Presented by CryptoLink.Tech

Volume 1 | Edition 6 | July 27, 2023

Opening Thoughts

Week 6.

Chain Reaction Media is still in its “pre-infancy” stage and I still feel like we are cooking with gas on this side experiment.

You know what else is cooking with gas?

Crypto news.

I was pleasantly surprised when doing my digging this week to find more nuggets of information that lead me to believe we are all in the right place at the right time. And while it can be hard to sift through the nonsense in this space, I do believe we have access to a news cycle that is incredibly important but witheld from the majority of the western world.

I was chatting with a mentor of mine the other day (no connection to web3) about the current macro situation and other things in the international politics sphere and he said some interesting things to me.

While he is the most well-read and intelligent human I have ever met, teaching me the ins and outs of all things “real economy” over the last few years, he doesn’t seem to get any of the same news we get in the web3 space.

This is a man with a masters degree from Harvard in International Relations, someone who speaks with world-renowned professors, lawyers, and business people on a day-to-day business, and he hadn’t the slightest clue about the BlackRock ETF news or the BRICS nations new currency.

I found this fascinating. The stories I’m talking about are most definitely news-worthy.

Is the web3 news being intentionally witheld, anon?

Either way, I have some awesome stuff to share with you this morning.

Also, we have two stories about Italy in here today. Don’t ask me, I thought it was a bit odd as well.

Let’s jump into it!

Cryptolink Connect

This is where you get the latest and greatest in the CryptoLink world! Catch all the news here before it’s announced anywhere else!

Our First Relic: v1 Bridge To Be Deprecated

I’d consider this a major milestone.

We have our very first relic in the proverbial CryptoLink museum of artifacts!

On a serious note, bridge v1 will be depricated soon and phased out of use for good. This marks a massive moment in CryptoLink history as we finally say goodbye to our beginnings and venture on to new upgrades and better tech.

This is especially important for any of you arbitrage botters out there, be sure to swap through AnyToAny.io from here on out!

Pull The Lever, Kronk!: RBX Integration Complete

We are pleased to announce that the long anticipated integration with the RBX DEX Aggregator has been finalized!

RBX is now officially routing cross-chain swaps through the CryptoLink.Tech protocol, meaning RBX volume is CryptoLink volume!

Keep an eye out on the CryptoLink and RBX Twitter accounts for a co-hosted space to discuss the long road of integration and what this means for both protocols!

BANasaurus-Rex: Cletus Isn’t Messing Around

Not much to say here.

Don’t submit nonsense in Zealy and stop being d***heads in our general chat.

GUSD: Stabilizing The Gauss Ecosystem

We have been speaking with Gary, CEO of Gauss, and he had some exciting news to share with us!

I had to coordinate with Gary to make sure that he would announce to the Gauss community before I spill the beans here, but Gauss will be issuing its own stable coin called GUSD.

We don’t have much more information on it to give; However, this is a big milestones for our partners and friends at Gauss. We want to give them a big round of applause from the CryptoLink side! 👏👏

Stay up-to-date on the Gauss ecosystem by following their Twitter. (And don’t forget to drop in for Marketing Monday next week!)

World of Web3

This section was previously called “Crypto Currents” but I’m switching it up. I thought that “Crypto Currents” was too specific to Crypto and not general enough to properly cover all major Web3 news from legislation to social media and everything inbetween.

This week I have a full slate of fun things to tell you about!

“Mama Mia!”: Email Hack Leads to Twitter Bans

Scammers have a new angle…

Just steal government emails and use them to file Twitter reports for account passwords or to just ban them!

On-chain sleuth ZachXBT is back at it again with another ‘wtf’ story, check it out:

At face value this could seem like a wild risk to take to simply ban some accounts, but upon further investigation this could get really ugly.

That is correct folks, the scammers did indeed try to get the passwords and all associated information for the official Arbitrum Twitter account by putting a request through the Twitter Legal Portal using one of the stolen emails.

They also tried to get 5 of Zach’s previous tweets removed from the platform but were denied.

This opens up more questions than answers, obviously.

First, how in the hell did some crypto scammers get ahold of some Italian government emails?

Second, you would assume they were fairly low level email accounts within the Italian government… Twitter should probably have a better filter for who gets to file for that type of information, right?

And then there is always the classic ‘whodunit?’

If you click through to the end of Zach’s thread, he has a hunch. But we won’t post that here as there is no substantial evidence and these are pretty damning claims.

Anyways, that’s it for negative news today, on to the fun stuff!

🐂🐂🐂🐂🐂(🐂): BlackRock Unleashes The Bulls

Another week, another BlackRock bombshell!

The equities giant released their findings from an April 2022 study and they are ground-shattering for the legitimacy of the web3/crypto space.

The study looked at Bitcoin as an investment asset from July 2010 to December 2021 on a monthly basis. The findings showed that an investment portfolio following the 60/40 rule (60% equities/40% bonds) should hold a whopping 84.9% of their portfolio in BTC. The other ~15% would be split traditionally 60/40 between equities and bonds. (Bitcoinist 2023)

I’m definitely not an expert on investment, and I’d love to talk to someone who is about this, but this seems incredible to me.

The most powerful investment vehicle in the entire world just suggested that you hold 85% of your investments in Bitcoin.

Joe Burnett of Blockware (Bitcoin Mining Behemoth) of course added on saying that the optimal holdings would be 80-100%.

Burnett, however, did make a very interesting observation in accordance with BlackRock’s findings.

Here’s what Burnett thinks could happen if the world were to adopt BTC on a scale that BlackRock suggests:

If you don’t hear the bulls in the distance at this point, anon, are you even listening?

NFA 😉

Grimace In The Metaverse: McDonald’s Latest to Jump Into Web3

From Grimace shakes to web3, McDonald’s has been making moves.

McDonald’s Hong Kong has officially launched a metaverse experience/game on The Sandbox to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Chicken McNugget. (Cointelegraph 2023)

Bring back all the nostalgia with this one.

Would I ever eat a Chicken McNugget today?

It would need to be 2:30 AM after a night out with the lads.

But we all indulged at some point in our childhood, didn’t we?

Anyways, this is very important in terms of closing the gap between major brands and web3. When large brands like McDonald’s start to dabble in building within a web3 environment there will inevitably be other companies that follow suit over time.

The best part about this whole ‘experience’?

Users can complete quests and earn rewards, including SAND. SAND is The Sandbox’s utility token used to purchase things on the platform, but as far as I am aware there are also multiple liquidity pools with SAND paired to other major assets like ETH and WMATIC.

This means that a major non-gaming or web3 native brand is now using a play-to-earn model only found on the blockchain to engage its audience.

Huge plays, anon. More on Sandbox in a little bit!

Gaming Picks Up Steam: Pro Gamers Want More Web3 Games

A pair of gamers, well-respected in their genres, have come out as pro-web3 for the gaming industry, and it could be a massive catalyst for more.

Erik Engel, better known as “Tofu” in the DOTA 2 community, has expressed his interest in more web3 games coming to surface and bringing more to the gaming community than what traditional publishers have offered.

Engel went on to say that it is refreshing to see companies “make more out of games than just games".

Engel has won over $400,000 USD in DOTA 2 tournaments and plays for the professional organization ‘Gaimin Gladiators’.

To piggyback off Engel’s comments, professional Rocket League player Max Ng, better known as “Maxeew”, has also expressed his interest in the growth of web3 gaming.

While Max said he hasn’t personally tried any web3 games yet, he intends to do a deep dive into a few once his competitive season ends. (Cointelegraph 2023)

This is great news for the web3 community, DOTA 2 and Rocket League both have massive player-bases and are attached to the brands of their pro players such as Tofu and Maxeew. I am seriously looking forward to seeing how the “game3” space evolves, and it may even warrant its own section…

or better yet, a podcast?

hmm, stay tuned anon.

Interchain Intel

Updates and insights from across different blockchain networks.

BSC Paves The Way: On-Chain Future For AI Art NFTs

The NFT arm of Binance announced the official launch of their AI-generated NFT creator, which is pretty cool.

This is just another case of making tools more accessible to people and breaking down the ridiculous barriers we have had up in this space for far too long.

However, it comes at a bit of a cost.

The AI generator and NFT minting tool is only available to those that are KYC’d (Know Your Customer) on the Binance platform. Nonetheless, let’s get into what it is. (Cointelegraph)

Users will be able to prompt the AI to generate artwork and then immediately mint that art on the Binance Smart Chain as an ERC-721 contract, which is an NFT.

Users can only create and mint up to 10 per day for now, but Binance believes this is a great step in the path to users having trusted platforms to create on-chain.

Binance, of course, doesn’t often tread without some controversy, and this is no different.

The product is called “Bixel” now, in its final form. However its Beta phase in the Spring went by the name of “Bicasso” which alledgedly was developed and named by a group of developers that won a Binance Hackathon event.

If true, super uncool. But can we expect anything less from Binance?

Italian Central Bank 🤝 Polygon Blockchain

I told you we had two stories regarding Italy today.

The Milano Hub of the Italian Central Bank has selected a project by Cetif Advisory and Polygon Labs to support in its second round of proposals. (Cointelegraph 2023)

The project has no commercialization purpose but will in-fact be used to research and study a “Security-token ecosystem” for institutionalized DeFi.

Security Tokens are digitized assets denoting ownership of a real-world asset. More on these in the “Decoded” for this week.

This “support” consists of 6 months of expert analysis/advice and in-depth research studies.

I don’t want to overspeak on this topic, as I’m not caught up too much on what is going on here.

However, when there is a central bank interested in supporting DeFi research for institutional means, it has to be good for long-term speculation, right?

Keep an eye on this one.

If you speak Italian, this thread is for you. ^

Tech Trends

Here, we explore the latest technological advancements and innovations in the blockchain space.

A Creative Paradise: How The Sandbox Is Revolutionizing On-Chain Gaming

Simply put, it’s a virtual gaming world on Ethereum where players can build, trade, own land etc… in an 8-bit type envirnment. Similar to something you would see in Minecraft or ROBLOX.

But The Sandbox is actually pretty unique and put together under the hood. Let’s check it out.

The defining factor of The Sandbox is that you can monetize your experience as a player while brands/companies can create environments to engage their users or customers.

The Sandbox has 3 main features:

• VOX editor

• Marketplace

• Game Maker

Each of these play an important role in tying this whole platform together.

The VOX editor allows users to create their own in-game assets on-site and mint them on chain as NFTs. As they put it, a VOX is a 3D version of a pixel — This allows the user to create animated pixel art in a 3D space and mint as an in-game asset on-chain.

The marketplace is essentially an NFT marketplace with trading, but the NFTs are all in-game assets!

The Game Maker allows users to build 3D games for free with no coding knowledge.

The entire ecosystem ties together with the SAND token, which you probably remember me referencing earlier in the McDonald’s section. This token has well over $1m in liquidity across all its pools and has real utility inside of this fairly robust gaming environment.

There is also land for purchase within The Sandbox for users to create their own playable experiences and games. This is where brands like Mcdonald’s are starting to capitalize heavily on The Sandbox’s components.

All-in-all this is a pretty cool platform and I expect something like this to help be a major catalyst for a mass-adoption movement in the gaming sector. Not to mention, the style of environment fits with a popular genre. Minecraft and ROBLOX are two of the largest games in the entire world, captivating audiences from children to adults, and they follow a similar set-up… but are missing the web3 component that The Sandbox brings.

Be sure to check out this YouTube explainer video for more info. This video is very well done!

Not to mention, we already know someone who has a game in The Sandbox that is interested in using CryptoLink technology to enable some cross-chain utility!

Be sure to check out The Wild Guardians on Twitter and keep your eyes peeled for news… 😉😉

Decoded

In this section, we decode complex blockchain and cryptocurrency concepts into understandable language.

One Token, Two Tokens, Red Token, Blue Token… What Is a Security Token?

You probably thought this was going to be a longer section, but maybe this is the pinnacle of what this segment is really about.

A “Security Token” is incredibly simple and definitely named incorrectly if we want people to understand wtf goes on in this space.

I followed a link labeled “What is a Security Token?” and it brought me to an article on tokenization on-chain.

But that is the catch here..

A “Security Token”, very simply put, is the tokenization of a real world asset on-chain.

You have a house.

You want to tokenize the deed.

That NFT is a “Security Token” now.

That is all.

Don’t let this space confuse you with verbiage, it’s probably a lot simpler than you think.

Final Byte: Wally’s Wisdom

Boom.

6 weeks down and nothing but green grass ahead of us here.

If you take one thing out of this week’s newsletter, take this:

We are privvy to information and news that even some of the brightest minds in the world aren’t. We aren’t “chosen” by some existential being, we made the conscious decision to be called “the crypto friend” and because of that we have access to a wealth of knowledge that tons of people are missing out on.

I guess this is really what it means to be “early”.

Keep an eye on the crypto news, read Chain Reaction every week, read Cointelegraph or your favorite web3 publication. You will be the best-read person in the room on topics regarding the future of the economy.

Thanks for stopping in again this week. I appreciate each and every one of you that read this publication. You are all mega chads. I am going to spare you the corny outro paragraph from now on.

Best,

Wally
CMO CryptoLink.Tech

ZEALY CODE: BANASAURUS-REX