🥛XRP 11 years later… 🎂

GM. This is Milk Road. We’re like that super honest friend that lets you know when you have broccoli in your teeth – we tell it like it is.

It’s Saturday, y’all. Let’s get it:

• Bursting the rug pull bubble 🫧
• XRP’s 11th birthday 🎂
• Reddit’s NFT playbook 📋
• The crypto founder found dead 🍪

Gather around Roaders, the Milk Man’s here to walk you through a tool that makes blockchain data easier to read than Captain Underpants…

Here’s 3 cool ways to use a little thing called Bubblemaps:

1/ Spot rug pulls

Rug pull – two words that give almost any crypto investor PTSD. And the sad truth is that they are too easy to create, and everywhere.

Well, Bubblemaps is the king when it comes to finding red flags. And here’s a quick guide on how you can spot em yourself in only a few minutes:

2/ Track the relationship between wallets

Imagine that the top holder of a token is Joe, but you don’t know the second is Joe’s mom and the third is Joe’s grandma. She doesn’t even know what a digital wallet is!

Each wallet is separate, but Joe is in control of all of these tokens. And you never want a holder to have too much of the supply.

Bubblemaps shows you how wallets were funded and any links they may have. In one scam, a top wallet only owned 3% of the supply, but they were tied to almost 25% of it:

Take a guess how this ended…

3/ Spot inflated volume and wash trading

Wash trading is when fake trades are made to boost different statistics or drive FOMO.

And wash trading has become a big problem. People are estimating that ~60% of all NFT trades in 2022 were wash trades.

But when you put it into bubbles, wash trading can be pretty simple to break down. It helped expose a notorious NFT project Squiggles by showing how a few wallets were responsible for most of the secondary market sales.

So what? Blockchains are meant to be fully transparent and open source. But while all blockchain data is available, bad actors are getting really good at covering their trails.

And look, we know we just spat a whole lotta praise for Bubblemaps. But they didn’t pay us to – we just really like what they’re doing.

All for that “M” word – mass adoption.

Pssst! It’s a certain someone’s birthday…

At the ripe old age of 11 is… XRP. AKA the 6th largest cryptocurrency by market cap created by Ripple’s founders.

Meanwhile, I ate too much cake and vomited in the bouncy house on my 11th birthday.

To celebrate, let’s go down memory lane – and see where XRP’s headed.

1/ XRP was created before its founders built Ripple

The two are technically separate from each other. Ripple just holds most of XRP’s 100B supply (the founders hold the rest.)

Ripple’s known for cross-border payments. Banks like BoA & Santander use its RippleNet (real-time platform) for that.

It’s built on XRP Ledger, the blockchain that the XRP token is native on.

Oh and Ripple was co-founded by the same guy that created Mt. Gox. #UltraFunFact

2/ Critics have called the XRP network not truly decentralized because:

• Only an approved ~1,500 people validate transactions. Versus anyone being able to validate on Bitcoin, etc.
• XRP tokens haven’t been created since 2012. Ripple’s founders hold the power to release some into circulation every month to keep the supply stable.

3/ XRP’s price peaked at $3.84 after the 2017 crypto bull run

Then the 2018 bear market dragged it down, and…

4/ The SEC sued Ripple in 2020.

It said founders were illegally offering XRP as an unregistered security. Exchanges like Coinbase delisted the coin.

So what will its 12th year look like? Well, the SEC/Ripple lawsuit is due to wrap up this month… and Ripple’s expected to win.

That prediction has already been driving XRP’s price up in the last few months.

You know what that means! We’re hittin Vegas for the next birthday, baby.

Big brands getting into NFTs is nothing new. We’ve seen it all folks… the good, the bad and the ultimate top signal:

And while there have been a lot of swings and misses, Reddit’s rollout tells a different story.

What’s happening? Reddit NFTs just passed 10M holders.

That’s 10M wallets being created on the Polygon network. 4x the amount of people that transacted on OpenSea by the end of last year.

Reddit’s gotten ~$33M in sales revenue. Not too shabby for less than a year.

How’d they do it?

First off, they never say NFTs, wallets or any other lingo. If Web3 is gonna be accepted by the masses, we gotta drop all those buzzwords.

Reddit’s also made them inexpensive. A far cry from the standard 10K collection that prides itself on exclusivity and high prices.

It doesn’t hurt that they’re kinda cute, too.

A crypto founder was found dead this week. John Forsyth founded ONFO coin and had been missing for a week.

The OpenAI CTO’s Twitter account was hacked to promote a fraudulent crypto token. So was Fortnite’s official Twitter account. C’mon Elon…

Nike’s dot swoosh is teaming up with Electronic Arts sports. We’re HERE for that Web3 gaming interoperability

Circle’s launching a native USDC on Arbitrum next week. It’ll make it a lot faster to trade.

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.