Stacked Insights Newsletter, 08.18.21 Market update: JPEG | Stacked

Stacked Insights Newsletter, 08.18.21

Market update: JPEG flippers lead the way
Sushi's Miso platform narrowly avoids $350M hack
Robinhood earning call reveals incredible stat

For traders, NFTs are the new altcoins

OpenSea, the definitive NFT marketplace, has just recorded $1 billion in trading volume for August alone — and the month isn't even finished.

The platform's year to date trading volume is up well over 76,000% to indicate the insatiable appetite out there for NFTs. As NFT hype continues exploding past every available metric in existence, it's clear not everyone is in it for the art.

Have you checked in on your favorite Crypto Twitter traders lately? If Punks, Penguins, and Squiggles are clogging your feed, just know those names aren't new altcoins — they're NFTs going for beaucoup bucks.

Big names like @HsakaTrades & Three Arrows Capital's @zhusu are buying NFTs heavily for both short flips and long term investments. After watching Crypto Punks go from little-known crypto art to NYC billboards, Sotheby's auctions, and 40 ETH price floors, it's impossible NOT to search for the next big thing.

Some are eyeing at Larva Labs' (creators of Crypto Punks) other project Meebits. However, for now, Pudgy Penguins and Axie Infinity are hogging the spotlight.

White hat hacker saves Sushi from losing $350 million

White hat hackers have made quite a few headlines lately. A white hat is a hacker who discovers vulnerabilities in code, then alerts the team about them before malicious hackers exploit them.

Late last week, a white hat hacker exploited Poly Network for roughly $600 million in tokens across three blockchains. As of yesterday, all the funds have been returned to a multisig wallet co-owned by the Poly team.

Now, another white hat hacker going by the name samczsun (works for Paradigm VC as a researcher) has just saved decentralized exchange Sushi from being exploited for $350 million.

As samczsun puts it, they noticed the massive $350 million raise for BitDAO on Sushi's MISO platform and dug into the code. Sure enough, they found a major flaw in the code putting ALL of the funds at risk of being stolen.

They alerted the Sushi team who quickly went about patching the flaw and securing the fortune. All in all, samczsun went from discovering the exploit to working with the team on a fix within five hours flat.

You can read samczsun's riveting write up of the events on the Paradigm blog.

Robinhood earnings call drops an incredible statistic

Robinhood just had an Q2 earnings call wherein they shared all the usual stuff — earnings, and so on. Nothing fun in and of itself, except for the insights about crypto trading.

In Q2 alone, 51% of Robinhood's $451 million revenue was generated from crypto trading. Apart from being a great sign of adoption, the amount is significant because in Q1, crypto trading only made up 17% of revenue.

Moreover, just a year ago, crypto trading accounted for a mere $5 million in revenue. Robinhood says this year's surge was caused in large part by DOGE trading, but something else caught our eye...

During Q2, the majority of new Robinhood clients did crypto trades — not equities Is this the flippening no one is talking about?

It just might be