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I talked to a guy that spent $30M on a Beeple
Shaan Puri & Ben Levy
March 07, 2022
GM, this is the Milk Road. The daily email that tells you what’s going on in crypto, in less than 5 minutes.
Markets are turbulent. Stocks are down. Oil is up. Wheat & corn prices are going crazy.
Bitcoin holding at $39K. Only 5 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap) were in the green this weekend.
What's In Today’s Milk Road:
🤑 We called a crypto OG worth $100m+
📊 An interesting chart
🥛 Five Nuggets you'll wanna read
🧑⚖️ Coinbase and FTX talk about enforcing sanctions
We talked to a Crypto OG worth $100m+
Just had a great call with Ryan Zurrer.
4 Baller Things About Ryan:
He recently bought a $30M Beeple NFT
Early at Polychain, one of the first-ever crypto focused funds
His net worth is $100M+
Early investor in MakerDAO, Filecoin, Axie Infinity, dydx, etc.
Highlights from the call:
He bought Human One by Beeple (a 7-foot sculpture made of LED screens) for $29m in November because it's a living and evolving piece of art, it's funny, and he believes Metcalfe's Law applies to NFTs.
(If you wanna see how it evolves, the sculpture just updated to support Ukraine).
He's an avid NFT collector and sees something most people don't: these pieces of digital art can earn him yield.
Here's how it works:
He borrows against the NFT in U.S. dollars, then uses the capital as a lender in a riskier, higher-interest DeFi transaction (I.E. the 20% UST yield we showed you on Friday).
Just last week we saw someone get a loan for 101 CryptoPunks, so we expect to see this more and more.
Here’s some other things he mentioned he’s bullish on right now:
Ronin
Axie Infinity was the first big breakout crypto game. It generated like $2B in less than a year, and thousands of people in emerging markets literally get paid to play the game as a job (“Play to Earn”).
It runs on the Ronin blockchain, which has it’s own token $RON
It's usage is so impressive, it's right up there with Ethereum's. Ronin has 410k daily users, while Ethereum has 480k.
But Ronin has only a $2B market cap, while Ethereum is ~$300B.
As Ryan put it: “Either this is all just one giant internet casino and fundamentals don’t matter…or fundamentals do matter and Ronin is grossly undervalued."
Safe Haven Assets:
He named a bunch, but one non-crypto asset that stood out was 1st edition Charizard cards that are in mint condition.
Pokemon is the highest grossing franchise of all time globally, and has lasted for decades and the 1st edition cards have a capped supply.
He has accumulated a large collection of premium Charizard cards in his portfolio.
DeFi Yield
He and his team built a product to deliver consistent yield farming results (they call it Medici) in the 20-50% APR range.
You can read about it here
His advice for us: lean into what the nerds are doing
Ryan got into some great early deals by hustling & spending time with builders before they even had a token.
Joining discords, participating in DAOs, going to hackathons, conferences, brainstorming with devs etc.
This is one way to get massive (1000x) types of returns.
If you wanna keep up with Ryan, here's his twitter and his company's blog.
Chart Of The Day 📊
Andre Cronje is a famous crypto engineer. He helped build Fantom, Yearn Finance, and a bunch of other prominent DeFi projects.
That’s why it was very surprising that he suddenly changed his LinkedIn and his partner tweeted they were done with building in crypto.
This caused the price of Fantom to drop 20% fast
While the price has started to recover, this brings up an interesting question. In a world of decentralization, how much should the founders involvement matter once there's real users and usage?
Five Nuggets 🔍
Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, & Lil Yachty are getting sued for promoting Safemoon coin
We bought a piece of a lamborghini that was blown up : the artist SHL0MS blew up a $250K lambo and auctioned off the fragments for ~$2M total. The auction lasted almost 30 hours and had 1784 total bidders with a top bid of 69 ETH (~$175k). Milk Road got in on the action & won CAR // 0883. See the top 50 bidders here.
DeFi legends are leaving crypto and handing over ~25 apps and services: Andre Cronje and Anton Nell abruptly announce their decision to stop their work in the space. Tokens associated with the projects are all down big - Fantom, Yearn.Finance, Solidly to name a few. This is how they broke the news.
I’ll take a side of Bitcoin with that burger please: Burger chain Shake Shack has announced that for every purchase made with a Cash App debit card through March, it will refund customers 15% of the equivalent total in Bitcoin.
Tai Lopez NFT chaos: Tai was the talk of NFT land with his recent drop where he was auctioned off activities to do with him. Some of our favorites include: game of HORSE with Tai (18.4ETH = ~$46,500 ), 1 on 1 Watch A Movie with Tai (12.27 ETH = ~$31,000) and 1 on 1 Shadow Tai At His Office (42.93 ETH = ~$108,400). Curious what else was for sale? check it out here.
Terra on a roll: The latest rise in the price of LUNA, Terra's native token, has made Terra the second-largest home for all things DeFi, right behind Ethereum. Check out the charts here.
How FTX & Coinbase Enforce US Sanctions
Both FTX and Coinbase put out threads on how they're enforcing US sanctions in the past few days:
Both are good reads to understand how centralized exchanges are following the laws and how it might not be a bad idea to hold your own keys from now on!
Alright, that's all we got for the start of the week!
What'd you think of today's email?
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