Elon Takes Twitter to the Moon 🚀

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made headlines this morning after a 13-G filing revealed that he bought more than 73 million shares of Twitter. The purchase means that Musk will be the company’s largest shareholder by a healthy margin, commanding 9.2% of the company. 🤭 🤭 

Musk’s lion-sized purchase comes just days after the world’s richest man hosted a poll on the social media site asking if Twitter “rigorously adheres” to upholding free speech. Musk added “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” Ultimately, the poll’s results demonstrated skepticism about Twitter’s commitment to free speech and democratic values: only 29.6% of respondents said they believe that Twitter upholds free speech on its platform.

In the midst of the poll, Musk floated the idea of creating a new social media platform. However, everybody knows that when you can’t beat them, just buy them. And buy he did. 💰 💰

Some of Musk’s purchase can be attributed to skepticism about Twitter’s “new regime” under Parag Agrawal, who replaced founder and CEO Jack Dorsey in November 2021. Musk tweeted a meme days after Agrawal succeeded Dorsey which implied that Dorsey was ousted by the former CTO. Musk came to the defense of Dorsey in March 2020, during which Twitter was being assailed by activist investors.

Though the filing indicates Musk’s buy is simply a passive position, recent tweets (and insight) from Musk support the case that “passive” could become “activist” in due time. ⏳ Regardless of what the filing says, Musk will probably have a lot more say in Twitter’s product from now on … unless the platform wants to anger the company’s new largest shareholder.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Twitter and Musk as this story progresses. 👀

A crypto “bridge” called Stargate has appreciated one of the most successful launches in the history of Decentralized Finance… and it hasn’t even been out for a month yet.

The protocol, which launched on Mar. 18, auctioned off over 100 million Stargate tokens ($STG.X) in order to amass the liquidity necessary to start the bridge. However, demand has pushed its liquidity figures beyond maxis’ wildest dreams. Within a week of launch, the bridge’s TVL notched $2 billion.

Now, 17 days after launch, Stargate is now above a $4 billion TVL.

Like other crypto “bridges”, Stargate is a protocol which helps investors move their money between blockchains such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and Fantom, among others. Bridges are important because assets from one chain cannot be sent directly to another chain. For example, Ethereum cannot be sent to a Bitcoin or Solana address. Instead, an intermediary has to agree to swap the assets for you. Alternatively, an intermediary can custody the asset for you and issue a “Wrapped” asset on another chain, which represents ownership in the interest on the base chain.

However, Stargate claims it has solved many of the headaches and security shortcomings with bridging (something it has coined as the “bridging trilemma”) by guaranteeing instant “finality”, liquidity shared across many chains, and the use of native assets on each chain. That means that it’s not just designed to be more secure than existing chains, but less risky to use.

Practically speaking, that means that Stargate only offers support on a handful of pervasive assets which exist across chains — mostly stablecoins such as $USDC, $USDT, and $BUSD. The new protocol invites investors to “pool” their stablecoins from chains on Stargate in exchange, which allows investors to swap stables across chains. For example, you can swap $1 of USDC on Ethereum for $1 of an equivalent stablecoin on another network, lesser a small fee that is kicked back to users who pool their assets for investors to use. Those fees are kicked back to people who pool and farm their assets, who are rewarded in the protocol’s crypto, $STG.X. 

The success of Stargate’s launch speaks to the enormous demand among the multichain-conscious, who have been burned by using bridges such as Wormhole (suffered a $300 million hack last month), Ronin (which was taken for $620 million two weeks ago) and Multichain (suffered a $3 million hack in January 2022.) However, in spite of these repeated shortcomings, demand for DeFi and crypto applications across chains have an uncanny allure. Nearly half of all money locked in DeFi protocols and chains is now coming from chains that aren’t Ethereum, speaking to the robust demand for interoperability (and the importance of bridges). 

Though there are no guarantees Stargate will be an absolution from hacks, security problems, and rugs, it’s already off to a better start. After all, the $4 billion that is already stewing in Stargate isn’t for nothing.