86th Edition

Rise and shine, crypto enthusiasts! 🔆

It's time for another edition of Flippening, the newsletter that's like a compass in a sea of digital currencies.

Disclaimer: All price movements are recorded up to 03:30 PM UTC, 24th Mar 2023

While most top cryptocurrencies didn't see much movement either way since last week, XRP's registered double-digit gains owing to whispers floating in about judgment in the SEC-Ripple case not being far off, likely with a positive outcome for Ripple.

Crypto simplified

Crypto Twitter is flooded with thousands of threads on the latest Arbitrum airdrop ($ARB). From someone who has spent hours scrolling through these tweets, I’ll try to keep things as simple as possible.

A couple of things that are absolutely true about the $ARB airdrop:

🔯 First things first: for many of us, it is our first-ever crypto airdrop.

🔯 Most of us couldn’t sell it at the top.

For those who received the airdrop and are still HODLing it, you’re the absolute rock stars. Let me show you why!

The Total Value Locked (TVL) in Arbitrum is more than double that in Polygon. The TVL shows the amount of trust investors have in the protocol.

And it is vital to remember that Polygon has been at it, developing the tech and forging multiple partnerships much before Arbitrum came into the picture. And to complete the picture, Polygon’s mcap is more than eight times that of Arbitrum.

📈That leaves ample room for the token price of $ARB to go much higher!

Compared to Optimism, the closest competitor to Arbitrum, the TVL is less than half of Arbitrum.

Time to HODL $ARB 🙌

🎊For those that missed the Arbitrum airdrop, we are curating a strategy for another major upcoming airdrop that is anticipated to be bigger than the Arbitrum airdrop. Stay tuned!

We are talking about ZKsync, which launched its Era mainnet on 24th March!

You wouldn't want to miss this!

ZK Sync airdrop might be around the corner. Are you prepared?

• 🪂 No, tell me more
• ⛔️ I know it all

Top Highlights of the Week

1. Turning a blind eye

On March 22, the FOMC announced an interest rate hike, raising it by 25 basis points. This is the ninth consecutive interest rate hike since the Fed started putting a chokehold on the economy to check inflation rates. With this hike, the interest rate now sits at 5%. FYI, that's the highest federal interest rates have been since June 2006. This announcement saw BTC and ETH slip temporarily, but they've since resumed trending in the greens at the time of writing.

Our takeaway: While the optimists among us may have had ambitious thoughts, the realists saw this rate hike coming. Well, it looks like tackling inflation is a higher priority right now. Word from Fed Chair Jerome Powell is that there's still a lingering uncertainty after the collapse of SVB and Signature, but he assured that the banking system is sound.

2. Tethered and stable

On Wednesday, Telegram informed users that its wallet function will now support USDT. Users can now send USDT through messages in a chat. Interestingly enough, the wallet bot available on Telegram was developed by independent devs and not Telegram itself. And while USDT runs on multiple blockchains, Telegram will only support the stablecoin on Tron, at least for now.

Our takeaway: This isn't Telegram's first rodeo in the cryptocurrency space. In 2018, the organization introduced the Telegram Open Network, along with a cryptocurrency. And while that passed hands to the TON foundation, Telegram's venture to introduce USDT transactions is a positive development for cryptocurrencies. This makes stablecoins a lot more accessible to a huge chunk of the population that uses the popular messaging app.

3. Putting your money where your mouth is

Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan got the attention of the crypto world with a rather dramatic bet on Bitcoin's price movement. Balaji has predicted that Bitcoin will touch the $1 million mark in the next 90 days. And he's wagered big money on it as well- two separate million-dollar bets. Balaji's backing his bets with the belief that many other US banks are risk-prone, which will lead to the Fed injecting big bucks into the economy, resulting in hyperinflation.

Our takeaway: While we love to see optimism in the crypto community, this might be teetering on the edge of delusion. Bitcoin would have to see a 36x growth in 90 days for Balaji to not take a steep loss on this bet. And while we believe his reasoning is logical, the timeframe and magnitude of growth he's betting simply does not seem reasonable. But if his intention was to get attention, he's definitely done that.

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Disclaimer: All price movements are recorded up to 03:30 PM UTC, 24th Mar 2023

After soaring high last week, most sectors saw the price corrections that were inevitable. Meanwhile, currencies remained in the green despite all the macroeconomic chaos.

Crypto jargon of the week

Explain Like I'm 5

"Seed Phrase"

Open sesame

A collection of words used to access your crypto wallet

Example- The longer the seed phrase, the more secure it is

Other stories that caught our eye this week

• MetaMask Institutional's staking platform to go live on March 27th. The stakes are high with this one. Read here.
• US SEC threatens Coinbase with lawsuit over crypto products. Once again, there's a pretty straightforward solution here in the form of regulations. Read here.
• Arbitrum's highly anticipated airdrop goes live. The mad rush to collect these tokens literally broke the internet with server overloads and ETH shortages on crypto bridges. Read here.
  

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