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  • 10/18/24: Your Portal Onchain 📱🌎🚀

10/18/24: Your Portal Onchain 📱🌎🚀

Top News

  1. Venmo now supports crypto purchases via MoonPay integration

  2. Worldcoin rebrands as 'World’, reveals new orb, launches mainnet

  3. Polymarket betting on US election crosses $2B in volume

Specs’ Insights

1. Venmo now supports crypto purchases via MoonPay integration

⌐◪-◪ → PayPal is doubling down on crypto. Venmo’s 60M users can now buy crypto thanks to a new integration with MoonPay.

As a reminder, PayPal purchased Venmo back in 2013 for $800M, making them one of the world’s biggest financial giants. PayPal alone processes 6.6B transactions a year, which is 11% of Visa’s 59.3B transactions.

While this is certainly exciting, I can’t say I’ve ever used MoonPay myself — and not by accident either. MoonPay left a bad taste in my mouth after they secretly gifted celebrities like Justin Bieber and Madonna Bored Apes for their own financial gain. Felt grifty.

But enough of the FUD — from a mass adoption point, this is super bullish. Venmo is the #4 Finance app in the App Store right now after CashApp, PayPal, and Capital One.

It will be interesting to see how PayPal continues to evolve within the crypto industry and if they can increase usage of their stablecoin PYUSD, which is currently #6 by market cap.

2. Worldcoin rebrands as 'World’, reveals new orb, launches mainnet

⌐◪-◪ → Worldcoin is cooking! The company, founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, just rebranded as “World” after realizing the name “Worldcoin” doesn’t work anymore.

It’s reminiscent of Facebook’s rebrand to Meta, in a desperate attempt to escape Orwellian brand affinity. Shoutout to the “Hello World” reference in their announcement, even if it’s technically “Hello, World!” — details matter.

More importantly than their rebrand are some real announcements:

While it's fun to FUD Worldcoin — excuse me, I mean WORLD — they are admittedly solving a real problem: proof of human. There are infinite use cases for a platform like this such as digital driver’s licenses, combating sybil attacks, voter fraud, deep-fakes, and more.

I’m excited to see what sort of super-app rivalry this brews between Elon and Sam — as last I checked, they don’t like each other. Nothing better than a good tech billionaire rivalry, but Sam really needs to work on his branding. He’s giving some serious early Zuckerberg energy right now.

Also, maybe download the app to snag your username. Not privacy advice.

3. Polymarket betting on US election crosses $2B in volume

⌐◪-◪ → Polymarket is on fire (in a good way). The platform just surpassed $2B bet on the presidential election, and it's still growing.

Just to put the momentum in perspective, it took 263 days to hit $1B volume on the Presidential Election, but only 23 days to hit $2B in total volume. With 17 days left until the election, we very well may see this market surpass $3B in total volume.

The real question is, what happens to Polymarket volumes after the election? My guess is they plummet. For context, here’s what happened to Augur in 2021, the leading prediction market at the time, after the election.

Some Polymarket-maxis may argue but this time it’s different, or sports betting will save the day — but I think that is unlikely. Think about it. Most of the sports betting demographic still doesn’t know how to use a self-custody wallet, let alone bridge funds to Polygon.

With that said, if the UX improves and Polymarket can compete on fees — maybe there is a chance. At the end of the day, everybody cares about price.

Meanwhile, tons of people are having a fit over Polymarket odds right now, coming up with all sorts of theories as to why Trump’s lead is so high. Read about my take on this in yesterday’s issue.

Everything Else

⛓️ Crypto & DeFi

  • Apechain upgrades smart contracts with LayerZero’s omnichain standard

  • EthOS introduces dGEN1 hardware device for Ethereum

  • Bitcoin exchange reserves drop to multi-year low amid institutional demand

  • Ostium Labs launches onchain perpetual markets mainnet

  • Meme coins blast past Bitcoin gains as market heats up

  • DEXs struggle to compete as futures volumes shift to CEXs

  • EigenLayer X account hacked promotes fake airdrop

  • Liquidation cascade risk rises as crypto high-risk loans surge to $55M

  • AI agent Terminal of Truths’ holdings hit $850k, closing in on $1M

🏦 Wallstreet & VC

🌎 Rest of the World

🖼️ NFTs & Metaverse

  • Moonray game comes to PS5 without crypto features

  • Hamster Kombat founders tout high trading volumes, expansion plans

  • Galaxis teams up with ‘Killer Whales’ to empower creators

  • MIKA memecoin founder denies allegations of rugpull

  • Artist accidentally buys 1110 SOL of memecoin THINK

  • Coinbase adds support for TURBO memecoin

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