Crypto winter is coming

Hello and welcome back to the Chain Reaction podcast, where we unpack and explain the latest crypto news, drama and trends, breaking it down block by block for the crypto curious.

You’ve probably gotten the memo that the markets are suffering, and crypto is getting hit especially hard. On this week’s episode, we talked through what an imminent “crypto winter,” or downturn, could mean for both public and private companies after a period during which huge crypto funding rounds seemed to occur on a near-daily basis.

We’ve been following the fiasco going on at Terraform Labs, which runs the UST algorithmic stablecoin and its sister currency, LUNA. UST is supposed to track the U.S. dollar, with 1 UST = 1 USD at all times, but it lost its peg this week and chaos has been unfolding ever since, putting downward pressure on the largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. If that sounds abstract and confusing to you, we feel you. That’s why we took some time to break down what’s actually going on behind the scenes with UST and why this emerging stablecoin is so important to the crypto ecosystem right now.

Our Guest: Kevin Rose of Moonbirds

Who better to share words of wisdom for startups and investors facing off with a market rout than someone like Kevin Rose, an investor at True Ventures, who says this is his “10th or so” crypto downturn? Kevin also co-founded Proof Collective, a private community of NFT collectors, that launched the viral Moonbirds NFT project last month. He dished to us about the ethics of running a crypto project, why he took money from a traditional VC despite raising tens of millions just from the Moonbirds mint, and his thoughts on charging people $40,000+ for a JPEG (the current price to snag a Moonbird).