Onchain: Coming back to life

Returning to life has been a theme for crypto recently in many ways.

Story One

New exit strategy just dropped

Imagine you’re the founder of an AI crypto project that paves your way to wealth, but not for others. People start harassing you, some going as far as blackmailing you.

What do you do? Jeffy Yu has found a unique answer to that. The Zerebro founder went on a pump.fun livestream (video since deleted so this is anecdotal) where he seemingly unalived himself. A little later, a blog post of his went live, supposedly triggered by his passing, introducing the idea of legacy coins, a memecoin that would stand in as his legacy. As his obituary spread across CT, the value of the legacycoin skyrocketed.

Yet, all wasn’t as it seemed. While CT discussed whether crypto livestreams and coining everything had gone too far, Jeffy sat happily in his parents’ basement, watching the charts of his coin go up. Eventually, greed set in, and he started putting in buy orders from the dev wallet. His coming back to life (or more correctly, his fake s*icide) were further proven by a San Francisco newspaper journalist running into him.

As people realized it was all just a lie, they started selling, and the first legacy coin’s chart looks like all the other pump and dumps. Congrats on the legacy!

DEX Screener

Takeaway: Bullying on CT might be bad, but so is faking one’s own death and then trying to cash in on the memecoin pump thus generated.

Story Two

Good boy gone bad?

Coinbase’s marketing image of a good boy always following best practices is endangered. But unlike the Panda, notoriously threatened by extinction, they don’t have a cute face to rescue them in the court of public opinion.

On May 15th, the official Coinbase account tweeted that they had experienced a data breach, blaming cyber criminals and rogue support agents who leaked 1% of their customers’ sensitive information, including their home addresses.

Instead of giving in to the criminals’ demand for $20 million, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong did a Uno reverse on them and offered anyone helping to catch the criminals $20 million instead.

In addition, they fired a team of support agents based in India. As a result of this breach, the company is facing at least six lawsuits alleging a failure to adhere to security protocols, and countless humorous to offensive comments on X. The privacy maxis are giving off new sparks of life.

Takeaway: KYC is a problem waiting to be fixed by Zero-Knowledge-Proofs. If widely implemented, we could KYC once, and present the proof thereof to any subsequent new service we sign up for.

Story Three

Eth coming back to life

Congrats to everyone who held ETH in the past years, wishing they’d bought Bitcoin instead, myself included. The time of our hardship might finally be over, as ETH has given up its stablecoin existence and price has finally moved.

I’m still convinced that it was the dance that saved Ethereum.

That said, there have been signs of life in the Ethereum ecosystem recently with the latest Pectra upgrade going live and the Ethereum Foundation making moves again.

I admit I spent very little time studying their newly published board structure. I didn’t get into crypto to look at org charts, yet the gist is that Ethereum must remain cypherpunk and not succumb to business acumen. On top of that, they launched a trillion-dollar initiative to elevate Ethereum security to a point where it surpasses traditional financial institutions.

And if all of that doesn’t get your blood flowing, maybe ETH-chan will.

Takeaway: We shouldn’t write off Ethereum just yet; it still got moves (pun intended) But I won’t rely on that alone, brb, practicing my TikTok dance skills.

Fact of the week: This whole Jeffy saga reminded me of the book we were forced to read in High School: Sorrows of Young Werther, written by Goethe, who wanted to criticize the Romantics of his time. It backfired, as anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in suicides emulating the protagonist’s death. This was later dubbed the Werther effect. Good thing no one reads anymore.

Naomi for CoinJar

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