The markets haven’t been kind to us this week but as usual the bad comes with the good. Lambo dreams feel pretty distant at the moment, but there’s still a lot of stuff happening in cryptoland and it’s time to cover the biggest stories!
Have your lunch with a billionaire (we’ll tell you how), find out the most exciting thing to happen to a smart contract platform since staking on Ethereum and discover where DOGE went when it got listed on Coinbase Pro.
Early this last May, Exodus offered shares of its Class A common stock, also known as EXIT tokens, for purchase inside the wallet to accredited and no-accreted investors, in the US, announced this week they will use the Algorand blockchain as the native blockchain for the digital common stock tokens. Anyone who has already bought Exodus shares will be able to claim their EXIT tokens on Algorand directly through the Exodus wallet. The expectation isl, although we’re still not sure when it’s going to happen, is for the shares to trade on the tZERO platform. W. Sean Fordm, Coo of Algorand said
Our partnership with Exodus is providing best in class management and exchange of digital assets on Algorand, representing a significant step in enabling broad access to the future of finance that is accelerating on our advanced technology.
There is surely more to come, trading shares of a public company on the blockchain is groundbreaking stuff. In fact, Exodus will be the first company to ever pull it off.
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of the FTX crypto exchange, is a 29-year-old self-made billionaire. Want to have lunch with him? Well, there’s an NFT that’ll buy you the privilege, but it ain’t cheap. With 12 days left the current bid is $112,000, and it could easily double from there. The lunch, along with a bunch of other FTX swag like t-shirts and caps, is all to promote the launch of FTX’s new NFT marketplace.
Up to this point most NFT trading has taken place on decentralized platforms running on top of Ethereum like Rarible and Opensea. You can’t trade NFTs on Binance, Coinbase, Gemini or any other major exchange so FTX has a chance to corner the market. Of course, the real question is, how many people will prefer to use FTX versus a decentralized competitor? That remains to be seen, however, if the NFT lunch with Sam is any indication, there’s definitely going to be some interest in the new platform.
DOT, the native token on Polkadot, is up 24% since the start of June.
That’s great, but the real gains are happening on Kusama. Kusama is Polkadot’s testnet and its native token, KSM, is up 43% since June 1st, from $327 to $468. 
What’s going on in the markets? Since we’ve mentioned Polkadot so many times already, we’ll just give the recap. Parachains are Polkadot’s scaling solution, and they’re currently being tested on Kusama. The results so far are good. These technical developments are attracting a lot of attention and the VC fund Master Ventures just launched a $30 million fund called Master Ventures Polkadot VC Fund.
Teams can apply to the fund to get some cash to help them build out their project on a Parachain. In the physical world this would be similar to a bank giving a loan to an entrepreneur to build a business on an empty plot of land. A lot of things are coming together at once for Polkadot and as we always say, this is definitely a project that’s worth following closely.
As often happens in the crypto markets, when the news leaked that DOGE was coming to Coinbase Pro the price pumped hard. DOGE went up 37% in less than 24 hours, from $0.31 to $0.43. For anyone who doesn’t know, Coinbase Pro is the version of Coinbase for professional traders. Or, at least that’s how Coinbase markets it. Actually, Coinbase Pro isn’t terribly sophisticated and the layout is similar to other exchanges like Kraken or Binance. There is one major feature that does separate Coinbase Pro from the crowd though, its liquidity. Institutional traders and investors, I.e. the people with all the money, don’t trade on the basic version of Coinbase because the fees are too high. The whales only trade on Coinbase Pro and once a coin gets listed there all the big players can start buying it up.
As a side note for any listeners who have a Coinbase account, you can transfer your crypto from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro for free. The interface is a bit more complex but the trading fees are cheaper and you can do more interesting stuff like set a limit or stop loss order. Back to the dogs, the big pump put DOGE coin’s market cap over $50 billion and once again the meme coin is the 6th most popular cryptocurrency on the planet.
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