Ember Nuggets - Pixelmon, Ukraine 🇺🇦

Hi Ember Crew,

We hope everyone had a great week! As always, don't forget to continue stackin' sats!

Nugget 1: Ukraine Leverages Crypto

Ukraine was invaded by Russia last week and is currently fighting to defend its sovereignty and freedom from an oppressive regime invading from the East. Ukraine has been creative in leveraging crypto rails to reach out to the world and raise resources for its war effort. On February 26th, the official Twitter account tweeted that they are accepting donations of BTC/ETH to help raise funds to support the country and its people. The country has raised more than $50M.

The country also had some fun announcing an airdrop, now canceled, but they really know what appeals to crypto folk as the contributions spiked after the announcement. With news that the airdrop was canceled - first sovereign country rug pull?!? Jokes aside, here is a use case of crypto where capital can reach those in need without unnecessary friction / roadblocks. If you would like to donate to the cause, see official address links below from their original tweet:

Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT.

BTC - 357a3So9CbsNfBBgFYACGvxxS6tMaDoa1P

ETH and USDT (ERC-20) - 0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F9358d18A45e14

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Nugget 2: What happens when an unknown team with no gaming experience raises $70M+?

Pixelmon raised over $70M on its initial NFT sale a few weeks ago in a bid to become the Pokemon of the Metaverse. The project has come under a lot of scrutiny since the reveal with many unsettling developments. To point out, there were red flags since the beginning, but here you had peak NFT euphoria, FOMO, and lack of judgment for many investors where greed overtook logic and they minted out at a 3E price.

The project has become a laughing stock and everything wrong with the NFT space at the moment. There were red flags from inception from the unusually high social media following (no key NFT players were present), inconsistent teasers/art and extremely high mint price (dutch auction started at 3E while most projects have minted well below 0.5E). But things really started down the slippery slope after the raise. To start, the anon team is led by a 21 year old New Zealander and a team of misfits that lack the credentials to build a game. It was discovered that the team used the proceeds to buy NFTs from other top tier projects. The teasers and art prior to sale and the reveal, are nothing alike, to say the least. Not to forget, that they paid an artist on Fiverr $500 for the work.

What was promised?

What was delivered? KEVIN!

To make things worse, the team realizes they may have rushed the reveal and blamed OpenSea infrastructure for the poor renderings and committed to spending $2M to bring on a professional studio to re-do the reveal art.

Now my pure opinions, I don’t blame the team as much as I blame the people that bought. People blindly decided to spend 3E ($9K) per mint on a project without really doing much homework. Additionally, this WL/mint vibe has blown way out of proportion, and it's sad to see decisions driven purely by FOMO and greed. On the other hand, if Syber (founder of Pixelmon) is smart, he'd refund the money and move on. The lawsuits won’t be pretty and this kid is way over his head. For one, Call of Duty costs $50M to produce annually, why does this unreputable firm need $70M to make a game that looks like Minecraft with a Pokemon skin. Furthermore, they plan on hiring professional studios to build the game, in which case, is Pixelmon just a middleman ripping a fee while they will be paying others to actually make the game? IDK but thanks for the Kevin meme and the absurdity of this whole thing. Be safe out there and think rationally.

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Nugget 3: ETH Merge TidBit

The ETH Merge is the process where the existing network used by the community merges with the Beacon Chain, called ETH 2.0, where people have been staking ETH to earn yield over the past year. The merge will effectively transition ETH from PoW to PoS. The Merge is expected to happen over the summer and could be a strong catalyst for ETH this year. EIP-1559 has already added deflationary pressure to the currency and is on pace to burn 3% of ETH, annually. With the merge, some experts predict that emissions will drop by 90%+ and could effectively make ETH deflationary and scarce in the future. There are many upgrades that the merge will bring and we will cover them soon, but for now, we see this basic info as a bullish for the price of ETH later this year.

Thank you for reading!

Harsharn Singh
Investment Associate | Ember Fund

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What are Ember Nuggets?

Ember Nuggets are a weekly update with commentary from the investment team on what’s happening within the crypto market - news, developments, market trends, and more.



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