5 Minute Crypto - a daily degens update (Shapella live! FTX rebirth?! Gigi bitcoin banger; Arca, and moar)

Two Degens (resources, interviews, on all things crypto and some AI)

This is the 5 minute crypto daily update for April 13th
As of recording:
Bitcoin is $30,013 on Coingecko
ETH is $1,919, after Shapella upgrade went live a few hours ago
What’s going on in crypto land…
Shapella
-the ETH upgrade went live
-there was lots of debate on what would happen to ETH price
-So far price has gone up 1% in last 24 hours
-320K ETH pending withdrawals, out of a total 18M deposited stake
https://beaconcha.in/validators/withdrawals
https://token.unlocks.app/ethereum-shanghai
FTX has reclaimed $7.3B in assets - of which $2B is cash
-There is also talk of FTX reopening its exchange
-Their exchange token FTT surged 80% in price as of this recording, to $2.49
https://twitter.com/thecryptosquad_/status/1646309123204747264
-In lead attorney Andy Dietderich’s words,
There are possibilities that customers could have an option to take part of their proceeds that they would otherwise receive in cash from the estate and receive some kind of an interest in the exchange going forward
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/04/12/crypto-exchange-ftx-could-reopen-its-attorney-says-firms-ftt-token-surges/
A few recommended reads for you
Gigi with another bitcoin banger on what is bitcoin mining
https://dergigi.com/2023/04/12/bitcoins-are-not-mined-they-are-issued-over-time/
If you are offended by Bitcoin’s energy use because you hate the little orange coins that are supposedly being mined, I have bad news for you: the same amount of bitcoins would be issued over the same amount of time, even if Bitcoin’s kilowatt-hours would be close to zero. The same amount of sats would exist, and surprisingly, the network could be used by the same amount of people as it is today. It would just be centralized, insecure, easily influenced, easily altered, prone to censorship, prone to corruption, and catering to special interests

Arca’s newsletter, with a fascinating explanation of the recent Rook DAO controversy:
https://www.ar.ca/blog/a-real-time-example-of-investing-in-daos
If DAOs and governance processes are supposed to be a more inclusive form of corporate governance, we should probably learn from what doesn’t work in traditional corporate governance. In crypto, there are “dual-class shares” in the form of equity in the teams combined with tokens (see dYdX), and there are non-independent boards (see Syphons in Rook DAO). Overall, there is a complete lack of alignment between the teams developing the products and the token holders who are supposed to govern them.

Finally, a great deep dive from the Overpriced Jpegs newsletter, a guest post by Uglydoll founder David Horvath on building character brands:
https://jpegs.banklesshq.com/p/building-a-massive-long-term-character
Evergreen Ubiquity is achieved by becoming one with culture, never marketing to it, earned through thousands of carefully thought out “culture micro-transactions”… events and moves which on their own, to the uninformed, would appear too tiny to make a difference, but collectively get the world to fall in love.

That’s it for today! That took 4.5 minutes. All the links will be in the show notes. You can follow @twodegenspod on Twitter and subscribe for more daily updates! I’ll try to do ‘em every day except when I’m very sad.
Outro clip from Bob Loukas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jewyEy2F3nM
Love you