Elon's plan for crypto Twitter
GM, we take the latest Web3 news and translate it into plain old English - so you can stay up to date, without your eyes glazing over.
In today’s edition:
Elon's plan for Twitter: crack down on crypto scams
Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow invest in MoonPay
RESOURCE: How secure is crypto? Learn in 5 mins.
Unveiling the team behind Axie Infinity's $625 million dollar hack
Elon's plan for Twitter: crack down on crypto scams
If you didn't already know, Elon Musk just offered to buy 100% of Twitter for ~$43 billion and take it private.
No biggie. It's like, whatever.
Whether or not this offer is accepted by shareholders and/or the board, is still yet to be determined.
But! If it goes through, here're the cliff notes of what Daddy Elon plans to do.
General vision:
Make Twitter "an inclusive arena for free speech", while abiding to any limitations governed by US law.
Make the Twitter source code open-source, so members of the public can see how the algorithm works and scrutinize its biases.
Add a time sensitive 'edit' option for tweets.
Crypto vision:
Elon says his top priority would be eliminating spam bots and scammers, stating...
"If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I see, I'd have 100 billion Dogecoins."
A veiled threat:
Earlier this month, Elon purchased ~10% of the publicly available shares in Twitter and mentioned in his 100% buy out offer:
"If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder."
[Translation] If this doesn't go through I'll dump my 10% holding in the company and crash your stock price.
Brb, making some popcorn...
Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow invest in MoonPay
Why are these three celebrities (along with about 60 other big names) putting money into MoonPay?
Isn't anything with 'moon' in its name a scam?
Well turns out, despite the name, MoonPay's value pitch is actually pretty legit:
They let users buy cryptocurrencies using traditional payment methods like debit/credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and even bank transfers.
Which seems simple...because it is. But 'simple' doesn't mean it's easy to do.
And if Web3 wants to go mainstream, its user experience needs to be as simple as possible.
Ok...but why are all of the big names of the entertainment industry backing MoonPay?
Our best guess: FOMO.
It turns out that the company has recently set its sites on bringing their payments system to the NFT space.
And the way MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright sees it, NFT's are the future of the entertainment industry:
"Web3 is radically changing the way we approach the business of entertainment, sports and music."
He envisions “An entirely different format for the entertainment industry."
Resource of the day
How secure is crypto?
[SPOILER] it's very secure.
Learn why in 5 mins.
Unmasking the team behind Axie Infinity's $625 million dollar hack
That $625 million dollar hack we wrote about a few weeks ago?
They found out who did it (allegedly).
The U.S. treasury department is tying more than $600 million of the hack to the North Korean hacking group 'Lazarus'.
The Treasury Department added the Ethereum wallet that's holding the stolen funds to its 'sanction list', on Thursday.
By which time it was estimated that 14% of the stolen funds had already been laundered.
Yikes.
So, where to from here? Does everyone get their money back?
Unfortunately, no. The decentralized nature of the Ethereum Network can be both a blessing and a curse.
In this case, the curse (for the government) is they can't approach a centralized authority figured to reverse the hackers' transactions - like they would a bank.
The power that they can wield is to threaten anyone that accepts those funds with sanctions.
Which will make the Ethereum held in that wallet (somewhat) useless on a global scale.
Your Daily Dose of Web3
Dogecoin co-founder says Elon’s Twitter offer is a ‘hostile takeover’
Why ‘Mr Metaverse’ is placing a big Web3 bet against the Zuck
BTC Whales are increasingly trading outside of exchanges based on the data
Quantum computing firm simulates adoption of crypto payments
Alright, that’s it for this Good Friday!
Love to the family,