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🌎️ Eightco Holdings to Buy $270M of Worldcoin (WLD)

If you hadn’t heard of Worldcoin by Tuesday, you probably have by now.

The Sam Altman-founded crypto and digital identity verification project got one of its biggest backers yet in the form of Eightco, which just pledged to sink $270M into a $WLD treasury.

Eightco will now be led by trading analyst Dan Ives in the position of board chair, and the ticker will change from $OCTO to $ORBS (in reference to the orbs that Worldcoin uses to scan people’s retinas.

What does this mean for you? Worldcoin’s price rose 144% over the course of this week, and now sits at a $3.29B market cap.

Being founded by Sam Altman and connected to $ORBS, which is led by a very popular trading analyst in Ives, Worldcoin’s popularity could be more correlated with ChatGPT’s growth over time.

And if the coin’s narrative around digital identity in the age of AI continues to grow in strength, it could be worth keeping an eye on as an investment over time.

Or, if you’re super weirded out by an orb scanning people’s retinas for biodata, then feel free to stay away 😅 Wouldn’t blame you.

 🧑‍⚖️ When the SEC Chair Is Bullish About Crypto, We Listen

The SEC Chair wants “super-app” crypto trading platforms. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.

Does anyone else remember the days of Gary Gensler being chair of the SEC? I still find myself shuddering when I remember seeing his face under the most bearish, negative crypto headlines we’ve ever seen.

Thankfully, he isn’t the chair anymore, and we have Paul Atkins instead, who is obscenely positive about crypto. He’s all about clean, clear regulation and enabling the crypto industry to grow, not hindering it with “regulation by enforcement” like Gensler.

Just this Wednesday in a speech he made in Paris, Atkins straight up said that “crypto’s time has come.” 👀 

He also said that the SEC’s “ad hoc enforcement actions” are a thing of the past, and that the plan is to provide “clear, predictable rules of the road.”

The craziest thing he said, though, was this: “We must ensure that entrepreneurs can raise capital on-chain without endless legal uncertainty. And we must allow for ‘super-app’ trading platform innovation that increases choice for market participants.”

I don’t know how to tell you this, but… that’s kind of a big deal. It screams “bullish” to me—not even in a short-term price chart kind of way, but in a long-term infrastructure kind of way.

The SEC seems to be saying that it does want the US to be the crypto capital of the world, and is putting its regulatory money where its mouth is.

✅ Ondo Just Got Some Massive Institutional Friends

After announcing the tokenization of 100 stocks last week, Ondo has now revealed that it’s partnering up with Fidelity and WisdomTree to do some big things:

1. Fidelity & Ondo are launching the Fidelity Digital Interest Token (FDIT), which is a “tokenized money market fund” that’s backed by U.S. Treasuries, mainly from Ondo’s Short-Term U.S. Treasuries Fund.

2. WisdomTree has joined Ondo’s Global Markets Alliance, and will likely help “enhance interoperability, liquidity, and compliance for tokenized real-world assets on Ondo’s Global Markets platform,” according to crypto.news.

It’s wild to see crypto companies like Ondo landing partnership after partnership with major institutional players. It’s happening so easily that it almost seems strange (if you were around the industry before this bull run, at least).

One Twitter user put it perfectly: “Everything’s going so smoothly/that it’s almost scary, isn’t it?”

And my response is that yes, it seems like things are going unbelievably smoothly for companies like Ondo, but that’s just because institutions’ attitudes have changed.

It wasn’t even that big companies didn’t see the value in crypto before now, it was that there was no legal certainty in partnering with crypto companies to this extent before now.

But here we are, years later, talking about how Ondo is digitizing US Treasury investments. What a world.

😮‍💨 Cardano Doubters Got Put in Their Place

So, if you’ve ever heard of Cardano Vouchers, you may or may not have had any idea what people were talking about. It’s ok, neither did I.

But these vouchers were quite a thorn in ADA’s side for years. And the controversy surrounding them just got majorly cleared up.

The setup: Paper vouchers that could be redeemed for $ADA were sold in Japan and other places in Asia in the mid-2010s. Not just some vouchers—$26B worth of ADA was sold this way.

The issue was that once Cardano’s mainnet went live in 2017, there was no way to confirm if all the ADA had been redeemed or not. This has let to all sorts of nasty rumors fraud in co-founder Charles Hoskinson’s cryptocurrency launch.

So, Hoskinson promised a full-scale investigation. And boy, did he deliver.

A 150 page report. A joint investigation by McDermott Will & Emery and BDO, an accounting firm. And 18 interviews.

The findings? 99.7% of all Cardano vouchers were successfully redeemed. A HUGE win for Cardano believers everywhere.

And they released the entire report for all to read (or to put into ChatGPT and summarize):

🍟 Extra Crispy Crypto Links

• Crypto exchange Gemini is set to go public on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow. Investors can apply for IPO shares on brokerage apps like Robinhood.

• Tom Lee, Managing Partner of Fundstrat Global Advisors, predicted a $200K Bitcoin price by the end of this calendar year on CNBC.

• A huge crypto npm supply chain attack was contained with only about $505 stolen in total (because of the hacker’s own dumb mistakes).

• COTI has brought Settlers of Catan into the world of Web3, complete with prizes, competition, Loot Boxes, and of course, gambling. Play at your own risk.

• The Avalanche Foundation wants in on the crypto treasury company hype, aiming to raise $1B to fund two different treasuries.

• REX-Osprey, known for launching the first Solana staking ETF, is set to launch the first ever Dogecoin ETF today. Yes, a real ETF for a meme coin.

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⏳ Wrapping Up

That’s all, amigos. The mainstream news has been pretty dark this week, so we hope our little crypto newsletter was able to bring some joy to you. Or at least some normalcy. Go hug a loved one, and if you need to, take a break from your phone and go outside for a while. It could do you some good.

Same time next week? Okay, sounds good.

Until next time,
The Chain Team

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