethereum’s journey.
Question is - who will play Vitalik? My guess is Timothee Chalamet.
📚 What we’re reading
ApeCoin & The Death of Staking - Cobie reflects on how "staking" in its current form is an over-used token distribution mechanism that doesn't benefit most projects.
Edward Snowden Revealed As Key Participant In Mysterious Ceremony Creating Anonymous Cryptocurrency - Zcash.
The Ownership Economy 2022- A primer on the state of web3.
🎉 We’ve just raised $40M!
Thank you for all your support over the years, we couldn’t have done it without you. We’ll be sharing more details about what this means for Argent and our vision over a Twitter space with our founders next month. This will be your chance to ask us anything.
We ran a poll out asking you what high APY option you wanted on ETH for L2. The majority of you voted on Index Coop’s icETH which we have now added in-app - currently offering 8.54% APY.
Finally, a teaser for our next update - we’re adding dark mode for Android!
