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⌐◪-◪ → McDonald’s is coming for your NFTs!

Doodles, one of the leading NFT brands, just partnered with McDonald’s.

This is big news for the NFT industry, which is making a comeback, as McDonald’s is arguably one of the world’s most recognized brands.

I don’t own any Doodles personally, but I’ve always liked their art — it has that special “wow” factor that’s clearly won collectors over.

For context: Doodles’ floor price is currently 2 ETH, a 40% jump in the last 24 hours, making it the 16th largest NFT collection by market cap. If you were paying attention, you’d have seen this coming in yesterday’s issue.

While the haters still say NFTs are dead, this is proof it pays to build during the bear market — a strategy we’ve seen Azuki (anime.com purchase), Pudgy Penguins (Walmart plushies), and Rektguy (Rekt drinks) double down on.

Details on the collab are still under wraps, but you can imagine the brand/IP activations that might happen here. For now, we just wait until November 18th.

Lastly, for those who forgot, Doodles named Pharrell Williams as their Chief Brand Officer in 2022 and soon after raised $54M from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s fund — big things could be on the horizon.

NFTs aren’t back; because they never left.

⌐◪-◪ → The PayPal mafia remains bullish on crypto.

PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD just integrated with LayerZero to enable seamless cross-chain transfers between Ethereum and Solana, the two leading blockchains after Bitcoin.

This means users no longer need to rely on centralized platforms like Venmo or PayPal; they can roam freely on the blockchain.

Checking in on the stablecoin race, PYUSD is currently the 6th largest by market cap, right after $FDUSD and $USDD.

That said, PYUSD is still leagues behind Tether’s USDT, barely reaching 0.4% of its market cap — or about 247x smaller, a tiny drop in the stablecoin ocean.

Meanwhile, the stablecoin market cap has expanded $5B to $41B since the U.S. election, signaling that the race between FinTech giants and stablecoin providers is about to heat up.

The crypto landscape is going to look wildly different in the next year; TradFi and DeFi are merging slowly. Incumbents know it’s adapt or die time.

⌐◪-◪ → We like the indices!

Coinbase just launched its own crypto index called the Coinbase 50 (COIN50).

The index is designed to provide investors broad-based access to the emerging crypto market so they can “set it and forget it,” just like with traditional brokerage accounts.

Given Coinbase’s foothold in the space and its strong Wall Street connections as a leading crypto ETF custodian, there’s a real chance this index becomes crypto’s S&P 500.

So what’s in it? Well, since it’s weighted by market cap, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana make up 84% of the index — making it very retail-friendly, in my opinion.

If you’re like me, with friends crawling out of the woodwork asking how/where/when to buy crypto, the best answer might just be to dollar-cost average into the COIN50 index.

Obviously, this isn’t financial advice, and I always encourage self-custody over centralized exchanges (which are basically neobanks), but sometimes people need to dip a toe in before taking the plunge. I know I did.

👉 Check out the full COIN 50 index and its holdings here.

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