[Daily] Shanghai plays Santa

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. It’s Friday! Let’s start you on something fun. Four of Andy Warhol’s iconic art pieces will be up for sale soon. But, it will be offered as tokenised investments. Each piece of art can be owned by a maximum of 1,000 people under what is being called “fractional ownership”. And the best part? The SEC’s green-lit it. Line up.

As of Thursday, 7PM IST

Crypto's heady rally hit the slow lane. Bitcoin was jittery ahead of the expiry of $4 billion worth options contracts on Friday. Ethereum saw profit booking and turned bearish. S&P 500 and Nasdaq saw buying in early trade. The Indian markets were closed for Ram Navami.

ETH Natives Are Winning

Earlier this week, we said Ethereum hasn’t been able to replicate the magic of Bitcoin. But the banking crisis has seen an upside for ETH as well. And not just the token, but others that are built on the blockchain.

Who is making hay?Lido Finance is up ~120% since the start of the year. In addition, it is also testing out decentralised ETH staking using infrastructure tools such as SSV Network.

That’s not all. Lido has revealed plans to include NFTs in unstaking. This means that Lido users will get transferable NFTs for staked Ether withdrawal requests. The NFT represents the staked Ether rewards, which can either be redeemed or transferred to someone else.

Who else?Frax Shares and Rocket Pool are among those that are seeing an upside.

Rocket Pool is a decentralised ETH staking protocol that has gained more than 15% over the past week. Unlike the mainnet that mandates 32 ETH, Rocket Pool allows users to stake ETH with only 16 ETH.

Frax Share is the governance token of the Frax Protocol that runs a fractional stablecoin on ETH. It also offers a liquid staking derivative through staked Frax tokens.

Other factors at play?It’s not just the enthusiasm around Ethereum that’s getting investors excited. The Shanghai upgrade is finally creating the enthusiasm that it was supposed to.

What’s Next For MATIC?

Polygon launched its highly anticipated zkEVM solution on Monday. But the network has failed to impress the market. Whales sold $30 million worth of MATIC soon after and the price continued to drop.

FYI  zkEVM is an Ethereum scaling solution that allows multiple transactions to be validated on a single protocol.

Hasn’t scaling helped?It is too early to say. But Polygon isn’t the first one to launch something like this. Last week, ETH scaling solution zkSync launched its Alpha mainnet to enable faster transactions.

While there is no doubt that zkEVM offers scalability, Polygon has advised users to go slow.

And what about partnerships?Now that’s something that Polygon is very good at. In the past two weeks, the network has added marquee NFT names, enabled NFT authentication and onboarded new infrastructure partners.

Who Will Get Do Kwon?

The much-maligned founder of Terra, Do Kwon, was arrested in Montenegro. Well, you know that. But who gets a hold of him?

Everyone wants a pieceThe US wants to bring him in for defrauding investors through Terraform. Then there are criminal fraud charges against him in New York. South Korea, his home country, has also sought extradition. South Korea had asked Interpol to issue a red notice against him in September. But Montenegro says it won’t let him go so easily. Do Kwon faces charges related to forging his passport before the country decides on his extradition.

Where does this lead?Do Kwon always maintained he wasn’t hiding and kept tweeting from his account intermittently. And then he was caught with a forged passport in Montenegro. Allegedly. But you know, infamous pharma bro, Martin Shkreli famously told Kwon that jail in the US wasn’t that bad.

Did It for Water

Remember Matt Damon’s “Embarrassing Cash Grab” ad? He’s now explained why he did it.

It was all for a causeDamon said water.org, the clean water project he co-founded, was the reason he did the ad. In fact, he claims he gave up all the money he made from the ad to his own venture. 🤔

Ok, thenThe reason Damon got so much flak was that people claimed the Academy Award winner’s endorsement convinced them to invest money and they lost a tonne of it soon after. Smh.

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