How an Uber ride cost someone $300K

🚕 How an Uber ride cost someone $300K

Plus: Justin Sun calls out Coinbase on delistings

GM. Today’s Daily Squeeze delivers a basket of blockchain fruits – some ripe, some a little bruised, but always fresh.

⚖️ Coinbase got sued for delisting WBTC.

🚕 How a fake Uber driver stole $300K in crypto.

🍋 News drops: the NFT community expects an OpenSea token, Ripple CTO’s message about the launch of RLUSD + more

🍍 Market flavor today

You know it’s a big day when even your uncle, who thinks blockchain is something you can find in a shed, starts asking questions 🤔 The Fear and Greed Index is back to “Extreme Greed” at 83, and Bitcoin set a new all-time high at $106,488.

Another milestone: the Bitcoin/Gold ratio ringing in a new all-time high at 40 ounces of gold per Bitcoin. There’s chatter about the next stop being an 89:1 ratio.

Now, how did we get here?

Donald Trump said that he wants to “do something great” with crypto;
Microstrategy is set to join the Nasdaq-100 Index this month = more eyes on its shares = more Bitcoin buys;
People are expecting an interest rate cut this week, translating to more liquidity that tends to make risk assets look attractive.

Bitcoindata21’s calling it: a short-term top of around $140K could be on the table by early January. The MVRV ratio – a measure of how much profit long-term holders are sitting on – still has room to stretch. In plain terms? Most long-term holders aren’t cashing out just yet, which means there’s probably still some gas in the tank for more upward action before we hit any serious resistance 🚀

Who knows, maybe by the time your uncle figures it out, Bitcoin will have doubled. Or tripled. Either way, he’ll definitely be texting you for wallet setup tips 👛

🥝 Memecoin harvest

If these memecoins are a joke, then the punchline is profit 🤪

Data as of 11:00 AM EST.

🫖 Wrapped up in drama

Everyone, dinner’s ready! Tonight’s special – beef with a side of piping hot tea.

BiT Global is coming for Coinbase’s neck with a $1B lawsuit, claiming their Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) got delisted just so Coinbase’s cbBTC could steal the wrapped Bitcoin crown.

Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, clapped back with the classic “nothing personal – it’s just business <3” line, saying that Coinbase only lists assets that meet their high standards. And, apparently, WBTC no longer makes the cut.

Of course, BiT Global affiliate Justin Sun wasn’t having it. He came through with receipts – an old post from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong that said Coinbase lists “every asset where it’s legal to do so.”

Haha, gotcha 😃🫵 Except… Armstrong quite explicitly mentioned those listing standards. But hey, what’s a tea session without a little selective storytelling?

🚶 Walking is underrated

Things to watch out for before getting into a taxi:

The driver might smell like they chain-smoked 40 cigarettes a second ago;
You might be treated to the worst playlist you’ve ever heard;
The “so, yeah… politics” conversation starter that never ends in agreement;
“I know a shortcut”;
Oh, and apparently, your crypto wallet might get drained.

Case in point: Nuruhussein Hussein, who stole $300K in crypto pretending to be an Uber driver in Arizona.

How did he pull that off? Here’s the passenger’s POV:

You’re waiting for your ride. A car pulls up, and the driver calls out your name. Weird that the app doesn’t say they’ve arrived… but hey, they know your name, so it’s gotta be legit, right?
Next, the driver asks for your phone, saying his is dead or offering to “fix” why the app didn’t confirm his arrival;
While they’ve got your phone, they transfer all your crypto to a cold storage wallet.

Now, Hussein’s POV of the aftermath: you get arrested and hit with charges of theft, fraud, and money laundering.

Anyways, moral of the story: if it feels sketchy, it probably is. Grandma didn’t tell you about stranger danger for nothing – make her proud, be careful.

🍋 News drops

🌊 OpenSea’s registration in the Cayman Islands has people talking about a possible token launch and airdrop. Many see this as a way to sidestep US regulations.

💸 Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, warned about possible “supply shortages” when their RLUSD stablecoin launches. He also said: “Please don’t FOMO into a stablecoin! This is not an opportunity to get rich.”

🤑 Donald Trump’s DeFi project, World Liberty Financial, went on a $45M token shopping spree this month. The haul? ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, and ENA.

🐿 Mark Longo, owner of Peanut the Squirrel, sent Binance a cease-and-desist. He accuses the exchange of using his Peanut the Squirrel trademark without permission to promote the PNUT token.

🤖 OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever thinks we’re nearing the end of the AI pre-training era, and AI superintelligence is on the horizon. He pointed out that computing power is improving faster than the amount of data available for training, so we must now work with what’s already out there.