Mandala Exchange

Hello everyone! We are back with ‘Mandala Minutes’, a dedicated newsletter that scours the internet to inform and educate people about what’s happening out there in the crypto world in an engaging and entertaining manner.

Ever since we wrote to you guys in the last newsletter, it’s been a wild ride in the crypto space. There’s so much happening, so much to keep up with, so much to learn and explore. While we encourage active participation, enthusiasm, and learning in this space, we also acknowledge that sometimes it can get overwhelming. It’s the ‘Mental Health Awareness Month’ in the USA. We encourage you to take a break here and there, talk to your friends & family, and say it out loud in our community channels if you ever feel overwhelmed. The key to winning in the land of crypto is to survive for a long time. Ensuring that involves keeping a check on your mental health. So, before we get to the news, we would love for you to keep a tab on your mental health and also talk to others you know are involved in the space.
Bird app gets close to being acquired by Elon Musk

 Elon Musk is involved in building rockets, electric vehicles, digging underground tunnels, implanting a chip in our brains to enhance consciousness and now he’s going to acquire the ‘townhall of the internet’ – Twitter. The web2 social media platform accepted Elon’s roughly $44 billion takeover bid. The approval from the Twitter board was unanimous and the deal is expected to close sometime this year. Elon Musk has been vocal about his bullish stance on crypto and his support for Dogecoin. Unsurprisingly, Dogecoin soared when the news of Twitter’s acquisition by Elon came out. We are all left to wonder that if Elon manages to take Twitter private, will Dogecoin play a bigger role on the social media platform where people involved in crypto live & breathe!

 Hacks, exploits & mistakes that soured the mood

Last month, we witnessed the largest DeFi hack to hit crypto. More than $625 million were stolen in DeFi hack of the Ronin Network. The group behind the attack was revealed by the CIA to be the infamous North Korean Lazarus group. Another DeFi hack last month affected the platforms Rari Capital and Fei Protocol. They suffered a more-than-$80 million hack. Fei Protocol, which merged with Rari in December last year, has offered to let the attacker keep $10 million of the stolen funds as a “bounty” if the remaining funds were returned. Due to a simple smart contract error during a new NFT launch, $34 million in ETH got locked away from both the creator and buyers. This happened with the highly anticipated Akutars, a collection of unique 3D avatars based on his popular Aku NFT series, created by MLB player turned NFT artist Micah Johnson. Also, The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s official Instagram page was hacked and used to scam $2.8 million in NFTs from followers.

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Metaverse Drop

Within two months of its launch, ApeCoin became the largest metaverse token by market cap in the crypto space leaving behind Decentraland ($MANA), The Sandbox ($SAND) and Axie Infinity ($AXS). One of the reasons this happened was because of the launch of Otherside – the BAYC-inspired metaverse project. The drop was a wild success. For selling 55,000 Otherdeeds NFTs, Yuga Labs earned more than $300 million within 24 hours.. The mint consumed over $177 million in gas fees, and there was such demand for the NFTs that, at one point, Etherscan crashed.

Nuggets from the cryptoverse📊

• Central African Republic became the second country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender.
• Chainalysis estimates that crypto investors made $163 billion in realized gains in 2021. 93% came from Bitcoin and Ether. US investors made up 29% of the total amount.
• The Solana blockchain went dark after suffering a global outage for nearly seven hours. The outage was blamed on bots that swarmed Candy Machine, an NFT minting tool. The NFT minting bots reportedly submitted more than 4 million transactions a second, generating more than 100 Gbps of traffic that crashed the network.
• The world’s largest asset manager BlackRock launched its first crypto-exposed ETF.
• Central American country Panama passed laws to regulate bitcoin and legally recognize DAOs.
• OFAC added North Korea-linked wallet addresses to its sanction list. The hackers who exploited Axie Infinity for $600 million have been able to launder money despite sanctions by sending assets to an intermediary address before sending the funds to Tornado Cash.
• Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST passed Binance USD (BUSD) to become the third-largest stablecoin by circulation.
• Tron is creating an algorithmic stablecoin called USDD. USDD will be pegged to Tron’s blockchain, TRX.
• a16z crypto is building out a dedicated research team led by faculty from Columbia and Stanford. The firm is looking to bridge the gap between academia and real-world applications.
• Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht waived any rights he had to the $3 billion bitcoin that was seized by the United States. This absolves Ulbricht of the $183 million debt he owes to the United States.
• Retail interest in Bitcoin fell to one year lows, but Google Trends indicate that retail interest in new sectors like DeFi and L1 blockchains like Solana and Avalanche is growing.
• Shiba Inu launched a ‘Burning Portal’ to reward $SHIB token holders. It is incentivizing participants to cut the meme coin’s circulating supply.
• The SEC renamed its “Cyber Unit” to “Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit.” It will add 20 investigators to its Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit in order to better monitor the crypto industry.
• Argentina’s largest private bank Banco Galicia will offer Bitcoin & Ethereum trading services. Their clients will also be able to transact in USD Coin and XRP.
• After 8 years, Wikipedia stopped accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum donations. The Wikimedia Foundation had previously accepted Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash through BitPay.
• Financial services giant Fidelity Investments will allow investors to diversify their 401(k) savings accounts with Bitcoin. Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy will become the 1st company to give employees the chance to add Bitcoin to 401(k) savings accounts.
• Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires Mayor presented a plan that permits tax payments in bitcoin.
• Fort Worth became the first city in the US to mine bitcoin. It will run mining rigs out of city hall.

From the World of Web3, NFTs & the Metaverse🔮

• web3 media startup PROOF raised $10M from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian after Moonbirds NFT launch. Moonbirds NFT is an Ethereum-based project and the first PFP launch from tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose’s PROOF Collective. Between the initial mint and hot secondary sales, the project generated $280 million worth of trading volume in the span of just two days.
• Security vulnerabilities in the NBA’s 18,000 free NFT drop allowed users not on the whitelist to gain access to the mint. The NBA said it would increase the size of the collection to ensure everyone who was supposed to receive one will get one.
• Crypto game developers raised $2.5 billion in Q1
• Talent agency UTA has signed on DeadFellaz, an NFT project comprised of 10,000 green-skinned zombies.
• ZRX, the native token behind 0x protocol, announced it will power Coinbase’s NFT marketplace.
• State lawmakers in New York want to make fraudulent rug pulls a crime in the state.
• Pplpleasr released Producer Pass Ethereum NFTs for Cannes. The NFTs grant access to events at the film festival, and all profits will support aspiring female creators.
• Square Enix sold off Tomb Raider and Three Studios to fund NFT Games. The Final Fantasy publisher will net $300M from the sale, which will bankroll new efforts including blockchain-based games.
• The NFL released Draft-themed NFT collectibles. Each of the league’s 32 teams is offering 52 NFTs that sell for $52 each. The NFTs are minted on the Flow blockchain rather than Polygon, the Ethereum sidechain scaling solution used for previous NFL NFT drops.

In this edition of our newsletter:

• Update on GoodCrypto Advanced Algo Trading Promotions
• Some news from Australian Real-World Marketing Campaign
• Safemoon Announcement (we know you’ve been waiting for this one)
• Mandala Madness & MandalaFi Updates
• Good old community FAQs

GoodCrypto Advanced Algo Trading Promotions

We recently announced our partnership with GoodCrypto. We aim to target their user base of 250k registered users, of which 60k are active on a monthly basis.

Mandala and GoodCrypto have partnered  to offer traders a risk and commitment free trial featuring Mandala’s (MDXT) token utility through an exclusive competition with Mandala. The top 210 Traders throughout the competition will receive significant trading fee reductions, as if they had $MDX locked on the exchange, by meeting some very reachable volume requirements. 

Traders will be able to actualize the monetary benefits of purchasing and locking up to 300k MDX and trading on Mandala Exchange!

Let’s show these traders what they are missing out on by NOT locking up 300k MDX and trading on Mandala Exchange!

Mandala is also matching GoodCrypto’s 5% trading fee rebate with an additional 5% back for the next 90 days.

You didn’t think we would stop there, did you?

The race has begun, as we will be giving away 250k $MDX in airdrops to the first 750 signups!

To help incentivise these promotions, GoodCrypto will be providing all GoodCrypto/Mandala users a free 90-day trial run with their PRO trading account.

You can find some more details on these promotions below:

https://goodcrypto.app/goodcrypto-partners-with-mandala-exchange-free-trading-with-pro-features-and-mdx-token-rewards/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Mandala_collaboration

We also recently hosted an AMA with GoodCrypto on our Twitter spaces. You can find the recording below:

https://twitter.com/MandalaEx/status/1521554479371354114?s=20&t=FbyXZFFifeoF5s3eyyixLQ

Australian Real-World Marketing Campaign.

We recently shared pictures of our real-world advertisement campaign in Sydney, Australia.

We also wanted to share a video recording so that you could see the ad in action.

This was a trial run to see how these sorts of ad spaces operate and gather some metrics. When we are ready for it, we hope to run these on a much larger scale.