August is here and Qrafty is live! What's going on? A LOT!

Wahaha! 👈️ That’s hello in honey badger language! 🤭 Ok… I’ll see myself out…

Fresh new start of a fresh new month! 🦡 Qrafty just got back from the crypto land loaded with news and updates. It’s all ready for you to dive in!

Your time is important, so here’s the main story of the day 👇️

Michael Saylor buys 467 more BTC again in July

Michael Saylor went on another BTC buying spree in July and bought BTC worth $14.4 million! That’s about 467 BTC. Again, that’s fourteen million four hundred thousand dollars, mkay? Qrafty wonders how much ice cream you can buy with that…

As of July 31, 2023, MicroStrategy held 152,800 bitcoins acquired for total cost of $4.53 billion, or $29,672 per bitcoin.

That’s a lesson in conviction for future entrepreneurs if I’ve ever seen one. It is beautiful to witness times like these and witness history being written.

P.S.: MicroStrategy is the financial vehicle Michael Saylor uses to own and hold this amount of bitcoin.

🙃 Before we get to the main news of today, here’s a short video that sums up Bitcoin’s price action throughout July 👇️ 

A good giggle… priceless. For everything else, there’s laughing hysterically.

Here are the main events of the day

• FTX wants to relaunch the exchange. Yeah...

  Word on the street is that FTX wants to restart the shi….show, let’s go with show. 🦡Qrafty thinks that some beautiful people saw the numbers behind Samuel’s goat rodeo and noticed some interesting numbers in the records 😀 

  It just might seem that if you have sound political backing and influential friends, running an exchange is like running a REALLY profitable casino in LowLaw Land!

  Bonus: Also all the big players come to you, because your buddies demolished your competition with lawsuits and regulations 😉 . And then you just rise like a Phoenix from the ashes with a clean sheet, right?

• Is there a connection between Sam Bankman-Fried and the BALD scam?

  As if his record isn’t already looking enough like used toilet paper, the magical crypto forensic department is working hard as usual and made a connection between Alameda/SBF and the whole BALD rug pull.

  There seems to be some circumstantial evidence for SBF being behind the BALD coin scam.

  Yeah, 🦡 Qrafty agrees that crypto winter isn’t really that much fun, you’re right… Here is a Twitter thread with a more detailed explanation.

• The SEC is suying Richard Heart (along with Hex, PulseChain and PulseX) for securities violations and fraud

  Qrafty is laughing hard at this since Richard Heart is a meme himself and it was long overdue to get a knock on the door from SEC. This type of lifestyle crypto godhead caricature founder is a sure way to disaster, most of the time running two operations:

  1. A media persona in charge of creating a cult like following and keeping the hopium up and the fans attention on the next new trick. A herd like mentality with the sole aim of worshipping the creator and ignoring any logical arguments or reasonable debate.

  2. Usually, running a Ponzi scheme masked as a “project”. Defrauding everyone until the last second when there is no way out except total collapse. The truth comes to light.

  But I don’t judge or decide for others, I’m just a honey badger loving crypto and sharing the knowledge.

• Brian Armstrong remembers the SEC’s “recommendations”

  Brian Armstrong, the CEO of one of US’s biggest exchanges (Coinbase), recalls the fabulos idea the SEC had towards his business: to delist all the coins on the exchange, except for Bitcoin, to be on the SEC’s safe side.

  Why? Well, because the SEC regarded a bunch of coins listen on the exchange as securities.

  Like a bully tells a kid to give up his lunch money just because he can, the SEC’s approach has been a bull in a china shop regarding regulatory approach (lost trial with XRP and Ripple?), oversight and enforcement, we will see how things pan out.

  Either way, Qrafty thinks collaboration with law agencies on both sides should be essential in a healthy system, especially pertaining such beautiful inclusive markets. But Qrafty never said that the system is healthy.

• US Congress has a letter exchange with Apple over App Store NFT rules

  So after the debacle with Coinbase and And also asking Mr. Cook if he’s been using the App Store terms of service in the detriment of, among others, Coinbase. There must be some lobbying on the halls 😀 .

• CEX price feed prevents Curve price from collapsing amid $100M vulnerability (cointelegraph.com)

  Among the news, I like to slip something a bit more on the technical side sometimes. You might argue that Qrafty want make your brain hurt mucho, but please bear with Qrafty, because Qrafty mucho love you, mkay?

  So this was a bug/error in the code of the contract of a coin (CRV) that is representative for the decentralized space. This error allowed the attacker access to steal funds from the pools (a pool is like a digital vault where people contribute different amounts of a pair of coins, example BTC/USD).

  When others saw that the pools are drained, the price of the coin started to crash with panicked people selling and other liquidations from exchanges. If it went under completely, it would have been terrible for the coin and the decentralized projects at large.

  So in the DeFi markets, on decentralized exchanges, the price of the coin was down really bad. But on centralized exchanges the price was high and stable. This made the coin to not crash to 0, which basically saved the whole decentralized space from a huge amount of destruction of value. Funny how things work in crypto and life, innit?

• Crypto staking rewards are taxable once received: IRS

  BANG BANG! ‘Nuff words, I want my share!… said the representative of the law in his neat suit, shiny badge and fancy moustache, while chewing tobacco and raging in the town square after a couple of whiskey shots at the saloon; on the house, of course…

  The weather was murky with a light rain coming down over everyone’s head. The man in the suit was yelling at everyone gathered in the small town square, stomping the mud: “Respect my authoritaaaayy! Once you get dominion over ya coins, I get my share! Otherwise y’all are outlaws!”.

  After all, it’s your job to pay and their job to collect, right?

I think that one of the fundamental forces of the Universe hasn’t been studied enough… It’s called the law of no knife catching and it’s about the speed at which a coin crashes in crypto.

Bringing the crypto IQ up! KAPOW!!!

Teachable moment right here! Today you will get to know about “rugging” and what that means in crypto. Aside from the beautiful design element for our homes, there’s a situation in crypto called a rug pull.

More simply put, it’s when a project is created as a scam to deceive users. Like the Maddoff’s or Ponzi’s of tradfi (traditional finance, we got you ) but at a much lower level. You could say it’s decentralized scamming… yeah not funny I know.

It follows the classic pattern of the pump and dump scheme and it uses a botnet and other “influencer” accounts, or actually paying crypto influencers to promote the project as valid.

Once enough people get involved, the insiders sell at market price, known as dumping. The last ones to come and the majority of the users are left with a worthless nothing, while the insiders have cashed out.

Airdrops

Airdrops are one of the best ways and generally risk free ways to get lucky in crypto.

Most of the time, projects will do what is known as an “airdrop” to initial users and give them small amounts of tokens as an incentive to become familiar to the project, to become a bit invested in the concept.

Sometimes that leads to big amounts of money for some that were at the right time and the right place. In some cases, fortunes were made.

Below is a guide on ZKitty’s NFT minting today.

ZKitty NFTs Minting On The 1st Of August - What's Next?

And here is a summary of the project: What is ZKitty?

That’s it for today! Qrafty wishes you to live each moment as if you are listening to the music you love most! Wahaha!