💪 Multichain: busted but not broken

Hey, guys and gals. This is the buidlbee crypto community team, and today we bring you a new batch of advantageous, interesting, and important information. Anyway, let's get straight to the main stuff. In this letter, you will find:

• Big weirdness with exchanges;

• Multichain: hacked but not broken;

• Where is Avalanche heading?

• Across the bridge for freebies.

And briefly, about the main things in 24 hours:

• Aptos' Twitter page was hacked. The latest post about the $APT airdrop is fraudulent.

• Arthur Hayes has published a new essay titled Massa. In it, he described how the development of AI will affect the bitcoin exchange rate.

• The Bloomberg: The chief operating officer of Japanese gaming giant Sega said that P2E games are boring, he worries about blockchain technology, and will put GameFi's development plan on hold.

• SlowMist: the crypto industry has lost more than $30B to hackers, with 1,101 hacking events; the largest number of hacking events occurred between 2019 and 2021; CEXs still account for the largest share, over 10B.

• CNN: Twitter sent a notice to the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, about the preparation of a lawsuit against the company over the new Twitter-like social network Threads.

• Gemini filed a complaint against Digital Currency Group (DCG), Genesis, and Barry Silbert.

🤨 Very strange things have been happening to crypto exchanges lately. Here is a digest of the latest news from the CEX world.

Kraken

The FBI is searching the home of the founder of the Kraken Exchange these days. Federal agents have also opened an investigation into him.

Recall that earlier, the SEC and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) required Kraken to release the personal data of all American users of this popular exchange. Kraken went to court to protect its users, but recently the court confirmed the legality of that request. Now the top Kraken executives themselves are already in trouble with the law, and American Kraken users have an interesting encounter with the IRS ahead of them. Given the sinister reputation of the American IRS, problems are sure to arise for everyone who gets into the field of vision of this service.

Binance

All is not well with Binance either. According to Bloomberg, many Binance executives, including the general counsel and chief strategy officer, are getting fired due to the chaos inside the company amid the DOJ investigation and SEC lawsuit. Bloomberg counted the opening of five criminal cases in different jurisdictions against Binance in the first half of 2023 alone, not counting the closure of offices in countries and the revocation of licenses.

In addition, Binance's dominance index has declined 11% in the last six months, dropping from 64% to 53%, and continues to fall further. At the same time, its main competitors, such as Bybit and OKX, have significantly improved their positions and expanded their customer bases.

The CEO of Binance had to reassure everyone on Twitter. Yesterday, he said that trading on the exchange will revive in the near future and Binance will restore its market position (without giving any details).

Huobi

It looks like the Huobi exchange is slowly dying. The unofficial owner of the exchange is Justin Sun, who, according to some reports, bought it in 2022.

• The exchange has 93% fewer coins on its balance sheet than it had at its peak (from 400,000 BTC, there are 16,400 BTC left).

• Quarterly revenue is down 98%.

• Site traffic has dropped from 30 million to 2 million users since March 2023.

Huobi updated its July Merkle Tree asset validation data. According to the latest July 1 audit results, the current asset reserve ratio exceeds 100 percent. It follows that such a severe drop in the balance of the exchange is not a waste or scam, but a mass exodus of users.

👥 About happiness in the crypto biz

And finally, a study from TrueUp conducted surveys to identify crypto companies' happiest and least happy employees. TrueUp also compared this metric to the growth rates of these companies. This study found that employees at leading crypto exchanges Binance, Coinbase, and Gemini are among the least happy in the industry.

💲 Ideas

[1] 🔔 Explaining how extreme trading works

A pretty popular project, Multichain, was hacked; it's all over the news now. Its MULTI token has already lost about 12%. The crowd panicked and held a sell-off, but... the percentage of the asset's fall is quite low. According to the exchange data, you can see that the tokens are being actively bought. What does that mean?

Example with FTT shows that there are players who actively picking up in their portfolio problematic projects, using market fright. Again, the example of FTT token shows that many projects experience a renaissance and then a dead token like that pops. So the launch of FTX 2.0 will increase of FTT many times over, and even now on the news of plans to relaunch FTX it shows +60% in the last month.

Of course, this strategy could be very dangerous. But the example of MULTI shows that there are such extremes in the market.

[2] 🔔 Avalanche slows down

AVAX/USDT is in consolidation. Buyers are probably gathering strength for a breakup. However, taking into account the current situation, P_S_trade analysts see possibilities for modest growth.

• The first target is $13.90 (+8%).

• The second target is $14.80 (+15%).

In the range of $13.90-14.80, those who a few months earlier stocked up, but growth did not work, and the deposit was in drawdown, can begin to get rid of AVAX.

[3] 🔔 Layer3 bridge: waiting for the extras

Layer3 - a platform of quests that allows anyone to open the Web3 world and gain new knowledge, and receive NFTs for these achievements. The project has raised $6.2M from Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Third Prime, and other funds.

The other day, Layer3 launched its own bridge built on Socket, on the principle of Bungee or Zapper. Their bridge is in fact an aggregator that looks for the best route among the various bridges and takes a percentage for providing assistance. The bridge is needed to make it easier to do quests on the platform when you need to transfer tokens to another network. However, it is not superfluous to use the service, as there may be rewards for activity in the future.

What to do

• Go to the link and connect the wallet;

• Make transactions and try to affect as many networks as possible;

• Complete new quests related to the new bridge.

Happy Friday, and have a great weekend! See you on Monday! A review of the week's major market events will be waiting for you. 💣