Inside this week’s edition of the Freeway Friday update you’ll find:

Let’s get straight to it…

Happy Friyay again #FreewayFam,

Do you know the (perhaps mythical) story of the Indian Minister who invented chess?

Sessa, an ancient Indian Minister, invented an early precursor to chess as an education resource.

Delighted by the game, the King asked Sessa to name his reward.

Sessa, clearly a capable mathematician, requested an amount of grain equal to the sum of one grain on the first square of the board, which is then doubled on each subsequent square…

Two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, eight on the fourth, and onwards.

The ruler laughed at Sessa’s modesty in claiming such a meager prize for his entertaining invention.

Until the court treasurers interrupted proceedings to report that such a quantity of wheat would outstrip the country’s entire wheat stores and annual production.

On the entire chessboard there would have been 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of wheat, weighing 1,199,000,000,000 metric tons — about 1,645 times the global production of wheat even today.

Versions of the story differ as to whether the inventor became a high-ranking advisor or was executed for his cheek.

This legendary request is known as the Wheat and Chessboard Problem and forms the basis of many modern mathematical and philosophical questions.

I share this because even though it may seem obvious, the power of compounding and exponential growth never fails to amaze me.

And on that note, monthly Supercharger inflows grew from $4m in October and $5.5m in November to $13.5m in December.

A tasty growth trajectory…

In the New Year update we announced what’s to come in 2022.

One of the promising aspects included was the Freeway Treasury Supercharging service.

Crypto projects can bring their treasuries to Freeway and operate their businesses based purely on their deposit rewards — without having to touch their base capital.

This solves perhaps the biggest problem new businesses face: cash flow.

A recent study by a US bank suggests that 82% of small businesses fail due to poor cash flow management and those businesses can often have great ideas, talent and potential at their core.

Well, in the last few hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve, we finalised deals with two crypto projects to do just that — to the tune of more than $4m.

As private clients we are not revealing names of the projects just yet — but if and when we can, we’d be happy to announce them both as officially supercharged.

And the good news extends beyond crypto…

Freeway’s treasury management service had a great start, extending beyond crypto into traditional business thanks to team contacts.

The first traditional business came onboard, bringing the total between the three businesses to more than $5.7m in Superchargers.

In years to come, we hope to look back at this Freeway moment and service as pivotal in the trajectory of hundreds, if not thousands of businesses, and the people and families depending on them — in crypto and beyond.

Following a record $5.5m month in November, we promised at the beginning of December that we would donate $10,000 to charity for every $1m received in Superchargers during the month.

Well, it turned out to be quite a month, with an inflow of $13,567,720.33.

True to our word, we’re donating a total of $135,677.20 to nominated charities.

We will also, in the near future, launch a Freeway Charity Supercharger into which future donations will be made.

By Supercharging future charity donations, we will be able to give once and give forever — giving much more over time than we would be able to otherwise.

We asked for the #FreewayFam’s nominations for charities of their choice, and our effervescent, ever-present, and never-evanescent community admin Olivia has been compiling a list.

We will choose from these charities — and some of our own nominations — which ones we’ll support with transparent funding.

We’ll reveal more details on that soon.

In December, we finalised plans with Freeway Prime to provide Supercharger-level rewards in segregated, regulated brokerage accounts with investor protections and compensation.

This means it will be easy for anyone in the Deposit Reward products to Supercharge their deposits — adding further utility to FWT.

This is going to be made available to retail consumers across 180 countries and means if a user can pass KYC and onboard to Freeway Prime, they will be able to access Superchargers as a fully regulated product.

It also means users can buy and deposit cash and crypto instead of needing to purchase a simulation thereof.

This is big news, allowing us to improve how we market the entire product suite for those who do not need or want a purely DeFi offering.

We’re calling this new improved product offering Financial Custody 2.0 with changes to the tokenomics for increased FWT utility.

These changes will cater for all users — giving you full control of the level of rewards you will enjoy, from (a targeted) 20–50%, with no fees to pay.

Instead of charging fees, which naturally cause user friction, deposit, staking, and withdrawal fees are dropping to zero.

Coming soon as one of the first major updates of 2022, we will share the new FWT Tokenomics with greater utility baked into every aspect of the Freeway ecosystem.

This includes the utility of Freeway Token generating staking rewards itself — whether or not holders buy or bring other assets to Freeway.

This FWT staking will generate rewards through a mechanism of surplus reward collection and redistribution.

FWT holders will simply need to hold their tokens inside their regulated Freeway accounts to begin receiving staking rewards paid in stablecoins, Bitcoin, or Ethereum.

It really is as simple as that.

Of course, the staking rewards you receive on your FWT will generate rewards themselves.

That’s staking reward compounding on steroids — and all you need is $FWT.

More details are coming in the planned New Freeway Tokenomics FriYay Update later this month.

All of our US #FreewayFam who were unfortunately unable to participate in the early Giveaway Rewards late last year will find a (not so) little New Year’s surprise in their Freeway Lite US accounts next time they log in…

Anyone that has been on Twitter lately would have seen Adrian out there crushing it!

He’s liking, retweeting, and talking to anyone that will listen (and even some that won’t) and we love it.

Your passion and enthusiasm should be applauded, and we certainly appreciate your effort.

It makes us all so happy that we have people in our community like you.

Keep the passion alive and we hope the grand title of Guerilla of The Week helps to keep the fire burning!

Once a week on a Tuesday at 7pm UTC, Freeway holds an internal AMA in the AuBit Telegram channel that gives the community a chance to ask direct questions with core team members.

You can find the transcript from last Tuesday’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) below.

If you’d like to participate in the next AMA on Tuesday at 7:00 PM UTC where you can ask Graham anything, join the AuBit Official Telegram group here.

As always, we love hearing from you, so do please join us on Telegram, follow us on socials, and if you want to hear from us and you want to hear it first, sign up for the newsletter.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aubitnetworkLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aubitTwitter: https://twitter.com/aubitnetworkInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/aubitnetwork/

Finally, we’re making good progress on the brand development work and the website rebrand will be kicking off as soon as possible after we lock in on the new and improved brand identity, which I cannot wait to share with you.

Until next week,

Sadie HuttonCo-Founder and CEO

We’ve put together simple resources for people that are new to AuBit Freeway. The below articles will help you discover everything you need to know including:

Any eligible user in more than 180 eligible countries worldwide can now create an account for access to Supercharger Staking products, FWT native staking, and Freeway Forever Referral Rewards.

Visit our website aubit.io to get access to Freeway Lite now!

Some of the statements herein are not applicable to US citizens and residents. US citizens and residents must access a distinct platform with limited features, which may be viewed at www.freewaylite.us and adheres to US regulations. The statements in this newsletter are subject to change and should not be relied upon when making financial decisions. Some of the statements by third parties included herein are not necessarily endorsed by or represent the views of Freeway. You should always seek independent advice before making financial decisions or investments.

The question is, which NFTs are most likely to hold their value, and how is the $41bn distributed? To give you an idea, there were 23,122,065 NFTs on OpenSea yesterday, and 23,151,602 today, meaning nearly 30k were added overnight (OpenSea). If you do the math, while many NFTs are doing quite well, it is almost certain that the vast majority of the NFTs being created will NOT have value a year or two from now. Here’s why:

Let’s take the market cap, $41bn, and subtract the top 5 NFTs, a little over $10bn (APN News). That leaves $31bn. Divide that by 23,151,602 (keep in mind, this is the number of unique NFTs, many of them have MULTIPLE of each, sometimes thousands). That leaves $1,339 USD or 0.4eth each. Not too bad! Next up, how much does it cost to launch a new contract on Ethereum? You’re looking at easily $2000 or more in gas fees, putting us at -$661. Next up, each purchase or transfer costs around $30–$60 in gas depending on the time of day. Lastly, we’re ONLY talking about OpenSea, there are plenty of other NFT markets, which means I’m giving a best-case scenario, not to mention leaving out the 2.5% or more that go directly to the exchange you’re using.

What I’m trying to say is, NOT ALL NFTs will go up in value. Yes, they’re a blast to collect, some will moon, and if you just love the art, this article doesn’t matter. But if you’re trying to find NFTs that WILL hold value over time, here’s why I think historical NFTs are your best bet.

I believe the following attributes account for the valuation of all NFTs:

However, the attributes above are NOT weighted equally, nor is the ratio of what gives a project value the same for all NFTs.

The “Newly Minted NFT”

For an NFT launched today, its value is almost entirely dependent on influencers to launch successfully. Without them, it’s incredibly difficult to build out a community or sell a single NFT. Sadly for new mints, this isn’t “Field of Dreams”. If you just made the 30,000,000th NFT, it doesn’t matter how good of an artist you are, 99% of the time you’ll be focused on marketing to get word out, and the odds of success aren’t high.

The “Survivor”

Next up, let’s look at an NFT released over the last year or so, with a fairly decent amount of volume and a solid price. At this point, the creator/team as well as the community are the most important keys to success, as well as maintaining value.

If the Discord is lively and excited, people are probably going to keep buying into the project. If the creator(s) decide to collect the ETH and move on with their life, there’s a pretty good chance the project will stagnate.

At that point, liquidity dries up, people aren’t able to find anyone willing to buy the NFT from them, and you end up with what is commonly referred to as “bag holders”. (Conversely, if the creator and community do a solid job, there’s a good chance that all of them will benefit as the NFT gradually develops a history and longevity).

The important thing here is that the number of holders steadily increases, and remain passionate. If you do well enough, you’ll also get to compete with 20 other NFTs that all decided to plagiarize everything from your name to your art. (Still doable, but frustrating). If you make it here, you’re likely 1/100,000, so fantastic job!

The “Mooned NFT”

This is the reason why NFTs are a blast. Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, and just a handful of others make the cut. By being at the right place, at the right time, with the right marketing, influencers, team, Steph Curry, and Meme-ability, a TINY amount of NFTs become worth millions, and eventually billions. I would argue initially, influencers were incredibly important, but at a certain point, these have become historical by being the first to grow so large and well known. As long as NFTs exist, and a quantum computer doesn’t break Ethereum somehow one day, BAYC and CryptoPunks will have value.

They’re cool, they’re unique, yet they’re incredibly risky bets. There are few things more stressful than placing the equivalent of a paid-off mansion on red at the roulette table, trust me. If you stumbled upon one of these before they went big, congrats! IMHO, they are perhaps the riskiest bet of all ONCE they have mooned. (That doesn’t mean they won’t go up in value, I think they will, but I don’t think this is where you find another +1000x gain, they’re already there)

The “Utility NFT”

For a month or two, this was THE thing. Wolf Game lead the pack (and got to experience competing with 100 clones launched per night). The concept behind it WAS unique. Would it have succeeded as well as it did without influencers tweeting about it? I don’t think so. IMHO, utility is a good way to differentiate to GET an influencer or two but is a short-term shot of adrenaline. I am (perhaps wrongly) bearish on most “utility” NFTs, because they’re so easy to clone, and most of them end up feeling gimmicky, not to mention being incredibly easy to game for those who are technical.

And finally, the “Historical NFT”

This is the whole point of the article, great job making it down here! A historic NFT is one that launched early, before the giant rush of 2021. What makes them unique is that the value is almost entirely in their history. In many cases, the creator or dev team that made it no longer even exists. To be completely transparent and to prove my point, I created PixelMap in 2016. It is now the oldest Ethereum NFT on OpenSea and the second oldest Eth NFT overall. The domain pixelmap.io was down from 2017–2021. Once it was rediscovered, people began buying it directly from Etherscan, before it was even listed on OpenSea.

Does the creator, influencers, art, community, etc. all matter for early NFTs? Yes, of course, and I’m lucky enough to have a fantastic community helping me. But before all of those existed, people were ALREADY buying the tiles up, the inherent value just from being one of the very first. Every single day more people in the NFT space start asking WHAT are the first NFTs, and the market has been gradually moving more to them.

If you think about any collectible, the oldest is almost always the most valuable, and I believe the same will be true for NFTs. If you’ve never looked into them, here are some fantastic examples.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just to give you an idea:

There are a lot more to choose from, (2015–2019) is really the sweet spot. The older the better. My point is, that tomorrow when another 30,000 NFTs are listed on OpenSea, there will still only be 1 NFT released in 2015, 1 NFT in 2016, and just a handful in 2017. NFTs have two possibilities. They’re a fad and will eventually die out, or they’ll stick around and become even more valuable, there really is no middle ground. And if they do continue to grow, historic NFTs are both the safest, and best bet for finding the next moon.

References:

APN News https://www.apnnews.com/combined-market-cap-of-top-5-nft-collections-hit-10-2-billion-in-november-cryptopunks-make-half-of-that-value/#:\~:text=The%20CoinMarketCap%20data%20showed%20CryptoPunks,bn%20as%20of%20this%20week.

OpenSea https://opensea.io/assets

Business Insider https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/nft-market-41-billion-nearing-fine-art-market-size-2022-1

At least 50 new NFT art projects are launched every day.

Questionably, especially since the birth of social networks, the process through which articles were written and selected for publication has always been foggy, to say the least, with writers and journalists being silenced by political and financial powers via their editors.

These days, it is hard to find unbiased and useful news pieces; most, if not all, media outlets express their political view via the articles they publish and vested interests guide the selection and publishing process.

The idea of securing the neutrality of an outlet is simply an utopia.

What isn’t an utopia is to bring the control over that process to the users, the reader themselves. It’ll be them who decide which article will be published, how the writers will be rewarded, by striking a balance between their own financial interest and their thrist of knowledge.

The publishing process: writers

Anyone holding a “Writer NFT” will be able to submit an article for review and votation on the cryptojournal.ink website. Non-holders won’t be able to submit any order, whilst having 2 or more NFT won’t make any difference. The article can be about anything you like, in any language you prefer. You can decide the lenght, the content… just about everything.

Every week all the submitted articles will be reviewed and voted by the DAO: our $NTS holders will be able to cast their vote, based on the number of tokens they hold. The top 10 articles every week will be published on the Crypto Journal and their authors will be rewarded accordingly to the rank they reached in the votes.

Writers can submit only an article every week, to avoid spam.

The publishing process: readers

$NTS token holders will be able to stake their token to receive rewards. Only people staking in the “Voting pool” will be able to cast their vote and receive the rewards. Earlier on, the governance will be limited to deciding which articles get published via voting, later on we plan to give out the control of the entire governing process and funds management to the DAO.

Readers will also be able to “print” an NFT copy of the Crypto Journal at the “Kiosk” for collecting purposes and for █████ too! Note that, you’ll be able to print on the CURRENT frontpage of the Crypto Journal, once the week is gone, that NFT won’t be obtainable in any other way!

The Business Model: bribing system

Until here, no words have been spoken about the value proposition of the platform. So, writers have an interest in getting published for a serie of reasons:

1. The $NTS rewards they earn if their article is voted in the top 10;

2. Their article — which can include any type of content, including articles regarding other projects or personal goals — will reach out to a wider audience;

3. Users will be able to tip them if they liked their content.

4. Readers, apparently, have no interest in participating in the votation process: they already earn rewards by staking, why should they bother voting? Well, in reality there are at least two reasons why they should do that:

5. Supporting particular creators or writers with their vote: the higher the ranking the author gets, the larger the rewards they will receive;

6. The Bribing System.

7. Each Author, when submitting their articles for publication, will be able to offer a % of their rewards, should they be voted into the top 10, to the voters. The voters will know this information when voting, hence they’ll have an actual interest into voting the authors offering them the highest reward or at least the highest between the articles that the voter think have a chance at getting published. Rewards offered to the community might not be the only factor: well known authors or writers, may be nonetheless more likely to win than unknown authors even if the latter offer juicier rewards; again, an useful article might get more votes than a promotional one. Basically, it comes to finding a good compromise between quality of the article and the slice of the pie offered to the readers (instead of promoting the interests of some fuzzy lobby or VC, like happens all the time in traditional media).

8. Advertisement

9. Entities or users interested in advertising a product will be able to rent, by buying Advertisers NFTs, an ads banner which will be published on the frontpage of the Crypto Journal for a period of time. 100% of the profits coming from advertisement will go into buying back $NTS tokens.

10. $NTS Token

11. $NTS is the governance token for the platform, which allows users and readers to earn staking/voting rewards and partecipate in the governance of the platform.

12. About Newsverse (formerly Nothing to See)

13. Newsverse is going to be the first metaverse-enabled gamified crypto news platform, where people can keep themselves up to date with the latest crypto news while enjoying play 2 earn mechanics and gamified crypto business.

14. Relevant links:

15. Website: https://www.cryptojournal.ink

16. Twitter: https://twitter.com/NewsverseNSV

17. Telegram: https://t.me/NewsverseNSV

18. Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/NewsverseNSVann

19. XDAO: https://www.xdao.app/

20. 
    

CoinEx offers a friendly interface, is fluid, has automatic transactions for deposits and withdrawals backed by the most important mining group in the world, all your digital assets in CoinEx will be 100% reserved and will not be used anywhere else, high security and many tools that make CoinEx one of the best cryptocurrency exchanges.

CoinEx offers us the “Financial Account” product where we can generate passive income with USDT, BTC and ETH

support.coinex.com

The first thing we have to do is click on “Assets” and then on “Financial Account”

Later we select the option in which we want to make the deposit in this example we will do it with USDT

The returns shown are an annual estimate that is calculated on a weekly basis

Interest will be calculated on the second day of the transfer instead of the first day

On the third day the financial account will generate compound interest

The first day that the assets are transferred from the spot account to the financial account, no interest is accrued

70% of the interest income of currencies borrowed from margin trading on CoinEx will be allocated to users against the proportion of holdings in their financial accounts

The man behind AAVE is known as Stani Kuchelov, who was disappointed in the offerings from the DEFI scene back in 2017. He created a small project that would make use of crypto and offer loans to users, this gathered attention and a community started to build around it. ETHlend launched where borrowers could lend crypto on a p2p basis, the LEND token went live with an ICO raising over 16 million dollars for the platform’s launch. With a bit of time, the protocol got a hefty pool of crypto, so much so that it switched over from a p2p system to a pool based lending service to make use of the liquidity. Shortly after a governance option was added to the platform and community decided to migrate the LEND tokens over to a new token for rewards and governance, named AAVE on a 100:1 basis.

The protocol is now heavily reliant on the community to make changes and operate as any and all changes need to go through a governance voting round and then having final approval from a DAO that holds the admin keys for the platform. AAVE has manged to grow a very large pool of funds and offer a good list of options for investors to borrow, lend or earn on their holdings.

AAVE’s protocol is entirely open source and ungradable through the use of admin keys, which are planned to be in full control of the public and governance. Speaking of governance, there’s frequent rounds of questions and proposals that the community can vote through. Upon a proposal passing the general vote, 3 of the 5 admin key holders need to approve and implement the code change, then it goes live.

The network functions in several parts, mainly smart contracts, that are run on-top of Ethereum & Polygon (recently also added the protocol on top of Avalanche). Users can freely move their AAVE between different blockchains. The old token is simply burned and a new one is minted at the destination blockchain. Chainlink is oracle provider and keeps prices updated, one of the features based on this is the stable & variable interest rates, which are adjusted based on market conditions.

One feature that provides security for the protocol is the safety module. Users can stake their AAVE to the safety module and earn rewards. The staked AAVE is used as a cushion to protect against shortfall events. Shortfall events are the case of liquidity or a severe error that could cause a risk for the liquidity in the protocol. The staked AAVE would be used to protect against this and provide temporary relief until the shortfall event can be addressed. How this protection is conducted and what classifies as a shortfall event is decided through governance proposals.

AAVE can be used to stake, borrow or lend your crypto, as well as their iconic “flash loans”. AAVE supports several underlying assets that can be accessed no matter which underlying blockchain you’re using. All loans users can take are collateralized, so to speak, you are borrowing money you have but don’t want to sell, this crypto you borrow is also someone else’s that you borrow, if you can’t pay it back with interest your collateral is liquidated. Any loans or actions on the protocol incurs a fee, 80% of which is burned and 20% that is given to liquidity providers.

One core feature that AAVE has had since its launch is “flash loans”, they are the same as traditional loans, but the loan needs to be paid back in the same block transaction. Flash loans serve the benefit that it doesn’t need any collateral, as it is paid back instantly, if the loan is not paid back it never takes place and the transaction is rendered null. This is mainly used by developers as paying back the loan within the same block transaction is close to impossible normally. An example is that one takes a DAI flash loan, close a Maker ETH vault (the dollar backing for your borrowed DAI), open a new Maker vault but for USDT, and pay back the DAI. Thus, you change your ETH backed DAI to USDT without needing to pay back your backing.

The protocol has had a very good reputation for a hefty amount of time, mainly thanks to its commitment to security and decentralisation. It is frequently audited on its protocol security and has kept a very high score since start, never releasing any production code without heavy code reviews. The protocol is built as a very basic and standard idea, but it’s executed very well. AAVE has the benefit of being one of the first DEFI platforms offering its loan solutions, which gave it time to build up a community. The team behind it is very respected and have worked together with the community to give away more control to the users of the protocol rather than the developers.

AAVE seems to have a promising future. There is still some downsides with the platform being more difficult to use than traditional banking that most common investors are used to. There’s also the fact that their 5 admin keys is held by Aragon DAO, and having 5 members that only need 3 of them to make protocol wide changes can make you feel a bit uncertain, still, the project has been doing everything correct.

Also, on the website, you will be able to see the amount of NFTs minted and the total amount of lands!

Fact: more NFTs minted mean more value of lands. Remember, their value will make sense when MOBA game is released due to the high demand.

IMPORTANT: Binamon will always sell forest lands at the price of a level one Irlanda land, even if you have the chance of getting a better one!

Last but not least, don’t forget to unpack your lands before March 15th at 23:59hs to have the chance of getting up to a level 6 land. (this is randomly picked)

AFTER 24 MARCH AT 00HS UTC ALL BINANCE TICKETS WILL EXPIRE AND WILL LOSE ANY VALUE TO BE UNBOXED INTO A LAND.

You will only have the possibility to buy them through our land website using BMON or BUSD!