Oh nice, digital collectible journey stamp assets.

Free email every week: sign up hereTrouble reading? Read onlineWrite to [email protected] with a tip, feedback or just to say hi.

Read time: 4 mins (how long ETH pumped for after the merge)

As usual, a hyped event hasn't moved the market as people hoped.

Sigh. 

To pick you back up, we've scoured the cryptosphere for light entertainment to take the edge off.

This is The Reveal, where the fun side of crypto is pumped and dumped into your inbox every Friday.

Top News 🗞

1/ Houston, We Have Merged 🤝

The world's energy consumption was cut by 0.2% thanks to a certain well-endowed, pyjama-wearing dreamboat and his talented team of geeks.

Early yesterday morning, Ethereum moved from proof of work to proof of stake, doing nothing for speculators hoping for a pump, reducing both its energy consumption by a whopping 99%, and the price of the coin by 9% at the time of writing.

For those who are more interested in how it affects their pockets, the stage is also now set for transaction fees to be reduced with its shiny, new engine, with the next stage being the Surge.

The Merge went insanely well, making incredibly significant changes to the network without any interruption or problem which is really quite some feat, leaving us not much to write about.

So here are some takes from Twitter instead:

Someone call Señor Raoul Pal, Mr. $10k ETH:

Presented without comment by someone who writes a trashy crypto newsletter: 

A rite of passage:

And in the anti-climax Olympics:

Safety first Greg:

2/  No Politics (That We Don't Like) At Work 🦹‍♂️

Coinbase have released a feature that allows US citizens to see whether their local politicians are for or against crypto.

Considering the CEO Brian Armstrong said there'd be no politics at work back in 2020, it's an interesting move that comes in a new offensive against the powers that be, along with backing Tornado Cash in their lawsuit against none other than the US Treasury.

The Cryptometer, (our new name for it), works in the same way the online sex offenders register does where you can instantly look up and judge the politician based on their track record, giving you a convenient, one-dimensional view.

They might back crypto (great), but also might be a raging racist (bad), so do use the tool with a pinch of salt.

3/  Starbucks Brew Up 

Finally, you can buy NFTs and redeem them for a virtual espresso martini class or a trip to a coffee farm.

On Monday, the company announced Starbucks Odyssey, a “revolutionary web3 experience” to boost their loyalty program.

The announcement states that Starbucks Rewards members will be able to “earn and purchase digital collectible assets” that will give them access to new benefits and immersive coffee experiences.

With Odyssey, users will be able to go on a series of “journeys”—”playing interactive games or taking on fun challenges to deepen their knowledge of coffee and Starbucks”—that, once completed, will earn them a “digital collectible journey stamp", a hideous phrase they've concocted up in a desperate attempt to avoid saying NFT.

The big assumption here from Starbucks marketers is that people love your coffee brand as much as you do. Who on earth wants to deepen their knowledge of Starbucks?

Our bet is on:

1) this Odyssey ending far sooner than the classical one 😏

2) any trading activity being from speculators 

DeFi Guy 👨‍💼

He's back on the free tier, suited and booted with not financial advice.

That's right, the paywall has been smashed into smithereens like it's 1989.

In short

Bankless DeFi Innovation Index is a diversified way to buy a basket of the up and coming DeFi tokens to spread your risk and make it easier to bet on the category as a whole rather than individual tokens.

What is it?

BDII is another product from Index Coop, the creators of the DeFi Pulse Index, which we featured in a previous issue. It looks at ERC-20 DeFi tokens that are not in that DPI index so excludes the larger players like Aave, Compound and Uniswap.

It includes promising DeFi projects like:

• Convex: a yield provider and the 5th largest ECR20 token by Total Value Locked (TVL).

• Maple: a staking / lending / borrowing network allowing uncollateralised borrowing.

• DyDx: a crypto trading platform which is the largest crypto derivatives platform by TVL, ahead of Synthetix.

• Frax: governance token behind an algorithmic stablecoin pegged to inflation (CPI) and ERC20 lending protocol and the 5th largest Ethereum stablecoin with a market cap of $1.34bn.

The Case

It's a great way to invest in a diversified set of tokens that are actually making money rather than pure speculation.

You're also getting exposure to proper projects like Frax that has re-thought what currency should be, by creating a coin that increases and keeps its purchasing power by being linked to inflation.

DeFi has been hard hit and the coins are out of favour – it's a good time to get in.

Head here to buy.

Shiny New Toys 👀

AssetDash Deals is a reward program for NFTs, where you qualify for various perks based on your holdings.

All you have to do is enter your ETH or SOL address, sign up, and get access to your customised set of bargains.

Right now the perks are pretty pedestrian, like gift cards and Discord Nitro, but as they grow it's worth keeping up with what freebies you can get your hands on, especially as we head into a global economy meltdown. Enjoy!

(This ain't sponsored, by the way, just very cool).

A Digestif 🍸

Cheers for reading.

Hopefully you might have learned something or at least be mildly entertained.