Happy Wednesday. It’s June 1, 2022.
We hope you enjoyed the holiday weekend… the crypto markets sure did, at least until the markets went back to disappointing today.
As we said last Friday, the next few days will include a lot of features coverage. Today, we’ve got a slate of short news stories to hash out for you. Among them are the airdrop of the new $LUNA and $OP tokens, the OpenSea employee charged with criminal insider trading, and Solana’s latest outage.
Keep an eye out over the next few days… they’re going to be very spicy and worthwhile.
That all said, here are today’s moves:
| Bitcoin (BTC) |
$29,661
|
-6.99% |
| Ethereum (ETH) |
$1,810
|
-6.88% |
| Binance Coin (BNB) |
$299.09
|
-7.19% |
| Ripple (XRP) |
$0.3959
|
-5.98% |
| Cardano (ADA) |
$0.5537
|
-11.19% |
| Solana (SOL) |
$39.62
|
-13.25% |
| Dogecoin (DOGE) |
$0.08123
|
-6.68% |
| Polkadot (DOT) |
$9.35
|
-9.69% |
| Tron (TRX) |
$0.08249
|
-0.80% |
| Avalanche (AVAX) |
$23.15
|
-13.19% |
Two high-profile airdrops lost steam out of the gate this week — the Optimism ($OP.X) airdrop and the Terra 2.0 ($LUNA.X) airdrop.
Both airdrops have been anticipated for the last few weeks, albeit for different reasons: the Optimism airdrop has been eagerly-awaited by early-adopters of the Optimism Network, an Ethereum layer-2 blockchain. Terra’s new $LUNA.X airdrop has been eagerly-awaited by people who lost stacks of cash on the original Terra blockchain.
Unfortunately, whether you were being rewarded or being compensated for losses — you didn’t have much selling at an ideal price.
Both the $OP.X and $LUNA.X tokens lost steam out of the gate. Both fell more than 50%.
Get a load of $LUNA.X’s price action…
And now check out the $OP token, which airdropped today. The visual is fresh off the Uniswap price for $OP on the Optimism chain…
The two airdrops prove that there’s enormous tension weighing on new assets, and on the broader market, in spite of an ongoing contraction in and around the crypto space. We’ll keep you guys updated on how these assets fare in the days to come.
The U.S. Department of Justice charged a former OpenSea employee with criminal insider trading. The incident, which took place last September, became a watershed moment for the crypto and NFT ecosystem.
OpenSea’s Head of Product, Nathaniel Chastain, used internal information to make millions of dollars. Namely, he knew which NFT projects would appear on the OpenSea homepage and purchased those assets in advance of their feature. He then sold them for multiples more once they listed.
Chastain was shown to the door at the company not long after the September incident. He was reportedly working on a new NFT project called Oval, according to investor materials.
He was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering today. The maximum sentence of each are 20 years in prison. He was arrested in New York this morning.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said that though NFTs were new, criminality is not. “Nathaniel Chastain betrayed OpenSea by using its confidential business information to make money for himself.”
Williams underscored the office’s commitment to “stamping out insider trading” on both the stock market and blockchain.
The Solana blockchain came to a halt today for four hours, marking the latest outage for one of the world’s largest blockchains.
The chain’s team acknowledged the outage just after noon ET today, saying that a “bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block.” The glitch prevented the network from advancing to the next block.
The validators completed a reset of the mainnet in the evening, according to a tweet posted at 5:06 pm ET.
Solana, the sixth-largest blockchain by market cap ex-stablecoins, fell more than -13% on the news today. Sellers cited Solana’s repeated downtime and failures as reasons for selling.
It settled into a market capitalization of roughly $13.5 billion as of this writing, wedged between the Binance USD and Dogecoin.