LensLinks: Issue 56

Today in LensLinks:

• Wintermute Emerges: $1.5T in Digital Assets Traded

• Daniel Alegre Joins Yuga Labs as CEO

• CZ: NFTs and Ticketing in the Music Industry

• 101: What and when is the next Bitcoin Halving?

• 101: Crypto Trading Vs Crypto Investing

Activision Blizzard COO Daniel Alegre is leaving the gaming giant to take over as CEO of Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Yuga’s first and current CEO Nicole Muniz will stay on as a strategic advisor.

“Nicole, Greg, and I have been on the hunt for someone with Daniel’s skill set for some time,” said Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow in a press release. The crypto company wanted to appoint a gaming veteran as CEO to help work on projects like Otherside, its metaverse gaming platform. As an executive who oversaw franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, Alegre fits the bill. He also worked at Google for more than 16 years, in roles such as president of Global and Strategic Partnerships.

Although it has doubters, the metaverse is already making huge changes in how we experience entertainment. In 2021, Facebook Inc. officially changed its name to Meta and announced its new focus on the metaverse.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the metaverse is a virtual world that users can access through VR headsets. But the metaverse isn’t a video game, it's a virtual interactive experience, and some people call it the next evolution of the internet.

Evgeny Gaevoy was contemplating what to do if terraUSD (UST), a cryptocurrency stable coin pegged to the value of one U.S. dollar, imploded. UST had about $15 billion in circulating coins, and its parent company was backed by highly regarded investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners. But as early as 2021, a small set of people had been tweeting about its potential demise, saying that algorithm-based stable coins not backed by government-issued currencies were doomed to fail.

This past February, 38-year-old Gaevoy said to himself, “If this happens, we want to be in the middle of it.” His company, London-based Wintermute, is a trading firm that does rapid buying and selling of digital assets, pocketing tiny fractions of a dollar in profits from millions of trades a day. The more the market moves up or down, the more money they make.

Metaverse & Gaming - A Little More...

Blockchain, Tokens & Defi - A Little More...

Crypto Trading - A Little More...

Make no mistake, these are trying times for our industry. FTX’s bankruptcy will result in huge customer and investor losses. The cryptoasset space is still developing, and this is a serious setback.

These failures can teach us valuable lessons about how to start capitalizing more consistently on one of the fundamental benefits of crypto technology: transparency.

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Disclaimer: This note is distributed by Regiment, LLC for informational purposes only and is sourced from publicly available media reports.  It is not an investment recommendation or solicitation for any investment.  The information is current as of date and subject to change. In such case Regiment, LLC does not undertake to provide any updates.  Recipients must be aware that any private, alternative investments discussed are speculative in nature, often illiquid, and subject to loss of capital.