Web3 is Going Just Great

The vote, which still has a day left before completion, is currently standing at 75% against and 25% in support. However, it was discovered that Arbitrum had already begun spending those 750 million tokens, including via the movement of a substantial amount of tokens, and "conversion of some funds into stablecoins for operational purposes".

Another Arbitrum team member subsequently published a post in which they claimed that the proposal was not really a vote but rather a "ratification" of decisions that had already been made by the Arbitrum team, leading many to question what the DAO was even for in the first place. Others questioned the fact that Arbitrum was receiving so much money to use however they liked, not subject to DAO approval.

Things got even messier when the Arbitrum Twitter account "clarified" that "40M $ARB tokens have been allocated as a loan to a sophisticated actor in the financial markets space", and the rest had been sold off for "operational costs". The loan of $52 million worth of ARB to an unnamed actor and the conversion of another $13 million to stablecoins led some to accuse the Arbitrum team of "selling off", cashing in far more than would likely be required for foundation costs in a brief period of time.

The group is seeking $25 million to create a cryptocurrency exchange they're calling "GTX" for now — which they write in the pitch deck is "because G comes after F".

Not only that, but the exchange plans to focus on claims trading — that is, the trading of claims held by creditors against debtors who are undergoing bankruptcy proceedings, like FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, or Mt. Gox (throwback!). The fact that 3AC was a major catalyst in kicking off the string of bankruptcies we saw throughout 2022 was not lost on observers, with Nic Carter of the Castle Island venture capital firm commenting that the endeavor "is akin to arsonists returning to the scene of the crime and offering to charge their victims for buckets of water".

The USDN stablecoin remained within a few cents of its intended USD peg for about a year, before losing its peg in April. Since then, it has had a pretty bumpy road, spending much of the year more than a few cents off the dollar peg, and dropping much farther below it in early November.

A less-than-enthused commenter responded to Ivanov's Twitter announcement of a new coin, writing, "My brother in Christ more stablecoins to depeg is not the answer". "It will be undepeggable", replied Ivanov. Well, in that case.

In case you were wondering, I checked, and yes. Someone has already come up with the concept of metaverse mortgages.

Personally, I'm excited to see other horrific parts of the system of homeownership get recreated virtually. Metaverse homeowners associations. Metaverse building permit red tape. Metaverse NIMBYs. Metaverse property liens. Metaverse neighborhood watch.

The group then delivered the sculpture to Tesla HQ in Austin, Texas, and is reportedly refusing to leave until he accepts the statue. Unfortunately he may be too busy burning Twitter to the ground to have noticed.

Despite receiving press coverage in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, and USA Today, the project has as of yet failed to achieve much of a pump, and the token is trading around where it was several months ago. I've not named the token here in the hopes of not contributing to the goals of their viral marketing stunt.