Rug Radio Recap - February 12, 2023

gm! First off, we wanted to thank every single one of you for making the Rug Radio Faces of Web3 by Cory Van Lew mint a HUGE success as we minted out all 20,000 PFPs in wave 2.

For all of our new members, welcome to the Rug Radio fam! We send out this newsletter every Sunday highlighting all of the key Rug Radio, web3, and market news of the past week, which is written by Ryguy.

Here's what we've got in this week's newsletter...

• Faces of Web3 is SOLD OUT

• It's Super Bowl Sunday, but expect less crypto commercials

• SEC comes after staking, settles with Kraken for $30M USD

Faces of Web3 is SOLD OUT

After a total of 14,665 PFPs were minted during wave 1 - which was exclusively for Genesis NFT holders, Cory Van Lew 1 of 1 holders, $RDAO holders, and Rug Radio creators - we moved to wave 2, an allowlist based mint, where we successfully sold the remaining 5,335 PFPs.

The first wave of the mint was perfect, but the second half of the mint did not go as planned as many on the allowlist did not get the opportunity to mint. If you were on the allowlist and unable to mint, had a failed transaction, or want to learn more, we wrote a full post mortem and will be starting to process the form submissions this week.

While the PFP is primarily for the art, we also want to provide utility within the Rug Radio ecosystem starting with our rewards program. This means that every holder of a Faces of Web3 PFP is eligible to sign up for our rewards program and earn $RUG - our utility token - by completing bounties, listening to shows, and so much more coming soon!

To learn more about the program and sign up, check out all of the information on our Wiki.

The reveal will be on Monday, February 13th with the time to be announced, but it will be on a Twitter Space - the same way we did it for the Genesis NFT reveal.

Super Bowl & Crypto Ads

It's Super Bowl Sunday! Whether you're a diehard fan of either team, or like me and just in it for the commercials, one thing you can expect to see less of this year is crypto ads.

You can attribute that to the collapse of FTX as there were a couple of crypto commercials booked with others nearly set prior to that; Once the news broke, the deals were all dropped meaning there won't be any representation of crypto companies in this year's Super Bowl, according to the Associated Press.

Last year, there were a few notable crypto commercials including Coinbase who had a QR code bouncing around the screen in a DVD style format that took people to sign up for the exchange and receive free Bitcoin; It worked so well that the site and app crashed.

There was also a Crypto.com commercial featuring Lebron James giving advice to his younger self, and an FTX commercial featuring Larry David who played a character skeptical of using the app...Interesting to see how that turned out.

The one person that managed to sneak in a highly anticipated ad was Gabriel Leydon, the CEO of Limitbreak and Digidaigaku, who labels the effort as The Biggest Free Mint Ever. In a now deleted Tweet, Gabriel released a trailer and mentioned to watch for the Limitbreak logo and be ready to scan the QR code.

Reddit also teamed up with the NFL to release free Super Bowl themed collectible avatars.

Kraken shut down crypto-staking operations and paid a fine of $30M USD to settle charges from the SEC, just one day after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted that he was hearing rumors of SEC enforcement.

LooksRare is partnering with Moonpay to allow users to easily purchase crypto and NFTs with a credit card.

Doodles hired Bianca Posterli as their Head of Brand Marketing, who formerly worked at Twitter as the Head of Campaign Strategy.

Taskashi Murakami teamed up with Swiss luxury watcher Hublot to release 13 NFTs linked to physical watches.

OpenSea announced that they're now an aggregator for the Seaport ecosystem, starting with 3 other marketplaces built on top of the protocol.

Context

• After sideways movement in the crypto markets for most of the week, prices fell on the news of Kraken shutting down staking operations after being charged by the SEC for offering unregistered securities and fears of what that could mean for the regulatory landscape of cryptocurrencies.

• On Tuesday, eligible traders get a little Valentine's Day gift as Blur is set to drop the $BLUR token. The big question marks are whether the token will have any value, and if so, will that value will be rotated back into NFTs.

• Also on Tuesday, we get the January CPI - which tracks the average change in prices for goods and services bought by consumers aka. inflation - with the expectation for this number to come in at a 6.2% increase YoY. As usual, expect to see some volatility across all markets leading up to release as this indicator is closely watched by federal reserve officials and may influence future monetary policy.