✂️ Temasek After FTX

Crypto Wallets’ Social Media | USDT Exchange Balances

Marco Manoppo & Karon Pangestu
May 29, 2023

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Good Morning,

Happy holiday to the folks in the US and UK. Seems like its going to be a pretty quiet Monday. Crypto markets are slightly up as US debt ceiling talks reached a tentative deal on Saturday. Let’s see what tomorrow holds.

In Today's Email:

What Matters: SG’s Temasek cuts staff post FTX ✂️
Products: Godmode, web3 growth tools. 🖥️
Charts: 1inch dominance, USDT exchange balances 📈

Narratives: Wait for the post debt ceiling market action and reassess accordingly.

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WHAT MATTERS

Singapore’s Temasek Cuts Staff Compensation

Temasek

State of play: The Singapore state-owned investment conglomerate cuts compensation for the investment professionals that were responsible for its investment in FTX.

The decision came 6 months after Temasek wrote down its investment in FTX from $275M to zero.
FTX was 0.09% of Temasek’s portfolio value as of March 31, 2022.
There’s no misconduct by the investment team, but the compensation cut is a way to take collective accountability, said Temasek’s Chairman Lim Boon Heng.

What’s next: Institutional capital will significantly increase their scrutiny and diligence before investing in crypto projects (much deserved).

Our take: In the few quarters, capital coming in from institutions will go down a bit further before spiking back in mid 2024 alongside the next Bitcoin’s halving.

For builders and investors: We’re seeing bad faith management conducted by many crypto projects and so called “DAOs” in the form of ludicrous salary compensation and the lack of transparency around grants program.

Some crypto funds are becoming activist investors to unlock the value from these DAOs/dApps.
Builders — make sure you don’t do such things. Recurring reports and more transparency for your investors are always a good thing.
Investors, take measures when such actions are being conducted by web3 projects — in web2, we have audits and balance sheets review. In web3, there should be similar standards for your portfolio companies.

Take a peek at our new referral reward at the bottom of this issue. Share this newsletter and receive our list of 100 smart crypto investors' wallet addresses 👇

PRODUCTS OF THE WEEK

Godmode: Web3 Growth Marketing Platform

Godmode

Godmode web3 marketing tools: Godmode, a web3 growth marketing and data tools enables users to use web2 social media data for web3 native purposes.

Godmode enables users to find the social media accounts of crypto wallet owners.
Godmode provides on-chain analytics about decentralized applications.
Godmode pricing starts at $1,000.

Other cool products:

Atticc, a web3 social platform for decentralized communities.
Webstudio.so, a no-code tool to build website
Tweetbank, a tool to save and mint tweets.
Rhino.fi, a platform to trade crypto on all blockchains from one wallet.
Lopeer, a hybrid neobank that combines crypto with traditional banking.

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

1inch Continued Dominance

Messari

1inch continued its dominance as the most utilized DEX aggregator.

The protocol accounted for 59% of all aggregator volume in Q1 2023, up 47% from Q4 2022.

Our take: 1inch is brilliant. It charges no extra fee but it’s making money from the swap surplus between the time of the quote and the time the transaction is mined.

To watch: 1inch product roadmap. The team behind 1inch focuses on acquiring customers first by launching a hot wallet after a successful DEX aggregator.

In an open source environment where everything is forkable, the winners are the ones that owned direct consumers interaction.

USDT Money Printer

Dune

State of Play: USDT exchange balances are down from a peak of $8 billion+ in September 2022 to below $6 billion as of May 2023.

Our take: Exchange balances of USDT primarily reside on non-US exchanges, with OKX being the most dominant one, holding more $3B worth of USDT.

This is unsurprising as USDT is often utilizes as offshore dollar, akin to Eurodollar in TradFi.

QUICK BITES

Beijing releases web3 white paper.
Bali cracks down on foreign tourists using crypto as payment.
Gemini chooses Ireland for EU HQ.
Harmony faces grant program money-grab allegations.
Coinone Exec admits to South Korean prosecutors charges.
Huobi applies for HK crypto license.
Temasek cuts staff compensation after failed FTX investment.
MakerDAO votes on savings rate hike.

MEME & NOTEWORTHY READS

Dan Elizter’s thread on how DeFi is broken.
@puntium’s thread on how gauges improve governance model.
@ciamac’s paper on AMM and arbitrage profits in the presence of fees.

Fidelity projected retirement age
— Soren Iverson (@soren_iverson)
2:00 PM • May 27, 2023

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