You can take it to court
Two NFT artists — Jonathan Mann and Brian Frye — have filed a suit against the SEC in a route we’ve usually seen taken by larger firms like Coinbase and Consensys.
It is important that the SEC responds to the artist and acts before it can act against the NFT projects.
Mann said the suit is from “deep frustration” With the lack of clarification. Mann felt the anti-crypto campaign by regulatory agencies had already focused on two NFTs: Stoner Cats & Impact Theory. “kind of implicated everybody in the NFT space.”
Frye and Frye then took the initiative.
Jason Gottlieb – who represented DEBT Box’s now-infamous lawsuit – was called in to support Frye and Mann as they argued their case before the securities regulator.
Mann is the A Song A Day Mann artist. He writes one song every day. He’s written songs on the SEC. One from yesterday details his plans to file a lawsuit against the SEC. Another from last year was about Stoner Cats and the SEC. The songs are available for auction on his site.
It is worth noting that the Mila Kutcher and Ashton Kutcher backed project settled with SEC for $1,000,000 and destroyed all NFTs it had in its possession.
“As I looked at what they said Stoner Cats had done, and I looked at what I continually do on a daily basis, [I realized] there’s no daylight here between what they’re accusing them of and what I do and what basically everyone that I know in the space, artists and creators of all kinds, are doing all the time,” Mann said to me.
A 45-page complaint filed Monday in Louisiana claims that Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe and other artists never had to fear that a regulator would claim that their work created contracts for investment.
“It would be crazy to think that Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, or Louisiana’s own Louis Armstrong should have retained attorneys to examine the SEC’s Form S-1 to see how to register their music for sale to the general public,” The complaint stated.
Mann was asked if he felt that the SEC’s NFT-related actions were aimed at American entrepreneurs. Mann, for example, has been putting out a song a day for 16 years and has been involved in the NFT space since 2017 — way before the 2021 boom that probably put such things on the SEC’s radar.
“It’s very ironic to me, because in a lot of ways, I think of NFTs as the most… direct relationship that I can have with people who enjoy my music. Any other way that I could sell songs to folks would be mediated in one way or another by either a giant tech company or a payment processor who would take a cut,” Mann said.
“I would have to interact with these huge multinational corporations. [But] when I’m selling NFTs, it’s literally just me and them mediated by the blockchain which belongs to no one… I find it ironic that this way of interacting with my fans is somehow deemed more harmful by the SEC than you know what Spotify does to artists or YouTube does to creators, or Tiktok, or any of these things where creators are just screwed at every turn. And yet, that’s just deemed normal.”
It’s too early to tell how the case could play out, but one thing’s certain: As frustration mounts within crypto, more and more folks are ready to take a stand against enforcement actions — even before the SEC can target them.
Data Center
- BTC is down 4.3% over the past day after markets were spooked by movement of $2 billion in coins seized from Silk Road (it turns out they haven’t been sold — yet).
- ETH The price of the car has dropped 5% over the last week and is currently $3,340.
- Weekly CEX Liquidations now total $170 Million — 86% of those funds coming from long positions.
- Ethereum has arrived 28% staked in the Supply To mainnet (currently at 27.75% and up over 1% in the last month).
- Base nearly set Daily transaction record set The weekend count reached 4,161,494. This is only 4,096 less than the record-breaking Monday.
Blob is your uncle
Ethereum Blobs may be one of the biggest changes in the history of crypto.
Blobs may have helped Ethereum users save hundreds of thousands of dollars on fees.
Blobs, ushered in by the Dencun fork in March, has made using the Ethereum ecosystem incredibly cheap — cheap enough to afford all sorts of high-volume memecoin shenanigans on layer-2s like Base and Blast.
Ether’s inflation has increased as a consequence (fewer charges burned mean more ETH issued net per block). Users are far better off.
In the last year alone, cryptocurrency users paid more than $9.75 billion for major blockchain protocols. This does not include Ethereum. Token Terminal reports that any network or app in the top 20 monthly fee-spending apps is included. This includes Bitcoin, Ethereum Solana Base and DeFi protocols like Convex Lido Uniswap.
Ethereum generated around 30 percent of this total, which is $2.85 Billion. Tron (15%) and Bitcoin (13.5%) were second and third. Lido, a liquid stake platform, was in fourth place with just over $1 billion.
Since blobs, Ethereum fee spend has dropped to only 14% of the total — $86.9 million in July out of $614.7 million for the top 20.
Tron fees are now nearly three quarters more than Ethereum. USDT transfers remain the dominant activity.
Ethereum mainnet is now similar to what it was like before the introduction of blobs. Today’s 30-day average transaction volume is higher than early March, when it was 7.6 millions. (The past few days saw slightly less transactions than average, around 8 million.)
Overall, Ethereum fees are down by 60% compared to their pre-blob levels, while onchain activities have remained relatively constant.
The reduction in Ethereum fees would roughly equal the savings users made due to the new market for blobs.
If you do the math, it’s possible that Ethereum could have spent up to $230,000,000 in just four months. However, this figure may be lower, due to fluctuations in blockspace demand.
The users can still save at the peak of the crypto-mania. The fee spend reached its highest level in November 2021 when bitcoin was nearing $69,000.
At the time — pre-Merge — Ethereum gas fee rates were five times more expensive than they are right now, leading users to spend $1.83 billion to transact on the chain that month. Overall, the top 20 earners made $3.12 billion.
It’s not a perfect science, and there are loads of other factors, but based on that 60% number alone, blobs would’ve saved Ethereum users over $1 billion in November 2021… if they were created and adopted back then.
Crypto users may not spend so much money again now.
The Works
- Infrastructure providers Anoma Foundation Bloomberg reported that the company is seeking new financing to push its value over $1 billion.
- You can also find out more about the following: Bank of England As it contemplates future CBDCs in the near term, is planning to experiment with digital ledgers technology and CBDCs.
- Caitlin LongDL News has reported that the Kansas City Federal Reserve refused to open a Custodia bank account. The CEO continues his fight with the Fed.
- Hardware for bitcoin mining could become a lucrative business. 20 billion dollars Bernstein analysts wrote about the opportunity for growth over next five years.
- Russia Bloomberg reports that the US has sanctioned crypto and is now looking at ways to regulate it.
The Riff
McKinsey’s temp may suggest tokenizing an obscure exotic asset class to increase liquidity in the niche market that it is part of. Rare books, manuscripts and maps, as well as Elvis memorabilia.
It’s all really old. Why not look to the future? It’s a long way in the future.
Imagine I’ve set a goal of sailing around the globe. This goal could be tokenized by creating a NFT which would only ever be issued when the goal is achieved.
It’s a market where people can bet on whether or not I will succeed. People who are interested in supporting the cause — and even those who think I could never sail around the world — can bet against me, and those funds would go into a pool.
The positive outcome of the prediction markets would enable me to make the NFT when I sail around the globe. The pool winnings would be transferred to an additional wallet, which can only be unlocked with the NFT.
Your supporters and haters can help you achieve your goals by letting them fuel your efforts. This is the pitch. VCs: if you read this, contact us.
Stocks. Bonds. Hell, tokenize my mortgage.
There’s a lot of value in tokenization, and I know there are tons of conversations that still need to happen before any action is taken — especially in the realm of TradFi — but the use cases are endless.
David’s presentation is a great example of how people can use tokenization to do things other than through purely financial lenses.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says tokenization is the future “next step” Who am I to question him?
Those who are in the know already know this, so those still thinking that tokenization was a crypto-thing reserved only for smaller markets should get on board.
Tokenization has arrived. In a few years, it will make all kinds of things more transparent.
— Katherine Ross
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