Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning and welcome to the newest addition in the Today I Noticed newsletter!
Crypto Thursdays!
First, in case you missed it, let me catch you up on what this is.
Before I took my writing break, I encountered two problems:
1. I was writing a random full fledged article or life update every single Thursday.
This is actually pretty hard to keep up with, and so I wanted to cut back and simply write a full fledged article whenever I feel inspired to.
Not necessarily on a weekly basis.
So those life update, travel blog, type articles are not gone forever! Just not coming weekly :)
2. Friday Inspiration pieces were morphing into all crypto articles
Not all of you are interested in that, and it kind of got away from the original purpose of finding fun or inspirational articles.
As such, I created this new weekly letter! The format of this will be exactly like Friday Inspiration, but this time they will all be crypto articles on purpose.
That means if you have no interest in crypto, you can just skip the Thursday letters and enjoy the Friday Inspiration pieces instead, which will not contain any crypto stuff :)
So without further ado, let’s jump into the first edition of Crypto Thursdays!
Ex-Coinbase Manager Arrested in US Crypto Insider-Trading Case
It seems like since the dawn of crypto the SEC and the US government have been trying to figure out exactly how to regulate this new space.
In the meantime, people have been treating crypto like a lawless wild west. No rules apply.
Well for this ex-coinbase manager (and others I believe), that didn’t work out so well. Let me explain.
Coinbase was founded in 2012 as one of the first centralized crypto exchanges, and has since become the most widely used exchange (in the US at least).
One way they facilitated a lot of success was by carefully vetting any new crypto project they would put on their platform. They wanted to ensure (to the best of their ability) the safety of their users.
In other words, they wanted to limit the number of spam projects on the platform.
As such, there is a pretty rigorous process to get your cryptocurrency on Coinbase.
What exactly is the outcome here?
Coinbase now acts as a verification process for your cryptocurrency project.
All it really means is that that crypto is not scam; it is legit. Whether that legitimate project is a good idea solving real problems is a different question.
When a cryptocurrency is first released on Coinbase there is an influx of investments. Usually really really fast and then it settles back down.
For instance, one of my favorite projects is DeSo. When it got on Coinbase it went from a price of around $80 up to $200 per coin in just a couple of days! Then over another couple days it dropped to $50.
Think of Coinbase as almost like going public, because in a way, it allows a huge public audience to buy your cryptocurrency who couldn’t or didn’t have the know-how to do so before.
Ok, so you understand Coinbase now?
What happened with the insider trading thing then?
Well, as you can probably imagine, a lot of higher ups in Coinbase know which cryptocurrencies are going to make it on their exchange or not.
And even though I said Coinbase is like going “public” it’s not the exact same. Most of these projects had ways to buy their cryptocurrency without Coinbase.
There are other exchanges out there that don’t have rigorous processes you could use, or the project itself might set up different payment methods. For instance, DeSo has a whole portal itself to buy DeSo with bitcoin or ethereum.
So what this manger did is he could see which cryptos were dropping on the Coinbase exchange the next day, and then he’d go and buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of those cryptos the night before.
Most would have a dramatic rise like DeSo and he easily doubled his money in a day.
The SEC said he profited at least a million dollars doing this!
CHIPOTLE ENCOURAGES FANS TO "BUY THE DIP" WITH NEW $200,000+ CRYPTO GAME AND 1-CENT GUAC FOR NATIONAL AVOCADO DAY
I thought this was some very clever marketing right here!
For those not aware of crypto or the terminology used, we are now in what they call a “Crypto Winter.”
That’s the crypto way of saying a bear market.
Anyways, so in the crypto world, we are in this winter time. Crypto acts like any market in that it has ups and downs. But with crypto things go to the extreme.
People don’t care about 7-10% growth like they might with a stock. They want 1000% growth, and they get it too!
But they also have really big dips, like down 80% is normal. Bitcoin dropped from almost $69K to around $20K, where it’s been for a few months now.
Which leads us to another common meme you see in the crypto space:
Buy the Dip
It’s not that clever or new. I’m sure people have been saying that for years in the stock market too.
But Chipotle took it a step further. They have launched a new marketing ploy where they are giving away $200K in different cryptos to encourage people to “buy the dip.”
But in their case, they are mainly talking about queso and guac! I love clever plays on words :)
So go buy some queso and see if you can win a bitcoin. And if you don’t want it, you can just give it to me :)
Until next time, thank you again for the support! Share this with someone you think might enjoy it!