U.S. Equities Bounce Back Strong

Dow: +0.10% | Nasdaq: +3.69% | S&P: +1.42%

Catch Up Quick

• GameStop ($GME) has doubled in equity value in the last 5 (trading) days

• The CDC says vaccinated people can gather privately without masks

• Coinbase is said to be valued at >$90B in a private auction (Bloomberg)

• President Biden is expected to sign a $1.9T coronavirus relief bill this week

• Blue Origin will upgrade its New Shepard rocket to have the ability to simulate lunar gravity

• American Airlines ($AA) said it would raise $7.5B backed by its frequent-flier program to repay federal debt

• Neeva, a search engine startup led by former Google Ads boss Sridhar Ramaswamy, raised a $40M Series B led by Sequoia and Greylock

• Disney+ tops 100M subscribers just 16 months after launch (CNBC)

• A global hack by a Chinese-government-backed hacking group breached upwards of 60K Microsoft ($MSFT) business accounts

• Short (bearish) bets against star stock-picker Cathie Wood's main ARK Invest ETF have risen to a record high

• Oil prices touched >$70 following an attack on a key Saudi oil site

• NY Governor Andrew Cuomo said he won’t be resigning in wake of multiple allegations of sexual harassment

• Boeing’s monthly aircraft orders outpace cancellations for first time since 2019

Thought of the Day

• Recently, Twitter / Square CEO Jack Dorsey made headlines for auctioning away his very first tweet as a non-fungible token (“NFT”), fetching bids as high as $2.5M

• The news comes days after musician Grimes, partner of Elon Musk, sold over $6M dollars worth of digital art via NFTs

• NFTs are a type of unique cryptocurrency currently taking markets by storm, that exist via a smart contract platform such as Ethereum

  Think of a smart contract as an agreement between two people, but both the terms & means of execution are digitally encapsulated within computer code versus pen and paper

• A “token” refers to a unit of cryptocurrency exchanged on a blockchain while “non-fungible” means that the token is unable to be exchanged for something of equal value

• Owning an NFT is essentially a digital certificate of singular ownership

• Because NFTs are stored on a public database (a blockchain) and are immutable (unable to change), value can be derived intangibly via scarcity, similar to that of a rare baseball card or piece of art

• Taking a step back, the rise in NFTs represents an interesting, unique, and sustainable use of blockchain technology

• While cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange is likely here to stay, volatility, slow transaction time, limited acceptance, and governmental skepticism have collectively hindered adoption of both coins and underlying blockchain technology

• However, given the open source and dynamic nature of the internet, proving transactional authenticity has always been a challenge, as the internet is riddled with fakes and scams

• But while the underlying digital asset within a NFT might be easily copied, downloaded, or replicated, because the transaction is recorded via a blockchain, singular / verifiable ownership of the “original” is easily provable

The Bottom Lines

• Right now, the most popular cryptocurrency (and thus blockchain) used for trading NFTs is Ethereum, which is second only to Bitcoin in terms of volume, but unlike Bitcoin, it supports smart contracts 

• In a previous Audit, we discussed why Ethereum is the safest long term hold given its blockchain wasn’t just designed to track the exchange of Ether (its signature coin) but enables a tamper-proof decentralized platform for applications and smart contracts

• With the future of crypto still very much incalculable, nuanced applications that solve real world problems (such as proving authenticity on the internet) not only possess greater sticking power, but present insight into what’s next for blockchain

  Afternoon Audit Home