OpenSea Disrupted by $400M Airdrop

MARKET MOVERS

Arkansas is offering $10,000 in bitcoin for remote tech workers to move there. The Northwest Arkansas Council, a nonprofit organization, is offering remote tech professionals and entrepreneurs $10,000 in bitcoin to move to the region. Northwest Arkansas says this incentive embraces the growing trend of cryptocurrency as a payment option by employers.
Read more here.

Crypto job openings surge 395% in a year, with Miami, Austin and Denver emerging as new hubs. Companies that range from tech giants Meta, Twitter and Amazon to Wall Street firms JP Morgan and Fidelity have all posted open spots for crypto talents in 2021. Companies have been hiring for engineering roles most aggressively, as job titles containing blockchain developer and blockchain engineer take up 15.6%.

US home sales tally biggest drop since start of pandemic. Record-low inventory dragged home sales down by a seasonally adjusted 3.6 percent nationwide in December, according to a Redfin report. But it’s not because buyers have left the market. Homes sold quickly and at a premium, but year-over-year declines in inventory led to fewer sales. There are plenty of homebuyers on the hunt but there is just nothing for sale.

Crypto has been trading sideways because wage growth has not kept up with inflation. So marginal dollars to invest by retail has been reduced, says Raoul Pal of Real Vision. It also got partly swept up with the growth story but he believes that it is not correlated with the bond market or the stock market. It coincides momentarily but diverges right away. Source(11:56)

OpenSea faces sudden disruption from LooksRare airdrop. LooksRare was a small competitor to OpenSea in NFTs until earlier this week. LooksRare announced a $400 million airdrop for OpenSea's biggest customers just for logging into LooksRare's site. The response has been swift, and at least in the last few days, LooksRare has taken the market share lead in Ethereum NFTs.

Bentley to build a luxury condo tower. The luxury car brand is partnering with Dezer Development to build Bentley Residences in Miami, a luxury condo tower for Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. This is the first Bentley-branded residential tower globally, which is set to begin construction in early 2023. The automaker is working with developers and architects to translate its luxury car design into a residential experience. Read more here.

The SEC considers tightening accreditation laws. They are considering tightening qualifications that investors must meet to access private markets and increasing the amount of information that some nonpublic companies must file with the agency. Source(1:17:01)

Nvidia is a stock to watch despite pullback from recent highs, says Jason Moser. They're coming off of another impressive showing at CES 2022. Cloud gaming is starting to gain traction which is a $300 billion market opportunity. They also continue to invest in autonomous vehicle driving with the Hyperion platform, data center opportunities, and the metaverse via the omniverse platform. He believes the pullback is a great opportunity to buy. Source(35:40)

Big Tech is weaving a Fiber-Optic web of power. In less than a decade, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Today, the share of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies is about 66%. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries. Read more here.

AT&T Inc. and Dish Network Corp. to spend billions for 5G services. The companies topped the list of bidders for a swath of wireless spectrum previously reserved for military use, offering a new test for telecom companies seeking to share the air with other users. The Federal Communications Commission on Friday said AT&T spent $9.1 billion and Dish spent $7.3 billion to secure rights to use the airwaves.