Story One

Movement is down only from here 

Remember how Facebook (now Meta) once had an idea for building their own cryptocurrency, and to do that, they even invented a whole virtual machine? While Meta was occupied with lawsuits, two college dropouts picked it up and fostered it into a full-blown alt L1, with $100 million in VC backing. 

So far, so ordinary, until December last year, when one of their market makers sold 66 million MOVE tokens, netting a solid $38 million in profit. After Binance detected suspicious activity on the market makers' account, they reported it to Movement Labs and the Movement Foundation. 

This kicked off an investigation, culminating on May 2nd with the suspension of Movement Co-founder Rishi Manche for getting the company into the "worst possible agreement ever." In essence, this agreement put an insane amount of MOVE tokens (5% of supply) into the hands of the Market Maker and incentivized them to pump the token price before dumping.

Takeaway: While market makers are helpful in facilitating selling and buying, it's not rare for them to abuse their power. That said, I won't shed a tear over Movement's downfall. 

Story Two

Good boy gone bad 

Gabagool made his name as an anon founder, and rose the ranks of crypto street cred by exposing other insiders, and seemingly fighting the good fight. He even featured in a Vice documentary on crypto scams.  

But this wasn't enough for him, and he launched a DeFi protocol called Velodrome right during the Luna collapse in 2022. After losing funds, he decided to replenish by draining his project's treasury of $350,000 and disappearing; not without casting the blame for the failed launch on the only doxxed team member: Alexander. 

He nearly got away with it, had he not reappeared under the name proxystudio, and become part of the Clanker team (a bot for launching coins). During a recent meetup, Alexander ran into and confronted him; the rest is history.

Gabagool/Proxy was quickly let go from Clanker, and the entire Base ecosystem has effectively banned him. 

Takeaway: The social layer is working fine for once, and we're banning a bad guy. At the same time, this saga just highlights the inherent challenges with how easy it is to be anon and disappear, then run it all up again under a different name. 

Story Three

Aztec launches testnet 

I know what you're thinking: Don't we already have enough chains? Of course, you're right that we technically have at least one chain for every daily active crypto user. Also, placing the announcement of a privacy chain right below concerns around anonymous founders might appear off. 

But I believe privacy is a human right, and full transparency is as dystopian as Psycho Pass makes it look. 

Of course, one value prop of blockchains has been that you can see everything people do, but we've slowly realized this might not be great in a world of cancel culture and mob mentality. 

Not saying that Aztec network fixes this, but at least this L2 says they are the first programmable privacy layer that combines private data with blockchain, allowing users to decide what they want to share and what not. 

With 8 years of development, you'd assume the tech is solid and ready to make privacy a default rather than a luxury afforded to the few anon founders who find doxxed members to blame when things go wrong. 

Takeaway: Aztec looks sufficiently different from other copy-pasta L2s, and in a world of surveillance capitalism, what's not to love about a privacy blockchain? 

Fact of the week: We all see them all the time. But did you know that pigeons can distinguish between good and bad kid paintings? Maybe it's time to adopt one, so you don't have to be the one crushing your kid's dreams of becoming a painter. Not parental advice.

Naomi for CoinJar

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