$4 billion hedge fund Fir Tree Capital Management shorts Tether
The large hedge fund Fir Tree Capital Management has decided that the doubts around the stablecoin Tether are serious enough to take out a substantial short position against the project. Tether has faced questions from regulators, many of which center around whether or not the stablecoin is actually backed by the reserves it claims to have. Some of the assets Tether holds are high-yield commercial paper, which Fir Tree evidently believes is substantially tied to Chinese real estate firms. If that is the case, the real estate crisis in China (primarily revolving around Evergrande Group) could cause the value of Tether's reserves to plummet. According to Fir Tree, they've been shorting Tether since July, and expect their bet could pay off within a year. Other commenters and analysts have speculated that if Tether collapses, and that it very well might, there could be enormous ramifications for the rest of the cryptocurrency space.
UK Financial Conduct Authority requires all Bitcoin ATMs to be shut down
All 81 functional Bitcoin ATMs in the United Kingdom are operating illegally, says the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). None of the companies operating them have a license to do so, and the FCA has said that they will take action against the companies if they don't shut down the kiosks.
One company now owns three of the most popular NFT collections: Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, and Meebits
Nothing really says "decentralized" like one company controlling the priciest and most popular NFT collections! Yuga Labs, the company behind the popular Bored Apes Yacht Club NFTs, announced they had purchased CryptoPunks and Meebits from LarvaLabs. CryptoPunks is one of the oldest NFT collections, and, along with Bored Apes and Meebits, ranks among the priciest collections on the market. Yuga Labs is also the owner of the popular Bored Ape Kennel Club and the Mutant Ape Yacht Club projects.
Facebook bans crypto scammer who pulled in up to $140,000 by impersonating economist David Rosenberg
A Facebook profile impersonating an economist named David Rosenberg was discovered by Snopes to have drawn in around 3.4 Bitcoin in deposits, ostensibly from victims who were convinced they were investing with the actual Rosenberg. The fake Rosenberg profile, and others associated with it, posted about how he had reportedly helped them get out of debt or make a lot of money. The scammer's account was originally created in 2012, and when it began to be used in 2021 for the crypto scam, the operators edited old posts to make it appear that the "investment" operation had been going on for multiple years. Facebook banned the account shortly after Snopes published its report.
MeUndies cancels its NFT underwear plans and sells its Bored Ape after community backlash
Believe me, I was as shocked as you were to discover that the MeUndies underwear brand has a "community". But that community apparently objected to the brand's purchase of a Bored Ape NFT, which they intended to use as a print on their line of undergarments. "We aren't going to make any excuses, we just didn't do the work we should have to make such an impactful decision", a MeUndies spokesperson wrote on Reddit. The spokesperson wrote that, after learning about the environmental impact of NFTs and cryptocurrency, they would be canceling the planned print, and selling off their Bored Ape. The NFT in question appeared to be BAYC #3986, which most recently sold in January for around 107 ETH ($260,000).
ESPN baseball reporter Jeff Passan has his Twitter account hacked and used to shill NFTs on "the biggest news day of [his] life"
ESPN MLB reporter Jeff Passan was having a great day, as he had been the one to break the news of an agreement between the MLB and the MLB Players Association, who had been deadlocked on labor negotiations. Unfortunately, this was soured a bit by his 800,000-follower, verified Twitter account being compromised and repurposed to shill "Skulltoons" NFTs.
Passan regained control of his Twitter account several hours later. Passan later wrote in a tweet, "hey remember that time i got hacked on the biggest news day of my life". The Skulltoons project distanced themselves from the incident, writing that they believed the hackers were trying to scam the Skulltoons community.
The Polygon network suffers an eleven-hour-long outage
After a network upgrade, Polygon went offline for eleven hours while developers scrambled to diagnose and patch an issue preventing its validators from achieving the 2/3 consensus required by the protocol. Projects and traders alike were affected by the outage, with various projects having to delay planned releases, and users reporting errors and funds stuck in transit. Although the network was able to release a patch to buy them some time, the project had to hard fork on March 18 in order to properly fix the issue.
After someone games the system to acquire a disproportionate amount of airdropped tokens valued at $123 million, Juno community begins a vote to take them away
A blockchain protocol called Juno launched in October 2021, airdropping their $JUNO tokens to members of the Cosmos ecosystem in proportion to how many $ATOM tokens they held. The protocol agreed via community vote that they would cap the amount given to a single individual at 50,000 $JUNO to "ensure fair distribution across the network". However, there is no restriction that one individual only have one crypto wallet, and so one single whale ended up receiving more than 3.1 million $JUNO across tens of wallets, which they later consolidated into one. Because of the enormous value centralized in one wallet — equivalent to around $123 million — if the whale sold off their $JUNO they could wipe out liquidity on decentralized exchanges and tank the price of the token. They could also perform a 51% attack on the network, as they already have half of quorum.
On March 10, a community proposal was submitted, proposing to take away the majority of the whale's tokens (worth around $121 million), and leave them with the 50,000 $JUNO (a little below $2 million) that was originally intended to be the maximum per person. The vote passed, in a major blow to an ecosystem where "your keys, your coins" is taken as gospel — that is, if you control the keys to a wallet, your assets supposedly can't be taken from you.
Bored Apes team asks people to verify their identities for their next project, shortly after making a stink about their own identities being revealed
Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) project, announced a new project in partnership with blockchain gaming group Animoca Brands. The signup required KYC — that is, people were required to verify their real-life identities — something many BAYC fans seemed to bristle at, particularly given they had released absolutely no information about what the project would entail. BAYC themselves wrote, "P.S. we don't like KYCs either, but we think you're going to want to be a part of this."
There was some irony in BAYC requiring their buyers to reveal their identities only a month after some of the BAYC founders' identities were revealed by a journalist (who made the connection based on publicly-available information), which made the BAYC team and many of their supporters absolutely irate.
NFT collector accidentally sells their rock for close to $0 instead of over $1 million
The owner of EtherRock #44 tried to list their NFT for sale for 444 ETH (almost $1.2 million), but erroneously listed it for 444 wei — the fractional unit of ETH typically used for representing transaction fees. A bot programmed to look for listings like this one, where a pricey NFT is listed for far below its average or floor price, quickly snapped up the NFT before the buyer could remove the listing. The buyer of the NFT eventually tried to flip the NFT for 234 ETH, (around $625,000). The trader wrote on Twitter, "In one click my entire net worth of ~$1 million dollars, gone".