🍻 *glug*glug*glug*

Ahhhh, nothing like that first sip of a cold beer on a Friday evening. 

Alright, now I’m ready to start writing. Welcome to the second edition of this newsletter, where you’re stuck with me rambling on from the pub for five whole minutes about what happened in crypto this week, what’s to come, and my general thoughts on the market. 

Honestly, with the lunacy in crypto these past few weeks, I don’t think the beers are going to cut it anymore. We might need to pivot to straight shots of whiskey neat. 

We had more celeb drama, more airdrop drama, we had hacks, we had liquidations, and we also had regulatory clear-ups. All of this, combined with god-awful market conditions which seems to have taken most of CT to their mental breaking point. 

So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

🫵 Will the real DJT dev please stand up

Ever since the celebrity coin meta graced us with its unfortunate presence, memecoins have been suffering. It appears not enough people are DM’ing Ansem before deploying. 

Anyway, this week, out of absolutely nowhere, we saw the DJT token (abbreviated from Donald J Trump, also known as politics GCR) skyrocket to a market cap of $500M. But why? Why’d this random trump coin catch such a heavy bid in such a dry market? 

Well, it all started with a new channel reporting that Trump will apparently launch his own official token on Solana called DJT. This effort would be spearheaded by his 18-yr old son Barron Trump. 

This news sent the coin on a moon mission. 

But of course, it all seemed too good to be true. With no confirmation from Trump's side, some red flags quickly started to show. 

A tweet from Bubblemaps suggested that 67% of the supply was in one cluster. Coinbase’s director said that the wallets were funded through KuCoin, which is illegal in the US. Trump’s affiliated projects are always funded by Coinbase, so it’s another red flag. 

The final nail in the coffin came from our detective GCR, ZachXBT. 

Arkham Intelligence put out a bounty tweet offering $150K to whoever can find the real identity of the DJT dev. 

ZachXBT then drops the bombshell thread and says that it was none other than the serial scammer and pathological liar Martin Shkreli who was behind the token. Surprise Surprise. Scammers continue scamming. 

He then went on a fruitless public tirade, making a $100M bet with GCR to say that he was working closely with Barron Trump. He also held Twitter spaces to say the same, but nobody believed him. There is ample evidence of him asking influencers and KOLs to hop on board with him, and there is no evidence of Barron Trump being even remotely affiliated. 

Then, Zach gave us evidence of Martin’s wallet dumping $850K, and it was settled. The token dropped 80%+ since then, and I hope it goes below zero. 

I expected this cycle to be rife with unholy amounts of grifting, but the blatant, low-effort, unsanctimonious levels of grifting I have seen thus far have honestly made me feel increasingly dissociated from this space. Nobody even tries to innovate or reward innovation. Just follow retarded public figures into even more retarded things. 

Hopefully, things end here, but I doubt they will. 

🪂 Got anymore free coins?

🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳 TODAY IS WORSE THAN SEPTEMBER 11 FOR INDIA ✈️✈️✈️

😡😡😡 WE DO NOT FORGIVE, WE DO NOT FORGET 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳 

🚫🚫🚫 ZKSYNC WILL REGRET MESSING WITH INDIA 🚫🚫 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

We had the two biggest airdrops in ZK and ZRO this week. That’s ZKsync and LayerZero for those of you who aren’t wasting your life in crypto land. 

All in all, I’d say these two highly anticipated airdrops were alright. They did their best to reduce allocation to sybil farmers, which is why, as you can see from the copypasta above, the Indian sybil farmers were not happy. 

LayerZero put the controversial mandatory donation button which rubbed people the wrong way, and a lot of people were also not too happy with their general rewards. Some people who farmed this airdrop for 12 months ended up getting rewarded between $1k-$2k in total. You could’ve made the same amount by working a month at McDonalds. 

This is all to say that I think airdrops, in general, have reached a saturation point, similar to how liquidity mining started tapering off towards the end of DeFi summer. 

Now we wait to see what the next incentivization meta will be. 

😧 What the hell is Certik doing? 

Getting audited by Certik is like walking into a warzone covered in bubble wrap, thinking you're bulletproofed. You are almost certainly going to die.

It’s a running theme that protocols adited by CertiK get hacked frequently. Recent events have given rise to conspiracies that these hacks and exploits may be inside jobs. 

If you want the detailed rundown, check out this thread by Tayvano. The gist of it is that there was a vulnerability in Kraken’s code that security researchers from CertiK exploited to take $3M+. They claim this was a whitehat attack but have not returned the funds. Not only that, the funds were sent through the privacy mixer Tornado Cash, which means it almost certainly wasn’t a whitehat attack. 

Kraken is claiming extortion, and it will likely be a major mess for CertiK to clean up. Their reputation was already pretty bad, but at this point it’s gone completely down the drain. We wait to see what follows.

💡 Light at the end of the tunnel

Amidst all the grifting, exploiting, and general pain, we got a glimmer of positive news. 

The SEC formally announced that they have permanently ended their investigation into the Ethereum Foundation and ETH 2.0. The reasons for this sudden halt are not clear, although if I had to bet money, I’d say it’s because Mr.Gensler saw Vitaliks massive schlong and wanted no part of it. 

Anyway, this is really good news and even more positive headwinds for ETH. Hopefully, it's ETH’s time to shine. 

🧐 What to look forward to?

If I’m being honest, I’m not looking to allocate too much at the moment, playing my cards close to my chest. 

BTC has a very good chance of retesting range lows, in which scenario things could get even uglier for alts. Other than TAP, I haven’t really bought anything new and am not looking to heavily allocate at the moment. 

However, when I do feel like bidding things, my focus will be on ETH and ETH-adjacent things. It seems like the most obvious play at the minute. Things like BTRFLY, LDO, and PEPE. If we do get a proper ETH season then I’m sure there’ll be a bunch of new tokens that we can ape. 

Anyway, that’s it from me. My homies just reached the pub, and these pints aren’t going to drink themselves. I’ll go about my Friday and see you guys two weeks from now.