Mornin’ Coinheads…

We genuinely hope you’ve had a wonderful weekend, because it’s been a little wonky across the crypto space, with a fair chunk of movement, but none of it consistent – but in broad terms, things were looking up with gains overall for the week.

At the time of writing this morning, BTC is down 1.43% and trending further downward after hitting a high of US$24,510 esterday.

ETH is following suit (-0.87%), XRP has dropped 1.94%, Solana is falling (-3.15%) and Cardano is also lower (-1.58%).

There were some big winners over the weekend, though, including YFI which went from $6,276 to $13,845 in two days, but has since sagged to a still-tidy $10,880. But it’s also falling today.

It looks like another case of the Monday morning blues, so grab a cappuccino and get yourself steady. It might get bumpy, but let’s go anyway…

Tiffany’s launches high-end NFTs

Tiffany’s – the New York jewellery company famous for being a place that pretty women like to have breakfast and selling insanely overpriced items, like this set of ice tongs (for making drinks, not handling drugs) that sells for more than $900 – is at it again, launching its first foray into the NFT space.

And, as the company is so delightfully predictable, the NFTiff (no, really) will be “truly exclusive”. Available only for those who currently hold a CryptoPunks NFT, the jeweller will make a physical pendant (and an NFT token) of your CryptoPunk, for the low, low price of just 30 Ethereum (~$72,000).

The whole thing kicks off at the end of this week on August 5, so you’ve got until then to save up – and you’ll need to get in early, because there’s only 250 of them to be minted.

Coinbase and Bored Apes made a movie, or something

We’ve waited a few days to bring this to you, because it’s taken us a few days to wrap our heads around the  Coinbase/Bored Ape metaverse-themed animated collab that they’ve called “The Degen Trilogy” and 99% of the population has called “WTF is that and why is it here?”

It’s either meant to be a movie of some sort or – more likely – a super-slick five minute commercial for crypto and NFTs and something.

Watch it for yourself here:

It is baffling, to say the least  – and has been met with a tidal wave of scorn from the broader crypto community, but we (along with just about everyone else) reckon crypto podcaster Cobie’s response sums it up best.

Spoiler alert: he didn’t.

But still, it looks like somebody has spent a lot of money making something that has all the hallmarks of a massive marketing misstep – and we can’t wait to see the next instalments of the trilogy, to see if Coinbase is able to knock George Lucas off the top spot for “worst trilogy of all time”.

Coinbase shares still not doing so well

Over at Coindesk, there’s speculation over what’s happening with shares in Coinbase, which Coindesk’s analysts are suggesting are stuck in something of a “tug of war between between bulls and bears”.

Coinbase shares have been sinking at varying pace since January, down around 80% since then, and are likely to get hit even harder on news that super-investor Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest recently offloaded 1.4 million of the reported 2.6 million shares it acquired in Q2 2022.

It’s an interesting read on the possible future of Coinbase’s time on the exchange – if you’ve got a spare 5 minutes, you can ingest the Bull v Bear hypothesis here.

Buterin reckons Meta’s Metaverse will be a gigantic misfire

And lastly, over at Decrypt, there’s a great piece on the intellectual brawl between Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and apparently everybody on Twitter, over the future of the Metaverse and Meta’s place in it.

The argument from Buterin is simple: Meta’s big play for control of the space is going to fail – and fail hard – because Team Zuck has started building all sorts of magical things to drive a space that hasn’t been defined clearly enough for most of those things to be relevant.

“The ‘metaverse’ is going to happen, but I don’t think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere,” Buterin said.

Whether he’s right or not is, clearly, up for discussion – but it’s raised an interesting question about how the soul of Web3 and decentralisation is going to fare, when the big corporations are gunning super-hard to build their own interpretation of how the immersive web is going to look (and, presumably, how much of the new frontier they can seize control of as it’s being built).

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