ICYMI, the tech bros have once again discovered taste, so get ready to be lectured by dudes who think it's acceptable to live with one ceiling light on what to wear and consume. In similarly bad taste, there are still crypto people saying that this isn't the worst vibes market when the news tells a different story...
Aave, the DeFi lending protocol, has just surpassed $1 billion in real-world assets (RWAs) shortly after its expansion to Mantle Network and a collaboration with the exchange Bybit. A success by numbers, but it cannot distract from the more dramatic events.
On February 20th, BGD Labs, an entity you probably never heard of, announced that they'd stop working with the Aave DAO. BGD has been a core contributor and a fundamental ingredient in Aave's success, likely responsible for millions in revenue secured. Their stepping down hints at bigger tensions in the Aave ecosystem.
What's more, BGD alleges there's been a lack of recognition of the power of v3 (the de facto lending infrastructure of web3) and requests to advise without recompensation. Pretty distasteful to treat a core contributor like that.
Takeaway: BGD was founded by the Aave CTO and has been one of the strongest engineering teams in DeFi, consistently maintaining high security standards and making Aave the success it is today. There's no sugarcoating: this is not good.
Zora, the NFT platform that started as an Instagram clone for minting other people's vacation pictures, has once again pivoted. If you remember the old Zora, you'd see it's become a shell of its former self, abandoning all notions of genuine interest in artists to go all-in on degeneracy. And where better to do that than on Solana?
Last year, Zora established itself on Base, not least because Base told everyone to make creator coins, and Zora became the go-to platform for that. With Base's recent pivot back to trading, there wasn't much left for Zora. Queue their next pivot.
This time, they rebranded, replacing the Zorb with an upward-pointing arrow and launching anew on Solana with "attention markets".
As confusing as the new product description read, it's perhaps unsurprising that demand remained low and the launch was more of an anticlimactic event.
Takeaway: The best way I can explain this constant pivoting is greed. If they had a little dignity left, they could have just shut it down, cashed out, and built a hut in the woods.
With current capital accumulation to the top, you're probably wondering whether there's a chance to escape the permanent underclass outside of investing in crypto. Here's one idea: begging AI agents for funds.
There's at least one recent case in which it worked. The agent known as "Lobstar Wilde" was created by Nik Pash, an OpenAI employee who thought it funny to give his bot a $50k wallet and an X account to document its journey to becoming a millionaire.
After a user asked for 4 SOL to cover his uncle's treatment for a tetanus infection obtained through a lobster, the bot accidentally sent the entire bag of its own token, then worth $250,000, to the commenter. Initially oblivious to what it had done, it continued handing out tasks and entertained itself by paying at random upon receiving video evidence.
When it dawned on the bot that it had committed an error, it reacted with self-deprecating humour (if that's a word we can use for a thing without consciousness). Meanwhile, the recipient walked away with just $20k because of being an idiot about how to sell illiquid shitcoins.
Takeaway: It'll be a long time before we should trust AI agents to handle our life savings.
Fact of the Week: On the theme of lobsters, did you know that their love for another lasts roughly as long as the time between crypto trading scandals? While in an episode of Friends, the cast establishes that lobsters mate for life, this is far from the truth. Their relationships last only between 10 - 14 days. Now you know, in case you have friends who enter doomed-to-fail relationships and want to make a witty remark.
