Upvoted

Gm, friends. Did you catch Anthony Hopkins’ recent NFT drop? He may be good at winning Oscars, but he’s even better at selling digital artwork. Hopkins sold out his NFT collection in less than 10 minutes, the fastest sell-out in OpenSea history—and for what it’s worth, he’s also 84 years old.

Today: Reddit’s NFT hit, Hodlonaut’s victory, and the U.S. dominates DeFi. Let’s go.

—Angelina

Redditors Upvote NFTs

​​Reddit is a strange, strange place (presented without comment: r/BreadStapledToTrees). But unlike other social media giants fumbling through clunky web3 strategies, Reddit is killing it on the NFT front.

Reddit Collectible Avatars NFTs, launched in July, already have close to 3 million holders. To put things into perspective: OpenSea, the world’s leading NFT marketplace, has 2.3 million traders.

So what are Reddit Collectible Avatars?

• Reddit’s Polygon-based NFT collection features about 40,000 NFT avatars based on Snoo, the Reddit alien in the platform’s logo.

• Owning a Collectible Avatar unlocks additional Reddit features including special treatment on posts and customizable wearables.

• When Collectible Avatars were still in primary sales, they were sold through Reddit’s own NFT marketplace and stored in Reddit Vault wallets. Users could purchase them using fiat credit cards. (Now, they’re primarily traded on secondary marketplaces such as OpenSea.)

Some context: Reddit isn’t the only social media giant hoping NFTs will breathe new life into their platform (and balance sheet). Twitter launched profile pic NFTs (PFPs for short) in January and Meta rolled out NFT integration for Facebook and Instagram in August.

But Reddit’s NFT project differs in one major regard: It’s actually successful. Sure, crypto Twitter is full of Bored Ape PFPs, but few outside that bubble are making use of the NFT integration. And while Meta’s NFT rollout is still new, chatter about it quickly died down.

Big picture? The demand for Reddit’s Collectible Avatars is reassuring news for crypto for two reasons:

1. It shows that PFPs have the potential to drive mainstream NFT adoption. With a user base of 50+ million daily active users, Reddit converted a solid chunk of its user base to NFT ownership.

2. NFTs aren’t dead (we’ll keep pointing that out). If Reddit can onboard nearly 3 million users to cute alien JPEGs in a bear market, imagine the demand once things turn bullish again…

Hodlonaut Wins Suit Against Wannabe Satoshi

​​Bitcoiner Magnus Granath, better known by his Twitter username “Hodlonaut,” won his defamation lawsuit against self-proclaimed Bitcoin founder Craig Wright last Thursday. Let’s unpack what happened.

Back in 2019: Hodlonaut posted a Twitter thread calling Wright––who has long claimed (and failed to prove) that he is Satoshi Nakamoto––a “fraud” and “pathetic scammer.”

Earlier this year: Hodlonaut sued Wright in Norway in an effort to preempt a defamation lawsuit Wright was planning to file against him in the U.K. (where “defamation laws are heavily tipped in favor of the plaintiff and monetary damages can be enormous,” according to CoinDesk).

And that brings us to today: Hodlonaut won the suit against Wright on the grounds of free expression. Wright has been ordered to pay Granath’s legal fees, estimated at $383,000.

The judge ruled that Hodlonaut’s tweets were fair, considering that Wright has yet to prove his bold claims. FYI, Wright’s lack of evidence has also been an issue in other defamation trials he’s involved in.

Bottom line: Hodlonaut’s win reaffirms the notion that crypto is a landscape marked by ideals like free speech and anti-censorship. It seems Wright will have to make peace with that—either that or prove he’s really Satoshi.

Supersized DeFi

The U.S. ranks first in many fields: It has the most billionaires, the most ungodly portion sizes, and now? It accounts for 37% of all DeFi volume—more than any other region, according to Chainalysis.

The U.S. can chalk most of its DeFi activity up to decentralized exchanges (DEXes) and NFTs. Interestingly, an uptick in DeFi has caused Bitcoin dominance to slip by 6% in the U.S.

The verdict? This is yet another sign that NFTs are the main draw for retail investors to enter DeFi (see today’s top story)––it also contradicts the bearish narrative that the NFT bubble “has finally burst.”

In other news:

• Binance becomes the second-largest voting entity in the Uniswap DAO.

• Bitcoin mining difficulty reaches a new all-time high—yes, again.

• Sam Bankman-Fried addresses the backlash against his controversial regulatory model.

• The island of the infamous Fyre Festival is being repurposed as a haven for the crypto elite.

• The Mango Markets exploiter strikes again, this time by rug-pulling the Mango Inu token.

And that’s what you need on your radar today in crypto. Respond with your favorite strange subreddit––although r/SEUT (squirrels eating unusual things) is pretty hard to beat…See you Friday!