Crypto winners & losers

Big brands diving into NFTs, a cool payment term concept, and Solana's unfortunate hack :c

Author

Lili (QueenBao)
August 08, 2022

GM Baos.

Happy Monday. Today we’re jumping right in to highlight some web3 winners & losers from a jam-packed news weekend.

Today we cover:

  • [Winner] Coinbase x BlackRock

  • [Winner] Starbucks NFT Loyalty Reward Program

  • [Winner] Halliday’s $6m raise

  • [Loser] $4m Solana hack 😭

  • JOBS jobs jobs – we're hiring too ;)

BlackRock offers Crypto to their Clients

Hold onto your seats Baos, because BlackRock is diving into crypto with Coinbase 🔥

This news has sent Coinbase’s stock price up 47% over the last 5 days, which is 89% since last month. (Sadly I'm still down 60% but we're mooning now, right?)

Why is this a big deal? BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with $8.5t AUM. Offering Coinbase to their clients means some massive funds will begin to utilise the platform for crypto trades.

$COIN became one of the most mentioned names on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets, blowing GME out of the conversation 😆

BlackRock is integrating Coinbase Prime to give their clients the option to trade crypto. It's about time! Coinbase has been a stellar product for institutional investors, and now they’ve landed the top.

We're likely to see a lot more big bucks coming into crypto. You ready? 😎

Starbucks’ web3 strategy

Nothing like some coffee-themed NFTs to keep my caffeine levels sky-high.

Starbucks is kicking off their web3 game by bringing their super successful loyalty program to the next level 📈

Imagine acquiring a new digital collectible from Starbucks that serves as your access pass to a global community, one with engaging content experiences and collaboration all centred around coffee ☕️ – Brady Brewer (CMO of Starbucks)

Starbucks has ~27m active rewards members in the US, 50% of sales coming from rewards members, and millions of customers already accustomed to pre-loading money onto Starbucks cards ($1.6b worth).

And with global distribution, it’s the perfect brand to be creating an international rewards program.

As the most caffeine addicted person you know, I’m extremely excited about this. As an Aussie coffee snob well… holding Starbucks NFTs would at least get me ordering some frappes 😆

Waiting impatiently for September 13 to hear the full announcement on Investor Day!

Halliday raises $6m seed led by a16z

Gaming is hot hot HOT.

And this time – we’re introducing League of Kingdoms by Halliday.

Why is this so cool? Halliday users can:

  • Pay now, play immediately

  • Pay later, play immediately with a leased NFT until you’ve paid it off – then it’s yours!

We’re now seeing more interesting payment methods like payment plans that mimic web2.

We’re absolutely going to have this for one of our game nights 🤲

BTS: The $4m Solana hack

$4m pales in comparison to $600m ETH hacks (Axie ☠️), but this one is different.

Assets were drained directly from user wallets.

OtterSec confirmed the reason

  • Slope’s mobile app sends mnemonics via TLS to their Sentry server

  • Mnemonics are stored in plain text, so anybody with Sentry access could access user private keys

This is a nightmare situation for a primary wallet in a blockchain ecosystem.

Bao-sized news

Web3 Jobs

📓 Join our Resume/Interview Office Hours! Every Wednesday 7PM PT 📓

Last week, we touched on:

  • Introduction to Figma and how it helps processes between people better

  • The wonderfulness of Dribbble

  • Frameworks like Flutter and React

  • Learnings on leading multi-dev projects

Psstt - you can catch the full notes of each session in #helpful-job-info. If you’re a Bao holder, you’ll get access to more curated job listings FIRST and job coaching during our office hours 😉

Have an incredible start to your week, Baos.