GM. This is Milk Road, your crypto captain for the day. We’re here to get you through the turbulent crypto seas.

It’s Friday, y’all. Let’s do this:

• Why PEPE investors can’t cash out 🐸

• Brian Armstrong in Bermuda 🏝️

• Funding Friday! 💰

• Sleeping Bitcoin giant wakes up 🍪

Today's edition is brought to you by Limewire - the OG music platform diving into Web3 with a new music NFT marketplace & token sale.

PEPE: THE MEMECOIN UP 21,000% 🐸

There’s one thing dominating Crypto Twitter right now.

It’s not Gary G. dunks or gm tweets. It’s not even 5 am cold plunges.

It’s PEPE, the meme coin that launched on *checks watch* Sunday and is already up 21,000%. 

PEPE is now the sixth largest meme coin by market cap (~$150M.)

Here’s what you need to know about all this:

1/ Meme coins are get-rich-quick schemes tokens based on internet jokes

PEPE is based on the Pepe the Frog meme. There are 420.69T tokens in circulation... 

These things feed off FOMO - crypto investors pounce on meme coins early in case the price skyrockets.

Why? Because that’s what happened with DOGE & SHIB.

Both meme coins were pumped so hard by online users that their market cap surged. They made early investors hella rich. 

Now everyone is looking for the next opportunity. 

(Don’t compare PEPE to either though - Pepe is trying to replace DOGE/SHIB.)

2/ PEPE investors are already seeing gains, but they can’t cash out

One paid $250 for 5.9T PEPE tokens. Now that’s worth ~$2M.

They might be millionaires on paper, but they can’t really sell. That’s because the token’s liquidity pool is just ~$3M (for comparison, ETH has a daily trading volume of ~$775M.)

So there isn’t enough in the pool for whales (largest wallets) to take out that much cash. No Lambo for you yet

Not until more people buy enough PEPE at least, so that the whales can cash out…

And when they do try to cash out for that much, it’ll drag PEPE’s price down and the rest of the holders would lose their money.

Be safe out there, y’all.

3/ Most meme coins won’t be as big as DOGE & SHIB 

Meme coins are usually rug pulls or scams. They crash & burn faster than Elon’s Starship

Take BONK, a Solana-based meme coin that was riding high for a few days in January before plummeting. People lost millions.

The Milk Road Take: PEPE’s low liquidity + major holders trying to cash out could = the token’s crash. But who knows.

Around here, we live by one major tenet: DYOR.

CHANGE THE WAY YOU DISCOVER AND INTERACT WITH MUSIC

Ready for the comeback story of the year?

A legend back from the graveyard. Everyone’s 2007 lifeline. LimeWire. 

LimeWire was the illegal Spotify before there was Spotify. It was a free peer-to-peer file sharing client used by 50 million users every month, to download and share pirated music. 

Then last summer, they decided to run it back. They raised money from some of the top venture capitalists in crypto including Kraken Ventures, Arrington Capital and GSR. 

Their goal? To reinvent how fans discover artists. And their music and entertainment NFT marketplace is just getting started…

So far they have: 

• Announced a global partnership with Universal Music Group

• Signed headline artists with a combined 100M social media followers and 100M+ monthly listeners, and advisors like Tareef Michael from Wu Tang Clan

• Grown their Discord community to 58,000+ and Telegram to 9,000+

• Launched a viral LimeWire game, that was featured on Cointelegraph, Decrypt and Blockworks

• Launched a new creator platform in March 2023 and sold out multiple music drops

• Sold out LimeWire Token community presale in <48 hours

Next up for LimeWire? The LimeWire Token (LMWR). 

LMWR provides holders with:

• Governance and voting rights on the platform

• Loyalty tiers and special access

• Exclusive music and video NFT drops 

• The ability to participate in their community and attend in person events

LimeWire just announced the LMWR token sale, happening on May 2nd and opened KYC today on https://token.lmwr.com/.

COINBASE GOES TO BERMUDA 🏝️

Welp, looks like the SEC has officially started pushing crypto players out.

And the first one is Coinbase. It just secured a Bermuda license to launch a perpetual futures exchange. 

What are perpetuals? They let traders bet on the future price of an asset indefinitely. They’re kinda like an everlasting Gobstopper.

And Coinbase is moving fast. It’s rumored that the exchange could launch as soon as next week. 

Why does this matter? 3 reasons:

1/ There’s a HUGE market for a hot sector like perpetuals

They’re offered on most major tokens, but there was over $25B of volume on BTC perpetuals alone yesterday.

2/ Coinbase is makin’ moves to bring the next billion users to crypto 

Coinbase just launched BASE, its new L2 blockchain. 

But perpetuals will appeal to a much different crowd. Coinbase is tryna be the one-stop crypto shop.

3/ Others could follow Coinbase’s suit and move overseas 

Coinbase isn’t the only one fed up with regulatory confusion in the U.S. A bunch of others have announced plans to expand across the pond. 

Way to go, Gary…

FUNDING FRIDAY 💰

It’s Funding Friday! This week, $236M was raised by crypto companies. Here’s who secured the bag:

EOS Network raised $60M via token sale to build out its blockchain-based gaming/app platform. No, this isn’t the chapstick company of the early 2000s…

Unchained Capital got $60M for its Bitcoin-centric services, like cold storage. Bear market who?

Karate Combat got $18M for its mixed reality gaming environment. And it’s powered by Epic Games… as in the creator of Fortnite. Sign us up

Tableland got $8M for its decentralized cloud database. Blockchain 🤝 The Cloud

Check out the full database of companies that have raised money this year, right here.

MILK & COOKIES 🍪

A 9-year-old Bitcoin wallet just woke up. The last time these funds moved, the wallet was worth $4M. Today, it's worth $176M…

Tesla $BTC Holdings were unchanged in Q1 2023. Details emerged from the quarterly financials filing.

Ethereum name service added fiat payments for domain registrations. Another partnership for Moonpay & another step towards mass adoption.

A Dutch court agreed to free the Tornado Cash dev with a pending trial looming. He was held for 9 months without an answer. The next court date is set for May 24.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

That's a wrap for today. Meet us on Twitter to talk all about it. It’s kinda like a family BBQ but better - no screaming kids, awkward photos, or drunk uncles telling weird stories (@MilkRoadDaily)

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.