RIP to the queen btw

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Read time: 4 mins (3 mins longer than it took the first Queen NFT collection to come out)

Life goes on. The Merge is full steam ahead, chancers are trying their luck with Queen NFT free mints, and Solana is still dodgy. 

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

Top News 🗞

1/ Merge Incoming

The wheels are very much in motion with The Merge. The Bellatrix upgrade went live on Monday which was the last big task on Vitalik's to-do list before he pushes the big red button next week.

Diaries have been blocked out, loved ones alerted and ETH taken off exchanges in greedy hope of fanciful airdrops.

But how are the professionals, wanting to make a quick buck, gearing up for it?

A report by Glassnode showed that the ETH markets are in backwardation, meaning the futures price is lower than the current price, and as such, it looks like the anticipation of the Merge is worth more than the event itself.

If you're wondering what you should do, but don't have much knowledge of what's going on: do nothing. The likelihood is you'll get scammed as chancers try and take advantage of the chaos.

Buckle up!

 2/  Queen Is the New Meta

You'd bet your house on the NFT crowd seeing the Queen passing as a fantastic opportunity to make a quick buck.

It happened in swathes and within minutes of the news breaking.

Here's how Crypto Twitter reacted, including some horrendous pixel art, gratuitous words of condolence and the customary airdrop begging.

It's what she would've wanted:

Big fan of your work @damydml:

I think we can all agree:

She was actually a huge "SolSteaks" fan:

This art is going up on Charles' bedroom wall, I believe:

DeFi Guy 👨‍💼

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

We decided it was probably too early to start gating this content so here you go: your cake that you can eat.

In short, here at The Reveal it is as much about discussing buying opportunities as it is those we're staying away from, and Solana fits that bill.

Whilst its price is down 86% since its all-time high and the TradFi squares at Morgan Stanley prophesised back in February that Solana could gain significant ground on Ethereum (spoiler alert, that hasn’t happened), crypto’s short history is full of copy-cat platforms that no longer exist and recent outages call into question its ability to scale.

We think it's best placed as a small hedge in your portfolio, because if the outages stop then there may yet be a way back for SOL but don't re-mortgage the house for heaven's sake.

The Take

Solana has suffered numerous outages in 2022 so far, including 30 hours of downtime in the 3rd week of January.

These have been caused by bugs and bots, leading to issues such as failure to reach consensus over new blocks.

Basically, it's damn fast but does break easily, which was acknowleged by one of the founders earlier this week as a major issue.

A more likely outcome is that other alt layer 1s gain ground on Solana, which was the 4th largest coin by market cap back in November 2021. Avalanche, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain and Cardano all stand ready to pounce.

What Terra Luna taught us is that no coin is too big to fail, and weaknesses are ruthlessly exploited.

Check out this time lapse of coins by market cap from 2013-2022 to see the turbulent times in action:

Solana could still yet sort out its issues and the market has shown in the past that it doesn’t give two shits about decentralisation, but what's the point if we aren't differentiating from the financial system that has been in place up to now?

Shiny New Toys 👀

Have you ever wanted to message the person behind a crypto wallet?

Now you can with Tribes.

The mobile app allows you to send messages to any Ethereum or Solana wallet even with group chat functionality, and also presents a social feed of sorts to stay up to date.

Finally, a way to react to paperhanding an NFT.

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

Mental Web3 🤯

Just when you haven't heard from them in a while, the news broke that Islamic State are getting into NFTs in a bid to beat censorship of their message, by making it immutable on the blockchain.

Here's what one of them looks like:

They were taken down from OpenSea and Rarible but of course, live on in the IPFS world forever.

Pretty horrible stuff but unfortunately inevitably attractive to the group.

A Digestif 🍸

Diamond hands baby!

Cheers for reading. Hopefully you might have learned something, or at least be mildly entertained.