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The $500 billion-plus firm is involved in NovaWulf’s offer for Celsius, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Pepe, a memecoin styled on the Pepe the Frog cartoon, has made some crypto traders millions — at least on paper — as its price skyrocketed since launching last month.

The top 15 pepe whales — large holders of the tokens — are collectively sitting on potential profits that currently total $92.6 million, according to onchain data analyzed by Lookonchain. While the whales have sold some holdings, they still hold over 38 trillion pepe coins, or around 9% of its total supply, Lookonchain said.

The profits result from simple math. The whales paid an average of $0.0000000853 per token, and the current price of the coin is around $0.00000224. That’s a lot of zeros, but it adds up to a gain of 2,526%, according to CoinGecko data.

Two of the top 15 whales are sitting on paper profits of over $11 million each, with the rest seeing gains between $2.9 million and $6.9 million, according to Lookonchain. One of the whales, however, has their address blacklisted, meaning they’ll likely never be able to cash out.

Meme coin trading volumes are soaring, led by pepe. Last month, Dogecoin saw volatility after Elon Musk temporarily replaced the blue Twitter bird icon with an image of the doge dog. 

Pepe coin millionaires

While most of the profits are yet to be realized, Lookonchain data shows that three of the whales have sold pepe tokens with actual proceeds totaling between $1 million and $4 million. Some still appear to be HODLing, though, with six of the whales having yet to sell a single pepe token.

Trading strategies also appear to be quite diverse, too. The biggest whale currently holds 4.91 trillion tokens and has only cashed out about 5.1 billion for a total of $20,024. The next largest whale currently holds 4.76 trillion tokens but has sold 1.75 trillion tokens for a cool $4.2 million.

Pepe, which claims to be “the most memeable memecoin in existence,” was launched on April 15. The coin has no association with cartoonist Matt Furie, who created the Pepe the Frog cartoon character.

“This token is simply paying homage to a meme we all love and recognize,” the pepe coin’s website states. “$PEPE is a meme coin with no intrinsic value or expectation of financial return. There is no formal team or roadmap. The coin is completely useless and for entertainment purposes only.”

Despite the warning, crypto enthusiasts have lapped up the coin and traded it massively. Pepe is currently the 53rd largest crypto token, with a market cap of over $940 million, according to CoinGecko data.

Pepe is down more than 25% over the past 24 hours

Pepe coin price, source: CoinGecko

Crypto venture capital firm Master Ventures was also a pepe holder. It made around $470,000 from trading the coin and currently has no holdings in it, according to Lookonchain. Not everyone has made profits, however. At least one pepe investor was sitting on a paper loss of $500,000, as The Block reported over the weekend.

Steven Zheng, research director at The Block, said the current memecoin frenzy is similar to past NFT and DeFi waves, where early adopters made substantial profits from relatively small investments. “Unlike the two previous waves of DeFi and NFT, however, this time, the promotion of utility has been put on the back burner for pure unadulterated speculation,” Zheng said.

“The memecoin mania will end with a handful of winners and the copycats will fade into irrelevance,” he added.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Railgun DAO’s new functionality – initially developed by the developer Chainway for use on Tornado Cash – could allow users to mathematically demonstrate that coins involved in transactions did not come from blacklisted addresses. Digital Currency Group, owner of CoinDesk, is an investor in Railgun DAO.

Regulators in the tech-friendly nation say they’ll return to business-as-usual monitoring after money laundering fears led it to take a tough line.

Worldcoin, the eyeball-scanning crypto project co-created by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, today announced the launch of a self-custodial mobile app.

The so-called World App gives users a way to manage their World ID, a tool for proving personhood online, alongside a range of cryptocurrencies — including BTC, ETH, DAI, USDC abd Worldcoin’s hotly anticipated token — once it launches.

Developed by Tools For Humanity, Worldcoin’s lead software contributor, the launch of the app comes a few months after the unveiling of World ID, the identity protocol that underpins the Worldcoin project. Momentum appears to be building towards the launch of Worldcoin’s token, which it has said previously will go live in the first half of this year. Users can claim their share of the coin by getting scanned by a Worldcoin orb.

Even in testing, the app has accrued 1.5 million users and logs 60,000 transactions on a typical day, the company said. Users can deposit and withdraw funds using bank accounts or local payment tools and can send money to phone contacts or crypto addresses.

“It’s already the fastest growing wallet in the world. Today every 14 seconds a person signs up to app,” said Tiago Sada, Head of Product, Engineering and Design at Tools For Humanity.

Keeping it simple

The World app, which had been in testing in a small number of locations, is now available for download in over 80 countries. It employs a minimalist design “with only the essential functionalities of the Worldcoin and Ethereum ecosystems,” according to the announcement.

TFH has also tried to simplify the product by offering “gas-free transactions,” which it can do by covering the gas fees. The company said the app is “engineered to maximize inclusivity.” It is available on iOS and Android, is around 18MB in size, is localized to multiple languages and can be supported by phones over 10 years old.  

“Everything at Worldcoin is about inclusivity,” Sada said, adding there is “potential” to introduce fees in the form of a few basis points for each transaction down the line.

A crypto who’s who

A who’s who of crypto firms, projects and tools power the app’s back end — including Uniswap for exchange tokens, ENS usernames that can be used to direct transfers, and Ramp and MoonPay for on and off-ramps. The beta version ran on Polygon, but the full version will be based on an Ethereum rollup, per the announcement.

“The other super interesting thing about the app is just thinking about what all of these financial and identity primitives together allow you to do,” Sada said.

Worldcoin is valued at $3 billion after reportedly raising $100 million from Khosla Ventures and a16z in March 2022. The Block revealed in February that the company is seeking another round of funding at the same valuation.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post spun off its NFT business into a new firm called Artifact Labs in March 2022.

Worldcoin’s “minimalist” wallet, World App, wants to help you prove you’re human in the age of AI.

Polychain Capital and Lemniscap co-led the seed round for the bridge protocol.

Tokens created on Bitcoin through the Ordinals protocol have exceeded a total market value of $900 million, highlighting the rapid rise of an emerging asset niche on the most valuable blockchain.

Ordi memecoin lead the BRC-20 category with a fully diluted value exceeding half a billion dollars, based on data from websites brc-20.io and Ordspace. That’s after a 22,500% jump to $25 today from $0.11 at the beginning of April amid the ongoing memecoin mania.

Memecoins make up the majority of tokens created using BRC-20, a recently-developed token standard for Bitcoin using the Ordinals protocol. These Bitcoin-based tokens are comparable to ERC-20, the token standard on the Ethereum blockchain. Introduced by developed Casey Rodarmor in January, the protocol allows for indexing and monitoring of every satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, across the network. 

Currently, Ordi has a fully diluted market cap of $525 million considering a token supply of 21 million. The token became available for trading today on Gate.io, the first centralized crypto exchange to list the top BRC-20 token.

What is the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin?

The Ordinals protocol allows developers  to assign a distinct identity or file onto every satoshi within the Bitcoin network, a process called inscription. This mechanism set the stage for the development of both fungible (interchangeable) tokens, like BRC-20 tokens, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which frequently showcase digital art. 

While the Ordinals core team devised a method for generating NFTs on Bitcoin, another pseudonymous developer named Domo introduced an experimental token standard built upon the Ordinals protocol called BRC-20 in March. This enabled users to issue fungible tokens like ordi and others with the help of incsribing specific files to satoshis.

Since then, the number of tokens created on Bitcoin using Ordinals has experienced a dramatic increase. In merely the past few months, over 11,000 tokens have been generated, and the trading activity surrounding these tokens has contributed to a substantial uptick in daily transactions on the Bitcoin network, going to a record high of 534,000, as per The Block data. Consequently, this has also led to a steep rise in network fees over the last week. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.