#136 Paypal Huge Stablecoin Incentives
How & Why Paypal Want A Slice Of The Stablecoin Market
GM - this is The Snapshot, edition #136.
This is what I’ve got for you this week.
This Week In NFT World - $3.7M Volume Day For CryptoPunks
Sponsored Post - Publish & Profit #2: Create What You Know
Notable Sales - Hobbs, XCOPY, Punks, ACK, Beeple
Investment Focus - Paypal Huge Stablecoin Incentives
For sponsorship enquires, please DM me on Twitter.
Have a great day,
B
51 CryptoPunk sales in the last 24 hours 1,459 ETH ($3.76M) volume (on Wednesday)
Simon's Cat raises $4.25M for Binance assisted memecoin
"Simon’s Cat is a world-famous cat animation series and an immensely popular cat memes. With over 1.6 billion video views on its official YouTube channel and many more views across other channels and social networks, the Simon’s Cat memecoin is set to undoubtedly become the world’s most famous and popular cat memecoin. The Simon’s Cat memecoin will launch exclusively on the BNB chain, in partnership with Floki, DWF Labs, and BNB chain.
From Tokenfi
"The craziest thing on Tron: a billion dollars comes in, and it feels like nothing happened."
"sunpump (pumpfun on tron) earned 143k yesterday and their revenue chart is up only"
Story Protocol to protect IP announces $80M Series B led by a16z at $2.25B valuation
"Without great original IP, the AI models don’t develop," PIP Labs co-founder and CEO SY Lee said in an interview, emphasizing that AI is "taking, stealing all your data without your consent," and benefiting from it without sharing the rewards with the original creators.
Story Protocol works by converting intellectual property into "IP Legos" – modular and programmable assets that can be licensed, managed and monetized through smart contracts on a blockchain.
"With Story, creators can embed licensing terms directly into their IP, ensuring that anyone who uses it must adhere to their rules," Lee said.
Coindesk
Tether announces UAE Dirham-pegged stablecoin
"Set to be launched in collaboration with UAE’s multi-billion dollar tech conglomerate, Phoenix Group PLC, and with support from Green Acorn Investments Ltd, the Dirham-pegged token joins Tether’s slate of stablecoin products that include USDt, EURT, CNHT, MXNT, XAUT and aUSDT. In true pioneering spirit, it will lead the way in seeking licensing under the UAE Central Bank’s recently announced Payment Token Services Regulation."
@Tether_to
McDonald's Instagram Hacked with $GRIMACE launched and $700k rugged
"Earlier Wednesday, the McDonald's account on the social media platform appeared to promote a Solana-based memecoin called GRIMACE. The token rapidly rose to a market capitalization of about $20 million before drastically following to below $1 million, according to Pump Fun data. While the Instagram post promoting the token has been deleted, it appears in one post the GRIMACE memecoin was dubbed "a McDonald's experiment on Solana." Simultaneously, the fast food giant's Instagram profile page also appeared to have been compromised with someone writing "thank you for the $700,000 in Solana" following a mention of a rug pull."
Sponsored Post - Publish & Profit #2: Create What You Know
Today I will focus on one of the most crucial decisions you can make on content to prevent a million problems further down the road: Create What You Know.
When I first started as an English teacher at 22 years old in a challenging secondary school in London, there were all sorts of tactics taught to help us control behavior.
They said we could line up the kids outside of the class beforehand to make sure they entered in an orderly way; they said we could make sure the kids had some specific task to do as soon as they entered; they said the school policy was for the kids to track you as the speaker at all times when you were speaking - but the problem was this was not working.
But my friend had the reason why.
He was an excellent teacher, had no problems with engagement, and noticed why it was going wrong for everyone else. He said this:
The problem with having all of these systems for engagement is that it exposes the teacher if they don’t know what they are talking about. Systems for engagement are only good if the underlying subject knowledge actually exists
This was genius and empowering to me because it made me understand the power in having the proper subject knowledge - and making sure I knew all of my content inside out.
There is nothing worse than giving your attention to someone because you think they are an expert in their domain, and then getting disappointed because you feel they have overstated their knowledge or credentials.
This leads to the two specific reasons why you should always create what you know:
1. You cannot trick your audience forever on a topic you don’t know about
2. You will never get over your insecurity of speaking on a topic which you know you don’t know about
Leaning in to what you know best or what you are interested in most will always be received better by the audience - and it might just make your job - and life - a lot easier too.
This segment is brought to you by @lilnounsdao, an expansion DAO based on the famous @nounsdao, who fund cool creative endeavors which proliferate the Nounish meme.
If you are curious about contributing to a cutting-edge DAO and getting paid to bring your ideas to life: check out the Lils website.
Notable Sales - Hobbs, XCOPY, Punks, ACK, Beeple
Tyler Hobbs, Fidenza - 40 ETH
XCOPY, The State Of Us - 30 ETH
CryptoPunk, Purple Hat - 53.5 ETH
ACK PFP, FireFace - 14 ETH
Beeple, Gigachad - 10 ETH
Investment Focus - Paypal Huge Stablecoin Incentives
I’ve been pretty vocal about how I think stablecoins are the best business model in the world:
Usually when you give your money to a bank, you expect an interest rate in return - because you know the bank is making some money off your money, so you should get a slice.
Stablecoin providers, however, do not need to give holders any return because - up until now - stablecoin holders have been happy knowing that their money is safe in the bank whilst operating in such a risky industry (+ they can usually access good rates on stablecoins in DeFi.)
This has been hugely profitable for stablecoin providers because they take your money, keep a lot in cash in a real bank and earn interest, or buy US treasuries and earn interest. They earn a whole load of interest on your money, and they don’t have to give any of that back to you.
Until now (?)
Paypal wants in to this market, but that means they need to disrupt the two main stablecoin providers.
Tether has a $117b marketcap and Circle has a $34b marketcap.
DAI is at $5b, and Ethena at $3b.
Paypal is way behind at $960M, but its marketcap is up 63% in the last month - why?
Incentives.
From DL news:
Key to PYUSD’s success are the lucrative incentives offered to those using the dollar-pegged stablecoin in Solana DeFi protocols.
Each week, PayPal provides lending protocol Kamino and trading platform Drift with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of PYUSD to distribute to users.
Depositing PYUSD on Drift earns users over 16% annually in kind, while Kamino offers users around 13%.
The actual rates on Kamino and Drift are higher at the moment. Around 17-18% on your PYUSD deposits.
In addition, today Fortune reported the following:
When PayPal joined the stablecoin wars in August 2023 with its dollar-backed PYUSD, the crypto industry celebrated the entrance of a TradFi company into a competitive arena dominated by crypto-native firms Tether and Circle. But a year after its launch, PYUSD is still lagging behind its competitors with a market capitalization of less than $1 billion, paling in comparison to Tether’s $117 billion.
In a bid to increase adoption, PayPal is partnering with Anchorage Digital—the only U.S. crypto firm to hold a federal bank charter—to offer rewards to Anchorage Digital’s user base of accredited investors who hold PYUSD at its U.S. bank, its Singapore subsidiary, or by means of its noncustodial wallet Porto.
It appears that Paypal themselves are turbo-charging the rewards (new term for interest) to PYUSD holders so that they can break into this lucrative stablecoin market.
Of course these rewards will not last forever, but I can foresee a number of huge players try to break into this market and - if Paypal can demonstrate this strategy works to increase its stablecoin marketcap (and it is working at the moment) - they will all need to incentivise users in the same way.
Stablecoin boom incoming.
Reply to this email if you’d like some additional help on how to get exposure.
Have a great day,
B
Disclaimer: The content covered in this newsletter is not to be considered as investment advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
I hold some of the NFTs mentioned in these newsletters
"Reply to this email if you’d like some additional help on how to get exposure."
Couldn't reply to the email, but I'm interested!
Really appreciated the deep dive on stables this morning on the show. Thanks for putting together all this data through your research efforts, B!