$24 million dollars, luxury watches, and the largest sim swap hack ever.

this is how teenage gamers became the most wanted cybercriminals, their entire empire collapsing from greed before they could even drive..🧁 this story begins with ellis pinsky, who at 13, loved video games and trash-talking other players.

one night - he took the trash talking too far.

after a match, a player messaged him: "how's the weather in irvington?"

his heart sank..

Hacking time to recover $3m worth of lost Bitcoin.

Sounds crazy, right?

This is how two white hackers cracked an 11 year old password behind this massive fortune.. 🧁 In 2013, an anonymous crypto user, 'Michael,' purchased 43.6 BTC (approximately $5,000 at the time).

He stored the BTC in a password-protected digital wallet.

The password, a 20-character string, was created randomly using a password generator called RoboForm.

In February 2022, government agents swiftly entered a high-rise in NYC.

Their target: two individuals with over $4.5 billion in stolen crypto assets.

Their findings unraveled a fascinating story behind what is now the largest crypto seizure ever..🧁

This sum of money stems from a fateful evening on August 2nd, 2016.

On this day, investors were faced with terrible news: A crypto exchange had been hacked for 125,000 BTC.

Immediately succeeding the news, the price of Bitcoin plummeted 20%+.

Layer 2 rollups have helped Ethereum scale by an order of magnitude.

Soon, there will be an upgrade that will reduce the cost of them by 10-100x, and shepherd in a new era of low cost on-chain activity..🧁 What is EIP-4844?

EIP-4844, also referred to as "Proto Danksharding" is an upgrade to Ethereum moving towards adopting an architecture called "sharding."

How much will the @arbitrum airdrop be worth?

Let's dive into the protocol and compare it to its competitor to make an educated guess on how much one $ARB might be worth..🧁 Arbitrum and its competitor Optimism are layer 2 solutions designed to help Ethereum scale.

Layer 2 solutions process transactions off-chain, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions that are then settled on Ethereum.

Recent events have shed light on how fragile our stablecoin ecosystem is.

Many are still reliant on centralized parties and expose us to their risks.

For this reason, I think we will see a huge shift toward decentralized stablecoins.

Below is my best bet on this narrative..🧁 Before jumping straight into the protocol in question, I would like to point out a few things about what unfolded this past week.

While a great stress test, it should raise some important questions for those involved in the cryptocurrency space.

EigenLayer.

An idea so big that if it works, it will absorb the majority of $ETH in existence.

What is restaking, and how might it help hyperscale Ethereum? 🧁.. Eigenlayer is a protocol built on Ethereum that introduces the concept of "restaking."

Restaking allows users to re-use their staked ETH to secure multiple networks and earn rewards on their extended capital.

I'm not an expert in law, but this thread will make one thing clear.

@SBF_FTX is fucked. SBF claimed FTX and its assets were fine.

Hint: They weren't

After the implosion of FTX, there is one sector everybody should have their eyes on.

& it's almost too obvious...🧁 What am I talking about?

Decentralized perpetual exchanges.

Why?

Trust in centralized exchanges has been lost.

On an industry wide scale, we have seen a withdrawal of coins from exchanges at a historic rate, as holders seek the safety of self-custody.

Few understand what is about to take place in the ENS space.

The way people view collections and NFTs has changed entirely.

Allow me to explain..🧁

++bonus alpha Let us first start with some objective facts:

The ENS domain industry is large. Incredibly large.

To date, theres been 2.4m ENS named created across 560k unique addresses.

Today, 3AC founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies broke their silence in an interview with Bloomberg.

The two gave insights on their current situation, and reflected upon past decisions made by the firm.

Here’s what it included.. Stressed they suffered deep losses & denied allegations of pulling $$ out of 3AC

Zhu: “People may call us stupid or delusional, & I’ll accept that. But they’re gonna say that I absconded funds during the last period, where I actually put more of my personal money back in.”

It's a big day for Ethereum.

Within the next 24 hours, the Ropsten network will undergo The Merge.

This marks the final phase of testing before deployment on mainnet.

Let's dive in... Ethereum is in its final stages of testing merge readiness.

For the past few months, developers have been testing client implementations on Kintsugi, Kiln, and other shadow forks.

A shadow fork is a new devnet created by forking a live network with a small number of nodes.

How to create your own NFT collection from scratch with no coding experience:

+ how we created pixelated pastries (coming soon..) Prerequisites:

- A great idea

- VS code

- NodeJS installed

- Images for each “layer” of your NFTs

A layer is a folder that contains individual images for each component of your NFT. (ie Background, Head, etc)

According to Vitalik, Soulbound tokens (SBTs) are “the future” of Ethereum.

Earlier this month, he co-authored a 37 page paper describing them and their role for Ethereum.

Here’s a TLDR…🧁 Web3 has some problems.

As of today:

-Users still verify collections with centralized platforms like OpenSea

-There is a lack of social scores

-Custodial wallets are still dominant

Alpha.

It’s what everyone here is after.

It’s not easy to find, but when you do it rewards heavily.

Here’s how a pastry goes about finding his alpha..🧁 Nansen

Nansen is one of the best tools for finding alpha.

They offer a suite of analytical tools, but my favorite is the “Smart Money” section.

This shows token inflows/outflows from some of the top wallets on ETH.

14 reasons you don’t own enough Ethereum

A thread by🧁… Stablecoins

Stablecoins are crypto’s killer app.

They act as a hedge against volatility & allow users to “cash out” without ever leaving the ecosystem.

As of today, the total stablecoin market cap is $180B.

Nearly 75% of which are home to Ethereum.

Markets getting to you?

Not sure what to do next?

Here’s what you should be doing during times like this… First off, the worst thing you could be doing right now is revenge trading.

There’s no saying where prices are headed in the short term.

The only thing you’re going to end up doing is over-trading and giving it all back to the market.

Crypto is where riches are made.

I’ve seen countless people that started with nothing go on to make unheard of amounts of wealth.

Here’s what they all have in common..🧁 Self-Discipline

Trading is a craft that demands a certain level of discipline.

You have to be able to keep your eyes on the prize.

Self discipline will give you consistency, and consistency will bring you success.

Clownbase: Willfully ignorant, or intentionally deceiving?

Yesterday, Coinbase published a blog post with a list of assets they are considering listing on their platform.

Let's take a look at what they are considering.. Big Data Protocol $BDP

BDP was an infamous Pool2 farm that launched in early March 2021. Within one weekend, it amassed 10% of DeFi's TVL.

How is this possible?

On March 3rd, BDP announced they'd distribute 100% of its supply over the course of 6 days.

https://twitter.com/bigdataprotocol/status/1368315515777785864?s=20&t=4SSa7LIYQxD46F_qm5bmHg

Over 2,000 years ago, there lived a wealthy trader named Zeno.

While on a voyage from Phoenicia to Piraeus, his boat sank, along with all of his cargo.

From an event that was entirely out of his control, this once wealthy man became poor in an instant… While such an event would make the majority of us feel cheated, depressed, or defeated, Zeno was different.

Rather than dread over his predicament, Zeno instead focused on maintaining his composure of the situation.

A multichain powerhouse is brewing..

What if I told you REN is about to completely revamp its protocol, & take a huge leap into the multichain ecosystem..?

Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not..🧁

(1/X) In late 2021, @renprotocol published an article titled “The Future of Ren”.

In this post, the protocol introduces a new arm of Ren known as “Ren Labs”.

This new arm could have game changing implications for the future of the protocol…medium.com/renproject/the…