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⌐◪-◪ → A new world record! Yesterday, CryptoPunk #1563 sold for an unbelievable $56.3M, no seriously — I don’t believe it.

While it was technically a sale, it was not a real sale, here’s why. Basically, in this transaction, the buyer was the seller and the seller was the buyer. Okay cool, but where did they come up with the $56M? Easy, a balancer flash loan.

So why did they do this? For attention. To secure the #1 spot on the CryptoPunk sale leaderboard so they could shill a memecoin called Kamala Harris Punk — because I guess they think this punk looks like Kamala?

Honestly, of all the things they could have shilled they just had to pick a super lame political memecoin. I mean seriously, I’d have taken LITERALLY anything over this. Missed opportunity IMO.

What would you have shilled, chat? Let me know in Specs.Chat!

⌐◪-◪ → TradFi investors want more DeFi. Grayscale, a $20B asset manager, just launched a new Aave fund to give investors exposure to a protocol with “the potential to revolutionize finance.”

It’s a sensible move in my opinion, Aave underpins the entire DeFi ecosystem. More importantly, it's solid evidence that Wall Street wants more crypto/DeFi investments to choose from — also made evident with the recent XRP ETF filing and the hybrid BTC + ETH funds.

In addition to actual demand, Grayscale might be strategically motivated to try something new considering their Bitcoin ETF bled 50% of its value since the beginning of this year.

Nevertheless, I’m excited to see another crypto product on Wall Street, and while I’ll never understand Grayscale’s decision to have the highest Bitcoin ETF fee by an order of magnitude — I do think they deserve credit for pushing the envelope here.

⌐◪-◪ → Music NFTs are ded — NOT! My dear friend Violetta Zironi just sold a 1:1 song, inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, for 1 BTC ($61,750).

She’s paving the way for music and web3, showing people what’s possible when you find your true 100 fans and go direct, no label, no publisher, no middleman.

As a musician and NFT collector, a lot of people ask me about music NFTs — and something I commonly hear is frustration that nobody’s figured it out yet, or that there isn’t a dominant platform for musicians to release NFTs.

The reality is, music NFTs are alive and well, and you don’t need a platform to make it happen — that’s sort of the point lol. And if Violetta is not an example of that, then I don’t know what is. She literally built her own marketplace!!!

She’s one of the most hardworking people in this space, who shows up every day for her community and never loses sight of her mission.

Join me in congratulating the homie on Twitter.

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