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gm everyone!

Today the NFT market is smiling back at you so buckle up and get ready for some bullish-type stories.

🙏🏾 Thanks to today’s Sponsor Tendies Research

Institutional Insights for everyday investors

Here is a breakdown of what has recently hit the industry.

• Matchday receives $21M in a funding round backed by Lionel Messi (NFTNews)

• Silvergate bank and Silicon Valley tragically collapse (CNBC)

• Biden budget proposes 30% tax on crypto mining electricity usage (CoinTelegraph)

• Vitalik Buterin cashes out his free shitcoins and donates $1B to charity (Binance Feed)

• MATIC under pressure as network outage weighs on Polygon (CryptoNews)

• A0K1VERSE Celebrates 1 Year with Steve Aoki and Reuko’s Prizmatics Collection Launch (NFTEvening)

• CoinDesk Just Launched A Multi-Year NFT Access Pass for Consensus (NFTLately)

• Binance bans buying EUR and USD using P2P for Russians (CryptoNews)

• Coffeezilla goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about crypto-related scams (NFTNews)

• Binance and Coinbase claim zero exposure to Silvergate collapse (CryptoNews)

• US Fed to create new crypto team amid concerns about unregulated stablecoins (CoinTelegraph)

• Indian government announces new crypto regulations (CyptoNews)

• Candy Digital & Getty Images Drop 70s music NFT Collection (NFTEvening)

• US regulator warns investors on proof-of-reserves unreliability (CryptoNews)

• Binance NFT marketplace adds support for Polygon (NFTNews)

• PLAY! POP! GO! Collaborates with Monaverse to Launch its First Official Collection (NFTEvening)

• The Sandbox March Festival Offers 1M of $SAND (NFTLately)

• ‘CryptoGPT’ Twitter accounts spring up as hashtag trends on Twitter (CoinTelegraph)

Here is what else we dug

Vitalik Buterin’s endorsed NFT collection pumps on OpenSea (but was it really endorsed👀)

Ethereum co-founder and famous computer scientist endorsed an NFT project that has recently set OpenSea marketplace a blaze in NFT sales.

Here is what we know about the project

• The digital treasure is called ‘The Quadratic Funding Open Edition’

• The collection was launched on March 1st, but started to gain traction on March 6th.

• The collection was launched through an alliance between Metalable and a Web3 software developing hub known as Gitcoin.

• Vitalik, a Harvard economic professional, Zoë Hitzig, and RadicalxChange founder Glen Weyl helped to engineer the collection.

• The collection has 9,209 editions collected and twelve sold out “signature” editions with over $10 million in total sales.

Matchday receives $21M in a funding round backed by Lionel Messi

In a recent seed funding round, Matchday, a Web3 gaming startup, secured $21 million in investment with the support of Lionel Messi

Here is what we know about the funding

• Messi’s venture capital firm, as well as Courtside Ventures, Greylock, HackVC, Capricorn Investment Group, and Horizons Ventures have invested in Matchday’s funding round.

• Derrick Ko, the CEO and co-founder of Matchday said that the company’s games are being developed for an underserved segment within the soccer community.

• During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Matchday launched a brief, time-limited mini-game.

• The company distributed 2 million NFT player cards among approximately 600,000 users.

• Messi has already established a significant presence in the NFT domain, acting as a brand ambassador for Sorare and the Socios fan token platform.

Coffeezilla goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about crypto-related scams

During a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, aired on March 7, American podcast host Joe Rogan received YouTuber and crypto detective Stephen Findeisen, also known as Coffeezilla.

Here is what we know about the podcast

• Coffeezilla stated that numerous celebrities gave their strongest support to Sam, drawing a comparison to the Bernie Madoff scandal.

• The crypto detective specifically touched on YouTuber Logan Paul’s purported scheme of defrauding investors in the Cryptozoo project.

• He also added that some influencers endorse NFT projects while knowing very well that devs intend to defraud investors.

• Rogan conveyed that these fraudulent schemes were a type of manipulation, drawing a parallel to the storyline in the film “The Wolf of Wall Street".

NFT Spotlight: JAKE

In the world of NFT, artists who curate and design unique digital treasures bear tremendous potential to grow. Those who mimic existing projects will likely rug-pull investors or flop in the long run.

Using a totally different art style, NFT artist Jake Osmun (known as JAKE in the NFT world) produces energetic, painterly digital artworks. His work ART_HEIST.JPG recalls Basquiat's expressive abstract style while turning it into something distinctively different.

Jake usually adds a glitchy composition to his NFT portfolio making his work different. Most artist go for the “high quality, high resolution” curation and designs. His works also mix the old and new, the familiar with the undetermined, mirroring the nature of the digital age itself.

Essential links: Twitter, OpenSea, Website

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Read our previous newsletters:

• Vitalik Buterin hosted in Accra, Ghana by Afropolitan

• Binance delists AION, MIR, and ANC tokens

• Paxos stops minting Binance USD stablecoin

• Blur Outperforms OpenSea in Trading Volume

Follow the team: Olumide Gbenro, Chris Hauser, Sandro IEVA

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