50M gone, thanks to… a PDF

GM. Take a seat under the blockchain lemon tree – the Daily Squeeze is serving today’s ripest updates.

🚨 Scams and how to avoid them.

🍋 News drops: Coinbase CEO’s beef with an SEC Commissioner, the new Binance wallet + more

🍍 Market flavor today

Crypto’s daily horoscope: ambitious with a side of chaos 🔮 Bitcoin spent the weekend in a tight $99K-$100.5K range, with the Fear and Greed Index sitting in “Greed” at 78. The big question: are we tapping out on this rally or just catching a breath? 

CryptoQuant’s Maartunn thinks that BTC may have already hit a local top. Why? Long-term holders sold nearly 828K BTC over the past 30 days. If you’re thinking MicroStrategy or the ETFs are going to save the day, well… 😬 MicroStrategy added around 150K BTC, and ETFs bought about 84K BTC – these don’t fully offset what the LTHs dumped.

So, who’s absorbing the pressure? Short-term holders and a whole lotta retail traders. Retail demand is at its yearly highs – they tend to buy into strong rallies and bail if things start looking rough. This means BTC could see some more turbulence if retail starts panic-selling.

Retail money is also going into memecoins, which could possibly drain some attention from BTC. For example, it’s been only 20 days since Robinhood listed PEPE, and they already hold 2.5% of its supply. To put that in perspective, that’s like $50B worth of BTC being bought in under three weeks.

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s got its own stuff goin’ on – it jumped above $4K a few times over the weekend. Bybit analysts pointed out that ETH has been outperforming BTC during big events lately (elections, ETF announcements, Gary Gensler’s resignation). With huge ETF flows ($836.8M last week alone) and not much standing between ETH and its all-time high, it’s no wonder people are feeling bullish.

Actually, ambition + chaos isn’t just today’s forecast – it’s the core of crypto. But hey, the thrill of not knowing what’s around the corner might be part of the magic that makes this industry so special 🪄

🥝 Memecoin harvest

Who let the memes out? 📢🐕 These dawgs are barking the loudest today:

A memecoin related to the unhinged AI Agent on X called Terminal of Truths.

• Baby Doge Coin (BABYDOGE) +33%

Driven by increased demand from futures traders and whales. And let’s not forget Elon Musk’s post, which didn’t outright name-drop Baby Doge… but c’mon, the dots are connecting:

• Amaterasu Omikami (OMIKAMI) +34%

Another memecoin riding the Shiba Inu wave – this one’s rumored to be the brainchild of Ryoshi, who left SHIB and made it his mission to launch a project free from any power abuse.

• Skibidi Toilet (SKBI) +30%

Based on a meme I’m too old to explain (ask Google or your 10-year-old iPad kid nephew).

🌑 Crypto twilight zone

Should your coworkers judge you based on your moody Monday morning self? Prolly not. But they do need to be aware of this beast that lives somewhere within you.

Same goes for crypto – scams and hacks shouldn’t define it all, but we can’t pretend they don’t exist.

So, today, we’re visiting some of the shady corners of crypto. Y’know, stuff that anti-crypto people would screenshot for their “I told you so” folder, and the rest of us could learn from.

1/ Cardano X hack

Cardano’s official X account got hacked, promoting a fake ADAsol token and making claims that Cardano would no longer support ADA because of an “SEC lawsuit.”

Founder Charles Hoskinson confirmed the hack on his personal account… after the token generated $500K in trading volume and then crashed by 99% 🫠

Lesson 1: don’t click links just because they come from a verified account.

2/ Radiant Capital’s hack

Back in October, Radiant Capital lost $50M in a hack.

It all started with a Telegram message – a dev received what looked like a DM from a former contractor, saying they got some new gig in smart contract auditing and asking for feedback. Attached was a zipped PDF. Overall – totally normal practice, nothing sus.

Well, they’ve found out just recently that this, in fact, wasn’t a normal practice: the person was really some North Korean hacker guy, and the PDF was really malware.

Lesson 2: certain PDFs can ruin your life in more than one way.

3/ High-trust person meets low-trust behavior

An 85-yr-old artist got a LinkedIn DM from this one friendly art dealer 😃👍 and was convinced to mint their work on what looked like OpenSea.

Promise: $300K.

Requirement: $135K fee.

Long story short, the poor guy drained his retirement savings, maxed his credit cards, and took out a loan to pay the fee… you know where this is going.

When he realized he got scammed, he went through the five stages of grief – one of which was reporting to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. While his money couldn’t be recovered, they did shut down 40+ fake NFT marketplace sites. 

Lesson 3: protect your elders + if it seems too good to be true, it is.

So yeah, if your coworkers survived you today (and vice versa), you can survive the crypto shadows. The key is quite obvious: don’t trust everything you see, DYOR, double-check, triple-check, and stay caffeinated.

🍋 News drops

👋 Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw is an anti-crypto failure and wants her out. He posted this rant just before the Senate Banking Committee’s Wednesday vote on whether to keep her around until 2029.

👛 Binance dropped the new-and-improved Binance Wallet (RIP Binance Web3 Wallet). First up in the relaunch is the Seamless phase, focused on better asset management, easier airdrops, and a slicker design.

🐧 Pudgy Penguins flipped Bored Ape Yacht Club in both market cap and floor price – now they’re the #2 NFT collection after CryptoPunks. Big W for the team, congrats!

🍌 Juicy memes