GM legends,

It's fantastic to see both crypto and TradFi markets starting February in the green this week after FED Chair Jerome Powell gave us the good news that rates will be hiked by 25bps and that disinflation has begun sending Bitcoin to $24,000.

In other news, Bitcoin maximalists aren't happy with the recent release of Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain, as NFT meme-culture is brought to the OG network that first started the cryptocurrency revolution. We'll dig into what Ordinals are as this might just bring some life to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

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Here's what's inside today.

🔥 The big topic. Bitcoin's first NFT collection causes major upset! 🗞 Hot crypto news. FED hikes rates 25bps as expected and J Powell says "disinflation is happening". The FTX 🫶 BNB love story documentary is coming soon. AND MORE.👀 Updates across the bloc. Entangle Fi testnet goes live. Evmos mic-dropped their 2023 manifesto including a roadmap. Gamma Swap integrates Balancer weighted pools. AND MORE.🛡 Chart of the day. Is $MATIC about to make a zk narrative move to the upside?

🧵 Thread of the day. Arbitrum and perps are two hot topics right now and Louis Cooper breaks down the broader perpetual landscape and takes a look at how Vela Exchange fits in.

🔥 The big topic.

Bitcoin's first NFT collection causes upset!

Is Bitcoin about to enter its first NFT ponzi meme season?

In amongst all of the Canto Longneck tweets were a myriad of salty Bitcoin devs, crypto Twitter engagement farmers and laser-eyed Bitcoin maxis as the idea of NFTs on Bitcoin becomes a reality.

Will Bitcoin as a blockchain actually get relevance?

Will Bitcoin rally as hard and as fast as Aptos did when NFTs were mentioned?

Will Ordinals be the catalyst needed for all of the Bitcoin maxis to come out of hiding again?

What is Ordinal?

Created by software dev Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals essentially give a “serial number to a Satoshi that allows for the tracking and transferring of individual sats” which constitute a numeric namespace for Bitcoin with Arbitrary assets, such as NFTs, security tokens, accounts, or stablecoins being able to attach.

Inscriptions (aka digital artifacts) are Bitcoin-native mechanisms and are created by inscribing satoshis with the content using Ord and can be viewed with the Ordinals explorer meaning there's no need for a token or side chain.

Surely this is a good thing for Bitcoin.

NFT culture has brought a sense of belonging and community to other chains that Bitcoin is missing. Especially as the number of laser-eyed maxis has dwindled since Bitcoin's $69,000 peak back in 2021.

Maybe now Bitcoin has a REAL use case.

For a deep dive check out Ordinals Theory in Casey’s Blog.

Good tech or meme culture?

100% innit4thememes

This is a 100% meme-driven development and Casey is finding creative ways to meme Ordinals into existence as Casey explains Ordinals Theory in a Hell Money Podcast (time stamps 11:39 & 50:25).

Now could you imagine the absolute chaos that would happen if the BSC and ETH micro-cap traders found a way to infiltrate the BTC network creating their own PvP arena of capital rotation rooting and tooting the next BTC 100x Gem?!

On a side note, is this the first EVER Pepe to be stored on BTC?

Jokes aside.

This is good tech with memeability added into it. And it’s good news for struggling Bitcoin miners as they’ll be generating more revenue from gas fees which hopefully means that the BTC hash rate increases, bringing the Bitcoin halving sooner rather than later!

The maxis are mad.

Probably because Pepe culture is coming to a satoshi new you!

Or the fact that times are moving on and the outer-culture of crypto is expanding on to the OG chain.

Plus the maxis are getting annoyed that the inscriptions are taking up more of their precious blockspace which they want to save for currency-related transactions only.

To add some spice to the great debate, Mempool CEO wiz added an Ordinals Inscriptions explorer visually showing what NFTs are being stored in Bitcoin.

When you look at it, Casey has not only created a hot debate but has created something that is Bitcoin native (which maxis should love!) that has the possibility of bringing in new devs, new communities, and possibly a flourishing ecosystem of digital art.

This is a fun story to watch unfold on Twitter and it will be interesting to see if greater adoption happens to bring more life to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

🎱 Poll of the day.

🗞 Hot crypto news.

🐮 Bullish

Stargate's token re-issuance following the Alameda wallet hacking. Set to be issued on March 15th to "eliminate any risk associated will illegitimate STG transfers from the Alameda wallet."

RuneScape taught us economics. If you played RuneScape, the OG metaverse, back in the early 2000's you'll know the hustle was real in World 2 Falador! Today Web3 game builders are building backward with over-complicated financial models and a lot can be taken from this simple-looking MMORPG.

Money Printer go BRRRRR as the FED hikes rates by 25 points. Fed Chair Jerome Powell says the "disinflation process has started" and that the job markets are "still very strong." Well, as they say, money printers go brrrr as the Nasdaq, S&P 500 and crypto markets rallied into the first trading day in February.

🐻 Bearish

Bankrupt CEX Put Options?! Where there is pain there is profit as Investment firm Cherokee Acquisition is offering investors "put options" to hedge against failing crypto centralised exchanges Binance, CoinBase, and Kraken. This will help protect account holders and offers a 100% payout if their exchange files for bankruptcy during the options contract being live. 

Are you on the list? As Celsius publish a list of eligible creditors who can withdraw their assets from the platform BUT they must complete the KYC process first. QuickBooks. Yes another multi-billion dollar firm using QuickBooks for its accounting processes across 15 different books and as you can imagine, the court found a number of discrepancies. If you don't have enough gas fees, you won't get your money.

The FTX 🫶 BNB story is set for the big screen as a documentary is in the works showing the explosively dynamic relationship between two of crypto's biggest players. Somehow this will still be a better love story than Twilight.

👀 Updates across the bloc.

Project updates

AAVE V3 goes live on Ethereum, Polgyon and Avalanche. To find out how to go from V2 to V3 go to this AAVE official Twitter thread or check out your V2 dashboard. 

GAMMASWAP will be integrating Balancer Weighted Pools to give LPs the chance to hedge their position with their newly approved grant.

BNB Chain release BNB Greenfield whitepaper, a new blockchain on BNB focusing on infrastructure and ecosystem focusing on the decentralized data economy.

BUSD comes to the Cosmos ecosystem with Axelar and Osmosis. Osmosis will be offering BUSD pools.

ENTANGLE FI. Entangle test net v1 goes live on Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, BNB, Optimism, and Aribtrum. If you were on the whitelist you can access the testnet here.

EVMOS have just dropped their 2023 Manifesto and roadmap including liquid staking support, interchain accounts and the introduction of EVM Extensions, the Evmos SDK, and the Evmos dApp Store.

FANTOM. After a 6-month wait, Fantom's fUSD v2 is soon to be released.  

SENTIMENT has just partnered with Arbitrum perps protocol GMX. The partnership will see Sentiment support GMX and GLP tokens to be used as collateral and leverage.

SUDOSWAP. Airdrop incoming! SUDO governance has been launched and XMON holders can lock their drops for 1 month with 1 XMON = 10,000 SUDO.

SUJIKO. An NFT derivative trading platform launches its presale on February 4th.

Y2K FINANCE LSD vaults coming soon and while we wait, their bond program for USDC/Y2K goes live on Bond Protocol.

Governance updates

FLOKI. A reminder that the reduction in tax happens on February 3rd and the burn happens on February 9th.

OPTIMISM FOUNDATION. The first protocol upgrade proposal to the Bedrock Release has been submitted and if passed, the Bedrock upgrade will be scheduled 2 weeks later, on March 15.

ROCKET POOL. A self-limiting proposal has been submitted to establish guiding principles whereby Rocket Pool would act in the best interests of the Ethereum Network in order to avoid any single point of failure. This CoinDesk Rocket Pool article goes into more detail.

UNISWAP. A temperature check proposal was passed to see which bridge UniSwap v3 should use for cross-chain governance between Ethereum and BNB. Wormhole wins with 62.31% in favour. The official announcement comes around February 20th as per the UniSwap forums discussion.

🛡 Chart of the day.

Is $MATIC about to make a zk narrative move to the upside?

If there are two things we know about MATIC it's that they aren't afraid to spend money on BIG partnerships and the Polygon zkEVM narrative might be drawing closer.

After yesterday's rally, MATIC made a strong push to the upside and the 12HR chart is showing that there isn't a lot stopping us from short term testing the $1.30 zone before a potential bigger move to the $1.50 zone.

Bull case. Continued bullish movement and zk (zero knowledge) narrative see an upward movement toward the $1.30 zone and beyond.

Bear case. Bearish figures coming out later in the week see heavy profit taking across the board sending price down towards the $0.94 - $1 zone

Coming up in the news.

🧵 Thread of the day.

Arbitrum and perpetuals are two hot topics right now and with Vela Exchange having recently bridged over, Louis Cooper breaks down the broader perpetual landscape and takes a look at how Vela Exchange fits in.

And on that note, thanks for reading, catcha apes in the next edition!

grant, jedi & dan 🫡

🦧 An apes review.

A final word 🤝 

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