Myth of Money: Luna, Kim Kardashian, The Queen, and more.
Welcome to this week’s edition of Myth of Money, a weekly newsletter on the digital asset markets read by 12,000+ investors.
Disclaimer: The following is not intended as investment advice. Do your research.
Dear Investors,
Greetings from sunny Malibu, California.
Last week has been full of earth-shattering events.
RIP Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8th. As the longest female ruler or anywhere, ever… this sucks. But her memory and leadership will live on.
Crypto degens of course wasted no time trying to cash in by creating Queen Elizabeth-themed NFTs and meme coins of the late monarch.
The Royal Mint, the maker of British coins, is supposedly developing an NFT of their own. Back in April, Rishi Sunak, the country’s former finance minister, asked the Royal Mint to mint an NFT in a governmental effort to have the country “lead the way” in crypto. No fewer than 40 crypto coins rolled out on decentralized exchanges on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and Ethereum over the past 24 hours, sporting classy names such as “RIP Queen Elizabeth,” “Queen Elizabeth Inu,” “God Save The Queen,” “Queen Doge,” “Elizabeth II” and “London Bridge Is Down.”
“Rise Of The King” token, in reference to the Queen’s successor King Charles, has pumped around 2,000% since its creation on Friday. The Elizabeth token, on the other hand, has seen $6.1 million in trade volume in the past 24 hours after her demise.
🤦🏻♀️ 🤦🏻♀️ 🤦🏻♀️
On OpenSea, the RIP Queen Elizabeth II “memorial” collection launched with 522 items and has seen the most activity out of Queen-related NFTs on the marketplace. But only 0.23 ETH ($394) worth of the tokens has been sold to date.
The Rise of LUNC and LUNA
Much of the last bull cycle was filled with “meme coins.”
A meme coin is a type of cryptocurrency that originated from an online meme or viral image. Some of these coins have gone on to be popular investment opportunities, with their success largely driven by online communities. The most popular meme coins were DogeCoin and Shiba Inu.
Meme coins DO NOT have any underlying value and are purely speculative investments. Some key characteristics of meme coins include - unlimited supply, high volatility, no real use case, and event-based price movements.
The latest coin following this patter is LUNA and its predecessor LUNA Classic, jokingly dubbed as “LUNA INU”.
LUNC skyrocketed 37,000% since its bottom on May 12th. The latest run was sparked by a community proposal to implement a 1.2% token burn tax on all transactions to make LUNC a deflationary currency. Time will tell if this run can be sustained long-term and investors can recuperate some of their previous losses.
Kim Kardashian Launches Private Equity Firm
Last but not least, in last week’s news, Kim Kardashian announced she will be getting into the money game.
The self-made billionaire and queen of the SKIMs empire (I personally love the products), partnered with Jay Sammons to launch SKKYPartners, a private equity firm focused on direct-to-consumer brands.
Kim has experienced her fair share of knock-downs throughout her career - her 72-hour marriage and certain tape to name a few. Today, Kardashian seems to be making all the right moves to be remembered as a role model to young females everywhere.
Kardashian passed the California Baby BAR exam and is on her way to becoming accredited as an attorney.
Kardashian’s first big success was her beauty brand KKW, which was founded KKW Beauty in 2017. By 2018, the business had expanded into eyeshadows, concealers, lipsticks, and fragrances, and was bringing in about $100 million in revenue.
She cashed in on that ownership in 2020 when she sold 20% of KKW Beauty to cosmetics conglomerate, Coty, for $200 million, a deal that valued the company at $1 billion. The same company purchased 51% of a shared cosmetics company which houses her remaining 72% stake, which is still worth about $500 million.
Kardashian also owns a majority stake in closely-held Skims, which hasn’t disclosed its revenues. However, Forbes estimates her Skims stake is worth a conservative $225 million.
Now, running a PE firm, she is showing young females that it is possible to lead with both beauty and brains.
Kim’s net worth is estimated at $1.4 billion.
This Week By the Numbers 📈
Markets are experiencing a small relief rally. The green is likely to be short-lived as a new rate hike is coming this month, estimated to be another 0.50% to 0.75%.
Ethereum Merge is scheduled to be complete in 2 days, causing a modest bump in the price.
Top Stories 🗞️
GameStop Partners With Crypto Exchange FTX.US to Boost Digital Asset Adoption
Video game firm GameStop (GME) is partnering with Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX.US to promote interaction between the gaming and crypto community, the company announced on Wednesday after the close. The deal unites GameStop, one of the key players in the meme-stock craze of a year and a half ago, with one of the leading crypto exchanges. The two companies will promote e-commerce and marketing initiatives, while certain GameStop retail stores will carry FTX gift cards, according to a statement Wednesday. GameStop is also being given the label of FTX’s “preferred” retail partner in the U.S.
Bank of Russia agrees to legalize crypto for cross-border payments: Report
The Bank of Russia, the country’s central bank, has reportedly admitted that cross-border payments in crypto are inevitable in the current geopolitical conditions. The Russian central bank has been rethinking the approach to regulating crypto and agreed with the finance ministry to legalize crypto for cross-border payments, the local news agency TASS reported on Monday. Deputy finance minister Alexei Moiseev reportedly said that the Bank of Russia and the finance ministry expect to legitimize cross-border payments in crypto soon.
Celsius is ready to give money back, but not much
United States-based crypto lending platform Celsius, which collapsed and stopped the withdrawal option amid the market meltdown in June, pledged its readiness to partially return money to customers. However, there’s a catch — as the company has filed a motion with the United States Bankruptcy Court, its pledge would only apply to Custody and Withhold Accounts and for custody assets worth $7,575 or less in value. The community response to the motion has been mixed, with some creditors happy to get back at least some of the frozen funds, while some industry leaders criticized the platform’s management.
‘Far too easy’ — Crypto researcher’s fake Ponzi raises $100K in hours
Crypto influencer FatManTerra claims to have gathered over $100,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) from crypto investors in an investment scheme that was later revealed as fake. The crypto researcher said he created the fake investment scheme as an experiment and to teach people a lesson about blindly following the investment advice of influencers. The account on Twitter has around 101,100 followers and is mostly known for being a former Terra proponent that now actively speaks out against the project and founder Do Kwon following its $40 billion collapse in May.
Reddit NFT avatars selling for a premium on OpenSea
Sales of recently launched Reddit blockchain-based avatars are rising on nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea, outperforming the platform’s proprietary store. Reddit, the “front page” of the internet, plugged into the burgeoning world of NFTs with the announcement of collectible avatars in July 2022. The avatars became available to users in August and are already generating thousands of dollars in sales for artists. Reddit users are able to purchase a variety of avatars for their profiles using Vault, Reddit’s cryptocurrency wallet, with credit and debit cards accepted to make payments for the blockchain-based NFTs.
Deal of the Week: Flooz.Inc 🔑
One of the most exciting things I’m working on this week is Flooz, a culture-first web3 infrastructure company. Flooz has created a series of tools and products to simplify the consumer and the creator web3 experience including a trading platform, aggregator, fiat-on-ramp widgets, chart bots, a consumer wallet, and more.
One of my favorite Flooz tools is Superkeys, which seamlessly integrates with Web3 with E-commerce. A Superkey reads what kind of tokens you have in your wallet, and gives you access to certain products on Shopify. For example, imagine I wanted to create an exclusive hoodie drop for BAYC holders only. The Superkey would verify the ownership of an APE before letting the customer purchase the item.
Why Am I Bullish?
Every product shipped by the Flooz team is downright beautiful.
Their creative team comes from DONDA/Yeezy, Nike, Off-White, etc. They partner with brands like Daily Paper and Diesel, to create useful Web3 products for both creators and consumers. And their technical team does it faster than any other I’ve seen in the industry. On their 18 month journey, they have created at least 4 categories of products, and generated $7M in revenues.
They have the backing of FelixCapital (Ledger, HighSnobiety), SeedCamp (Revolut, Sorare), Kima Ventures (TransferWise, Carta), Nicolas Julia (Founder, CEO of Sorare), Antoine Martin (Founder, CEO of Zenly), and Michael Kazam (Early investor in RTFKT).
To me, Flooz is the missing link between Web3 being an esoteric exercise to finding a real-world application.
The company is opening their seed round in September. If you are keen to learn more, please reach out for an introduction.
Thank you for reading this week’s edition of the Myth of Money.🚀
Until next week,
Tatiana Koffman
By Tatiana Koffman
Hi there and thanks for reading. If you stumble upon my newsletter, you will notice that I write about money, economics, and technology. I hold a JD/MBA and spent my career in Capital Markets working across Mergers & Acquisitions, Derivatives, Venture Capital, and Cryptocurrencies. I believe in empowerment closing the financial education gap and creating equal opportunity for the next generation. I have invested in 20+ companies and funds. Check out my portfolio here.
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