WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - May 11

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

Fun fact: Binance and KuCoin will be allowed to operate in India again, which opens the market for a large population, but the heavy taxes may limit people’s involvement anyway.

Bitcoin has some interesting numbers

There have been more than 1 billion transactions on Bitcoin as of this week! That’s pretty cool. But on the other hand, the mining difficulty has dropped almost 6%, which isn’t great because the more difficult it is to mine, the safer the Bitcoin network is. This drop is kind of expected, at least temporarily (we hope), because of the halving in April, where the rewards for miners were cut in half, which made mining not worth it for a lot of miners. Miners have to work harder now, but they get less rewards, so a lot of them stopped mining. Ironically, the less miners there are, the easier it is to mine. It should stable out as the network continues to grow, though.

Learn more here.

LayerZero tries to make their upcoming airdrop fair

An issue with airdrops has always been the ability for malicious people to farm them with bots and now AI so they get more of the airdrop than they should. This is called sybil farming - where one user creates multiple wallets to farm the tokens. LayerZero announced that sybil farmers can out themselves before the airdrop to retain 15% of their tokens, or risk losing everything if they get caught.

Learn more here.

FTX wants to pay out

For those of us who have been in crypto for a few years, the FTX saga has been relentless. We keep hearing that FTX is finding money hidden in various proprietary investments and litigation claims, and some individuals (including SBF’s parents) are having to pay back some of what they got from the company. Anyway, the tl;dr is that FTX will be able to pay out at least 118% of cash investments to people who had $50k or less on the platform. While this doesn’t account for the growth of the assets since then, it’s far better than some numbers we were getting before. Plus, if you had Solana NFTs, you’ll get those back too. Solana was a major asset held by FTX and so the token dropped 5% on the news for fear of SOL sell-offs that will help cover some of this.

Please look out for scam emails offering to claim your lost tokens - there are a ton of scams around FTX, Voyager and Blockfi, but they already have user’s information from KYCing so they probably won’t be reaching out to you via email asking for your wallet connection or personal information.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore