British crypto startup Copper is working on a fundraise of up to $500 million that would vault it into unicorn status.
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Back in 2015, the pharmaceutical executive and fraudster Martin Shkreli purchased the sole physical copy of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the seventh studio album by the Wu-Tang Clan.
When Shkreli was sent to prison in 2018, the album was seized by the federal government, which held onto it until earlier this year. It was sold in July to an unknown party for an undisclosed amount.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the mysterious buyer was PleasrDAO, the investment collective that’s spent the past year buying up multimillion-dollar non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The sale price was $4 million.
It makes sense, in a way. NFTs are one-of-one cryptocurrencies attached to media files. Proponents say they encourage a new sort of economic framework for digital art, based around patronage: if an NFT purchase funds an album or artwork, the work can still exist online, for free, while the artist gets paid.
It’s the inverse of the Wu-Tang model, where a single purchaser was able to effectively keep the music from the rest of the world. This was part of the concept behind the album – the initial sale contract prevented the buyer from releasing the music commercially for 88 years.
Though the general public has still never heard “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” PleasrDAO member Jamis Johnson has described the album as a sort of “O.G. NFT.”
DAOmentum
DAO stands for “decentralized autonomous organization” – a kind of investment group built around shared ownership of a cryptocurrency. Think corporations, without the actual incorporation.
CoinDesk has also learned that an agency called 6, which works with clients in the NFT space, brokered the deal between the PleasrDAO and the U.S. government.
6 co-founder Jesse Grushack told CoinDesk in an interview that he and his partners brought the idea to PleasrDAO earlier this year.
“The U.S. government was very clear that they needed to get rid of this to basically pay back the debts that Martin had accrued, and had been legally liable for,” Grushack said. “They didn’t want this deal to become like a public auction or anything, they just wanted it to be like a closed-door thing.”
Ultimately, it’s up to PleasrDAO to decide whether or not they want to keep the music under wraps. Because the album can’t legally have a commercial release, the DAO may decide to get creative.
“We believe that we can do something with this piece,” Johnson told the Times, “to enable it to be shared and ideally owned in part by fans and anyone in the world.”
“Theoretically, they could have 5,000 owners of the album and make a private listening party for those owners,” said Grushack, nodding to the concept of fractionalized NFTs (something PleasrDAO has played around with before). “I think it’s gonna be up to them to figure out the way to bring this back to the people.”
A look at how other bitcoin ETFs around the world have performed and what investors are actually looking for in a bitcoin investment vehicle.
How long does a layer 2 remain a layer 2?
A new report released on Wednesday from blockchain development platform Alchemy shows that the number of apps on self-described Ethereum layer 2 Polygon is growing at a rapid rate, and that the ecosystem is increasingly becoming independent from projects on the Ethereum base layer.
According to the report, there are now 3,000 apps on the chain, up from just 30 last year. Additionally, Alchemy has seen a 145% increase in the number of teams building on the chain month-over-month.
Per Alchemy product manager Mike Garland, it’s growing “2x faster than Ethereum did at this point in its life lifecycle.”
While Polygon is often referred to as a sidechain and developers are working to position it as a complement to Ethereum rather than a competitor, the data also shows that the number of new Polygon-native apps is outstripping the number of apps deployed to both chains – possibly a sign of growing independence.
Of the new apps deployed to Polygon, only 38% are being built on both Polygon and Ethereum, versus 62% deployed exclusively on Polygon, per the report.
Garland said that the data shows how projects that are ETH-native but also deploy to Polygon are growing in tandem with fully MATIC-native projects.
“I think the most interesting thing to me about this data is that we’re seeing both developing in parallel (roughly 4/10 using Polygon alongside Eth, 6/10 using just Polygon). There are certainly many teams that are launching and growing natively on Polygon, but also a substantial group using Polygon to deepen what they started in the Ethereum ecosystem and enable new use cases,” he said.
MATIC is up 3.86% on the day to $1.54, and ETH has risen 8.35% to $4,105 over the same period.
Shares of crypto miners continue to rally as bitcoin moves further into record territory.
Bitcoin (BTC) reached an all-time high around $66K on Wednesday, which could yield further upside toward $86K according to technical indicators. Upside momentum is improving, although overbought signals could precede a brief pullback.
Commodity futures ETFs are at constant risk of losing money due to an arcane technical phenomenon. Understanding it is key to deciding whether the new bitcoin futures ETF is right for you.
The issuer filed a post-effective amendment today proposing to list its Bitcoin Strategy ETF just after October 23.
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The environmentally-friendly firm that’s using coal waste for energy opened 42% higher than its $19 IPO price.
Should a DAO retain a law firm? Representatives from Morrison Cohen LLP discuss the emerging legal issues around this new type of business enterprise.
